“As a parent you think of modeling kindness for your kids so even if you didn’t do the exact same thing in your life, I would hope that you would look for ways to help others and be kind.”

-Janet Aasness

What does it mean to care for someone? How do we learn about care by watching our caretakers care for others and what do we take for granted when they care for us? How is teaching a form of caretaking? Janet Aasness has been a teacher and caregiver for decades and is a mom of two, she’s my mom. When I was growing up, I tagged along as she cared for elderly neighbors and friends. It seemed to me that everyone must have an elderly friend they looked after. I wanted to ask my mom how she remembers those relationships and if my memories matched up with hers. Along the way I wanted her advice about teaching, and to have a conversation about care in our family, and how the landscape of what we each need shifts as we grow and grow old. If I were to describe the quintessential characteristics of a conversation with my mom, I would say first, at some point, some word or phrase would compel her to sing a song with the same words, she knows a song for every occasion. Second, she will (like everyone in our family) sometimes make clicking noises to indicate something instead of using words. Both of those things happen in the following conversation, please enjoy a classic conversation with Janet. 

Caryn: How did you come to start taking care of older ladies when I was a kid?

Janet: I think that’s so interesting because I don’t think I knew that I did until you pointed it out. But I think that I learned it from my mom. That was something that she always did, I think also without necessarily recognizing it. When I was really little I remember that every month we would have a list of people at the nursing home that was nearby and she was given the job of providing their birthday cakes or whatever birthday celebration. So she’d say, well, I need to make three cakes and then we’d go and deliver them and sing and do all that. For some little stage of my life, that was kind of her responsibility. I was probably young enough that I wasn’t in school, so I was included in the project. Then she always had somebody that we would pick up on the way to church and there was always somebody that she was looking after. I was just brought along for the ride usually. She said the other day, and it just made me smile; one of her little ladies that she took care of was somebody who was kind of just used to being alone and not super open and not super friendly. It was hard, but she just kept going and going and going. Pretty soon they became really sweet friends, but it took patience and at one point, the lady told her how she appreciated it. She knew that she wasn’t easy to get to know, and she appreciated that my mom took the time to keep coming in. I thought that was sweet.

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Caryn: I remember we would do things for Mrs. Dieckman across the street sometimes, but then after she passed away we would go and see Maryann. In my memory, it was every weekend or most weekends, but is that accurate? Did I always go with?

Janet: You didn’t always go with but it was pretty regular. So Mrs. Dieckman was our neighbor, she was sweet. We always tried to be friendly and helpful if we could be but it was never anything official with her. Then when she passed away, we really got to know Maryann, her sister. We ended up helping Maryann put on the estate sale. Maryann was pretty much all by herself. It started out as just friendly visits, and then she expressed that she could use a little help with certain things she couldn’t do herself. I would go, I don’t even know how often but regularly, maybe every other week or something, and wash her bedding and take her to the grocery store, or go to the grocery store for her, take her wherever, whatever she needed. So it was a regular deal. 

In appreciation for the help with the estate sale, she got tickets to the Lion King musical for our whole family. 

Caryn: I remember going to the Lion King and I remember being at Wells Fargo with Maryann one time…

Janet: Oh, that took so long! 

Caryn: It took forever, yeah. There was another little kid in the waiting area of the bank and you had two calculators in your purse for some reason and gave them to us and we made up games on the calculators. I also remember being over there helping you guys clean out Mrs. Dieckman’s house.

Janet: Mrs. Dieckman had all kinds of interesting stories too. She had been married and then they had their one son. They had a liquor store that they owned that was in, I don’t know, downtown LA and she told me once that she was robbed at gunpoint when she was running the store and they locked her in the cooler. She was in there until the police came, so for a while.

Caryn: Their son had polio, right?

Janet:  Yeah, when we cleaned up that house, we found all kinds of his stuff. All his friends had gone to Vietnam to fight but he was unable to because of his health. So we found letters that they had written to him. He raced cars, and he died in a car racing accident. She was lonely after she lost him, that was a big blow in her life.

Caryn: Would you have said she was a hoarder?

Janet: I would say that she definitely was a hoarder, and she was embarrassed about it. We came to visit her one time and there was so much stuff. She basically said I was addicted to the Home Shopping Network and then she said to herself I just have to stop. So she got a handle on it, she made herself stop, but for a while, that was something she definitely had a problem with, yeah.

Caryn: I remember tons of stuff just still in boxes.

Janet: Yeah, and odd stuff.

Caryn: Odd stuff?

Janet: Yeah, remember that weird camera thing? Those closed-circuit cameras? I don’t know if they worked.

Caryn: They did work, it was like you could watch… it was kind of like this, like FaceTime [Gestures to Janet on the screen]. But early on like, you could only really be in the next room over. You could be watching a person on a screen, and they were watching you on a screen.

Janet: It seemed like they were very limited. It didn’t seem very useful. 

Caryn: I think we set it up and watched a model train go around. That’s all I remember.

Janet: That seems like something dad would have checked out. Yeah, she was always very sweet to you guys. She gave you Christmas cards, she was thoughtful. Oh yeah, Mrs. Brown. She was down the street. Do you remember her?

Caryn: No.

Janet: Her name was Brown, she always wore brown, and she lived in a brown house. You don’t remember that?

Caryn: Wow. No. 

Janet: It was easy to remember her name. It wasn’t just ladies. Mr. Nathe, he was sweet.

Caryn: He would always say hello to me, even though I was a child. 

Janet: Yeah, he was very kind. Remember he had bought that little swimming pool so he could check inner tubes for leaks and then once he was done with it, he gave it to you and Dylan? Very sweet. He would always get the two-for-one Western Bacon Cheeseburger deal and give one to dad because he couldn’t eat two!

Caryn: Oh, I want a Western Bacon Cheeseburger right now! 

Janet: I would go get you one if I could.

Caryn: Thanks. If you did bring me with you to Maryann’s or Mrs. Dieckman’s or whoever, were you thinking about it as being an experience that I would learn from or was it just sort of like I was around, it was Saturday, so I went with?

Janet: I think that as a parent you think of modeling kindness for your kids so even if you didn’t do the exact same thing in your life, I would hope that you would look for ways to help others and be kind.

Caryn: What do you think you learned from taking care of these older folks?

Janet: I think again, they have a story, they’ve lived a life. They’ve had joys, and they’ve had losses. They have stories to tell and wisdom to share. Anybody you meet has a story and unless you take the time to ask or listen, you don’t really know. You can’t assume that you know what their deal is. I totally remember Mrs. Dieckman saying, Yeah, I used to watch baseball but it’s so slow. I can only watch hockey now. [Laughs] I would not have expected that, I had no idea. 

I think I recognized out in the world, a lot of times, somebody is having to deal with something hard, having trouble with something, whatever; and to me, I would want help on that or I would want company at least. It’s helpful even just having someone to be alongside me for the stuff I do know how to do. Just seeing people doing the hard thing without help, that makes me want to help. So that’s part of how I ended up getting involved with people too. I just think that would be hard, so I feel sympathy for that. 

Caryn: Do you feel like that’s how you show people that you care about them?

Janet: I think so, yeah. And that the world can be a positive place. People don’t have to fear each other or isolate themselves.

Caryn: When have you felt the most cared for? 

Janet: Well, when I had my babies people cared for me, and when I had my surgery people cared for me.

Caryn: What did they do that made you feel cared for?

Janet: Just checked in on me, called or whatever; brought me a meal, sent me a card, told me they were praying for me. Those kinds of things. My mom brought me fresh squeezed orange juice the minute you were born, that was very sweet. Even just this week, dad is away and Aunt Robin invited me over to join them for dinner. My students often show their appreciation and care. They bring a little coffee or a little something to share with me which is nice. Hairong brought me an açaí bowl this week! 

Caryn: Wow. Did you like it? 

Janet: It was incredible! She put everything in it. Oh my gosh! I didn’t eat it right away so it was very melty by the time I got to it. Is there yogurt normally?

Caryn: I don’t know.

Janet: I think so. I think that was yogurt. I don’t think it was ice cream! It had blueberries and strawberries and peanut butter and little chia seeds, I guess probably açaí in there somewhere or whatever. A bowl of crazy goodness. It was very filling. It was good.

Caryn: [Laughs] Yeah, you teach adults now, but you taught elementary and then preschool for a long time. Do you want to talk about how those experiences compare?

Janet: I think all of them are meaningful and rewarding, they’re very different things. As a parent you have love, you have strong feelings, you have history, so it’s special, and maybe a little more challenging. It can be more frustrating, and heartbreaking. I think that’s a good thing. It’s just a little bit different caring for the people that you love. Not that I didn’t love my students, it’s just one step removed right?

I enjoyed teaching elementary, but I did that before I was a parent. I always wonder, if I would have done that after I was a parent, would I have been better at it? Better at understanding the parents’ side of things and the students’ side of things; just what it’s like to be in school and to have kids in school. I enjoyed it, but I was pretty young and inexperienced. 

I loved teaching preschool, especially in our programs because the parents are part of it. I had so much fun when you guys were that age, so I kind of kept that going and that was a lot of fun. I think I was good at that, I think I was good with the kids and the parents by that point. 

But I like teaching adults as well. It’s a different challenge. Most of the people that come to us had something that challenged them when they were originally in high school. Whether it was a disability or anxiety or just an interruption in their life. So I think we, as a team, try to figure out how to best support them to help them succeed this time around because they don’t usually have positive feelings around school. So I think we have to do more to make them feel at home and accepted and comfortable and encourage them and all that as well as just give them the classes they need. We have lots of positive stories. I had a grad yesterday, his wife and his little two or three-year-old girl came with balloons. Oh my gosh, they were so excited for him! He’s been there probably three years working on his diploma little by little and just about a week and a half ago I sent him an email like, it’s the final countdown, because I could see he was almost done and he’s like, I love that! We have another graduate, he’s one of those that came every day and we all got to have a soft spot for him in our hearts because we saw him so regularly. He’s all done this week, it’s exciting. 

Caryn: It was interesting to watch when you went from having preschoolers to adult students, the types of stories that you were telling about your students were different but your enthusiasm was the same, you’re equally excited to watch them succeed, which I think is cool.

Janet: Yeah, they have different goals, different stories, but they all have their story. That’s the cool part about it, each of them has their story and it’s fun to be part of their story.

Caryn: I’m gonna be teaching pretty soon. Do you have any advice for me?

Janet: Well, you’re gonna do great, I know that. One thing that I was told, or learned over time is to be as prepared as you can be, with your plan in mind. Have everything you know you’re going to need, but then be ready to abandon that and go with the flow. 

Try to think of your students, not just as students, but as people, and recognize that they have, like we just said a story. Maybe a challenging story. Maybe you don’t know everything they’re dealing with. So keep that in mind. 

I always like to encourage my students to let them know that I don’t have all the answers and that I don’t think I have all the answers. They can let me know if they don’t understand, and we can either go over it together or they can usually get really good answers from each other, maybe someone else is able to explain it in a way that you understand better. I always think of when I learned decimals, I wouldn’t know decimals if it weren’t for Holly Thompson. I think I missed a class and I was so confused and she was sitting next to me and said you just do it like this [makes a clicking sound effect and hand motion]. An instant lightbulb went off.

Caryn: What have been the most surprising things to you about yourself as you’ve gotten older or your parents getting older or your kids getting older?

Janet: Well, I can’t believe my kids are as old as they are because I feel like I’m still that old, I really do. I don’t feel like I’m as old as I am. I mean, clearly, I recognize that you are the age that you are, and I enjoy knowing you as adults, which is different from knowing you as kids, but it just doesn’t seem like I’m that old. It’s hard to believe.

I guess with my mom I’m just surprised by the worries that she has and how she really goes back and forth between thinking I can do that and then thinking oh, no, I can’t do that. She has real big swings there between confidence and enthusiasm about something or worry and lack of confidence, fear. Even about the same thing from day to day. It’s interesting. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but that seems to be true for her.

Caryn: When Dylan and I were born, did you have an idea of what you hoped or thought or imagined that our lives would be like as we got older? Did it change as we got older and showed more of our personalities?

Janet: Yeah. I think I just assumed that we would always love each other and get along because dad and I love our parents and got along well with them. I’m thankful that that is true. But I think a lot of things that I assumed are not the way I pictured them just because, for one thing, there are so many things about the world I didn’t picture. Technology and all that made things different. I mean, I think I expected to be a grandparent. I don’t think I’m going to be a grandparent. I would never want to pressure my kids into having kids for my sake. Having kids is a big deal and you have to want to do it if you’re going to do it. So I’m definitely never going to be that kind of mom who says, when am I going to be a grandma?  I’m just going to find other kids to play with, that’s my plan. But I wouldn’t want you to be under pressure. Under pressure… [sings Under Pressure by Queen and David Bowie, 1981] I heard that song today.

Caryn: How do you think or hope that yours and my relationship will change as we both get older and need different types of care from each other?

Janet: Well, I hope we can ask for what we need from each other and say what we are able to provide. I think that we love each other and so that shouldn’t be a problem, but it might be challenging. We’ll have to be conscious about communicating our needs to each other and our boundaries and all that so that we can do it well, and care for each other well. We can’t read each other’s minds, so we have to communicate. 

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Janet Aasness (she/her) has been an educator since 1986, currently teaching adults who are pursuing their high school diplomas. She is a caretaker, song lyric virtuoso, and mother of two living in Long Beach, CA.  

Caryn Aasness (they/them) Lives, laughs, loves in Portland, Oregon. They follow their compulsive interests into the topic of hoarding and other manifestations of other peoples’ compulsions. They make work about brains, language, and bodies. Caryn likes to ask questions as an act of care.

“…I’d say that when it feels like an artwork for me, it’s because there is actually a deliberate, palpable, and intentional presence of the artist in the work.”

-Nina Katchadourian

Nina Katchadourian is an artist working across many mediums and often not in a studio. She’s made work in libraries, on airplanes, and in parking lots. She has collaborated with sports announcers, curators, her parents, and museum maintenance staff. She has interpreted the shapes of moss growing on rocks as countries on an atlas, decoded the sounds of popping popcorn using Morse code, and mended spiderwebs with red thread. Her exhibit Uncommon Denominator, which opened at The Morgan Library & Museum in February 2023, is a mix of objects she selected from the Morgan’s collections, her own career, and her personal and family history. She even invited fifteen Morgan employees to discuss a collection item “about which [they] have thought, ‘I’d love to see this in a show one day.’” 

When I left that show and returned to the world outside, I felt like I was wearing eyeglasses with an updated prescription. Things on the New York City streets and in the subway station looked different, sharper, and lines and shapes and words felt different, like they were alive.

In the exhibition at the Morgan and so much more of her work, I like what Nina does with the world and in the world. This interview was a thrilling opportunity to learn about her life, practice, and how to be an artist who gets to do this work.

Nina Katchadourian: What year are you in your MFA program? 

Laura Glazer: I’m in my last year of a three-year program. 

Nina: Oh my gosh. Do you know where you’re headed next?

Laura: No. 

Nina: You’ll know at some point. 

Laura: I like to think of it as I planted a lot of seeds and we’ll see which ones bloom at the right time. 

Nina: Excellent. 

Laura: And you’ve visited our program? 

Nina: I did. I was trying to remember when it was. It feels like it was a really long time ago. Like it could have been 2012. Do you know when it was? 

Laura: It was 2012. There’s a little book that collects interviews with people who visited and there’s a very brief interview with you.

Nina: It’s funny, I don’t remember doing that at all, but I guess I did! There were a period of years where it seemed like a lot of things were going on in one part of the country. There was a Portland phase of many years where there were many opportunities to go there. Then for a while it became Marfa, Texas. Then it became Austin. It was weird. There were these regional magnet points, but I really haven’t been to Portland in ages. Now that I live in Berlin half the year, it feels super far away to go all the way to the west coast but when I do go, it tends to be to see my parents in California. 

Laura: Do your parents feel famous? 

Nina: They sometimes do because I’ve put them in my work. They came out with me to see The Morgan Library show and I went to see them for a week. Then they came back out with me to New York. My dad was going up to people in the exhibition and—referring to that piece of my mom growing up in the nightgown—he kept saying, “Guess who this is? That’s my wife. She’s right over there.” They were very thrilled to see the show.

Laura: When you told your mom you were going to exhibit that piece, what did she say? Or was she surprised at all? 

Nina: No, because I have actually made a response piece with my mom and it has been shown a couple times. It’s called “The Nightgown Pictures.” There’s a real, full scale digital scan of the actual nightgown, which we have, and that’s printed really big at the beginning. And then all these pairings of the original photo with my retake and the texts underneath them run in a long, long line along the way. It’s a little like an exploded book. Over the course of many years, we went back to all of the places where those photos were originally taken together and tried to find exactly where my grandmother had been standing.

My mom knew enough and remembered enough about the particular summers and where they were and recognized enough things in the pictures that we could find all of them pretty easily, at least generally where they were. We had the actual photos in our hands and would stand there, moving around until…it was an uncanny feeling. It would be like a tree, a rock, a horizon line. Suddenly, it would be like “bloop” and it all clicks into place and then we know that exactly on this spot is where my grandmother must have stood to take the picture. Then I would take the picture again. So, it wasn’t with my mom in it, it was a record of the landscape and how that had changed more.

But then running alongside that, there were these short commentaries that I wrote that tracked various things we learned while we might’ve been in each of these locations and other kinds of things my mom might’ve told me about that particular summer. 

Laura: Do you ever think of yourself as a socially engaged artist? 

Nina: It’s funny, I made a bunch of things when I was in grad school that I’m sure now would solidly fall under the header of social practice. We weren’t using that term then. The people who were important to me in graduate school—in terms of professors who had a lot of influence on me—were people like Allan Kaprow. The kind of art/life happenings legacy of him and many others in my program, had a big effect on many of us there. 

Allan wasn’t my advisor but I definitely felt like I had a lot of conversations with him and his approach to things, his attitude and what he located as interesting sites for making art, those things had a big impression on me. I sometimes think if I had been educated 20 years later that might have very well been the kind of program I could have wound up in. 

In grad school, there was particularly a lot of collaborating going on in my program. We were all trying to find the thing that we do and figure out who we were as artists, but there was a nice way in which that wasn’t completely fully figured out. I think it made it easier to work with other people because there’s just somehow a kind of flexibility to all of that, that I think gets harder as you get older. I don’t know if it’s older or more settled into your innate ways of working maybe. I do collaborate now and then, but not nearly as often. Sometimes I think about whether that has to do with deadlines pressing harder on me or where I’ve just ended up working by myself more than not by myself. 

But there are projects that come around for me. The one that comes to mind where I would say there is a socially engaged aspect is a project called “Monument to the Unelected” that I made in 2008 as a commission for the Scottsdale Museum of Art. It was for a show that they were putting together as a 10-year anniversary show called “Seriously Funny.” The idea was it would be a group of artists who work with humor, and they wanted me to make something new. It was like, “okay, so you want me to come to Scottsdale, think of something funny, and put it in the show?” I get asked about this sort of humor stuff all the time and I’m not trying to make things that are funny, actually. This is the only time I have been asked to do that, and it was really difficult. I was like, “I have no ideas, everything I’m thinking of is tragic.” The piece that resulted from it was sort of like two things that met up with one another.

One was a rumination in Scottsdale about indigenous histories and the tragedy of what has happened in the U.S. around the attempted erasure of Native American people. Growing up in California, those things had become a little more invisible to me and in Scottsdale, I could notice them, see them, and think about them in a way that I shamefully hadn’t as much as I did on that trip. There was that going on in one part of my head, which certainly wasn’t funny! 

The other part was that we were coming up on the 2008 election and that election cycle was the one that Obama eventually won. All over Scottsdale and Phoenix were these plastic election sign posters with candidates’ names on them, as is such a weird American kind of tradition. 

I wondered how I could make something that would actually make us look back on an American past and think about our history in some way, but that would also be funny. The piece became this piece called “Monument to the Unelected,” and it’s a series of 56 plastic lawn signs that were designed from scratch. I did not research them historically, but they have the names of everybody who ever ran through the office of U.S. President and lost. It’s like the road not taken since the beginning of election history.

These signs are shown in the kinds of places you would see them on a front lawn of a house or in a vacant lot and we found a few different sites in Scottsdale to show them, and it does look kind of crazy. It’s like an explosion of names on these colorful signs and the names… you’re sort of like, “Wait a minute, Roosevelt? Aaron Burr? This is John Adams?” These are odd names to encounter. It’s very intentionally supposed to be politically ambiguous; you’re not supposed to be able to read a political viewpoint into how I might feel about any of those names on the signs particularly. That’s one thing that I really feel pleased about with this piece is that it did—in the best possible way—confuse people. They were looking for a political message and there wasn’t one to be distilled out of that. 

I made a commitment to show that piece every election cycle. I’ve shown it in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, which was a really intense one. The 2024 election is coming up and I have to start thinking about where it’s going to be shown next time.

Last time around, because we were in the middle of COVID, it also had to be really re-thought. What I also began doing as a kind of tradition is I would produce the signs of both candidates who were running for election that year, and then once the results of the election were known, I would show the piece three weeks before the election and then a few weeks after the election.

On the day that we found out who won, I would—in a solemn ceremony of sorts—add the newest loser to the group. That was for me—revealing my political leanings—difficult to do in 2020. It was really tough. Walking out there and putting the Hillary Clinton sign on the lawn, I was like, “I’m trying to stay really neutral, but this is really awful. This is really awful to have to do.” Then in 2020, because I couldn’t be in the U.S. I was in Germany, and traveling was not happening. It was shown in eight different places across the U.S. In every one of those places, I had a first-time voter hold the sign and plant the sign on the lawn.

We had these fantastic live Zoom events that could have been a total train wreck, but they were amazing. We had all the eight sites live and then I’m on the Zoom in the middle of the grid and all the first time voters—this is all archived on Pace Gallery’s YouTube channel if you want to watch it—and I gave what I hoped sounded like a very dignified speech, again, trying to be neutral. I didn’t want it to sound celebratory, it was meant to be very matter of fact. But I said, “Now candidates, please place the sign of the most recent losing candidate.” I didn’t use the word loser on purpose. Then I had them bring up the signs to the camera and then they put the sign in the lawn. It was actually really special to do it that way. 

I feel very committed to it being in a public space every four years and ideally more than one, and ideally in different parts of the country and in places where they vote differently. I didn’t want it only in blue states, you know? There’s a social engagement, not just with what the piece tries to talk about, but with who gets involved in it. 

Laura: How did you figure that out? 

Nina: It was logistically crazy. For a long time, I’ve worked with a gallery in San Francisco called Catharine Clark Gallery, and they’re completely amazing. Our careers have grown together and they’ve been so supportive of me and stood by me through thick and thin and so on.

About three years ago I also started working with Pace Gallery in New York, who are an enormous operation and a very different kind of gallery. They’re all over the world and they have a lot of artists who are historical figures and a lot of living contemporary artists. The two galleries are working together and it’s all very good. I feel really supported and fortunate. A lot of opportunities have opened up because Pace has such a broad reach, too, and resources.

It was actually my gallery director at Pace, Ben Strauss-Malcolm, who suggested this first-time voter thing. And I was like, “Ben, that is such a great idea!” I knew there had to be somebody remote in each location, willing to place the sign, and I thought it could be a citizen of that city. But then Ben’s suggestion to make it a first-time voter, I thought was great. Between the lines, I guess I wanted it to be some advocacy for voting and there were a lot of people who voted for the first time because they were young and hadn’t been able to vote before.

But there was also somebody who voted for the first time because he had been in jail for every other election that he could have voted in. And that was really amazing to hear about what it meant to be able to exercise that right. It was really a very moving event. There was a lot of help from both Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace to help organize the event and getting eight venues for that work was largely because of the two galleries and the outreach that they did. 

Laura: Who do you talk to about your ideas? When I was going through the exhibit at The Morgan Library & Museum yesterday, there were moments when I was like, “Whoa, I can connect this to this.” For me, when I have those moments, there are certain people I’ll call and say, “You’re not gonna believe I just figured this out.” So, who’s your person? 

Nina: I’ll say at the outset that for me it’s been very important to realize that there are some things I need to keep very close to the chest before I talk about them at all. I am married to someone who has the honesty gene, and if you ask for an opinion on something, you are gonna get the brutal truth and you better be ready to hear it. It’s a good thing. But I also know if my own roots are not in the ground with something yet, I can be kind of thrown a little bit if I don’t get the reaction I want. I sometimes wait and think by myself for quite a while. I think there are a set of friends, artist friends, friends who are not necessarily artists, and sometimes it is the person I’m married to—who is not an artist—who I will float a fledgling idea by. There’s also a set of people who are my secret weapon friends when I’m really stuck with something, the ones who have sometimes had the chiropractic effect [makes bone-cracking sounds], like, “Oh, I see it now. Oh my god.” It’s really great to have those people on your side. 

I had to make some difficult decisions about a piece that I showed at Pace for the first show I did in New York with them in May 2021. To make a long story short, there was sort of a complicated component of one of these works that raised certain kinds of questions about race and representation. I knew I wanted to think through what I did with this one element of this one piece really carefully in part because it was also the framework of my first show at Pace. People love to hate on the big galleries and I get it. I do really understand the objectionable thing about any giant anything. I get that. So I felt that there would be a scrutiny that would be more intense than if I were showing this piece at a lot of other places, and for lots of reasons, I knew that I wanted to think this through very, very carefully.

There were a couple people I reached out to, and one is an artist friend I talk to often, and the other two are people who I know a little less well, but who I just think are really smart thinkers about these questions. One of them is an artist I’ve never even met, but we sort of know each other through social media. I think she’s smart and I just said “Would you be willing to have a conversation with me about this? Because I really feel like I would trust your feedback.” Sometimes I reach out to the trusted, tried, and true and other times it’s helpful if they’re not my friend exactly because I feel like maybe I get a more honest response. There’s nothing at stake in the same way.

When I talk to people, I’m not so prone to share every small, new thought, like calling someone like, “What do you think?” I have to have thought about a thing quite a bit before I’m convinced it’s worth pursuing. I am really lucky, I really trust the people who professionally I work with, like that story about Ben at Pace or Catharine Clark herself. They’re really smart and I think that certainly on the business end of things, I get a lot of advice when I ask for it. But not just that, I’ve floated conceptual questions by them, too, and it’s been really useful input.

Do you know this piece called “Accent Elimination” that I made with my parents? I had the idea to make that piece for years and years and years, and the thing that was preventing me from making it is that I had no idea what the script would be like. I knew we had to be speaking something in order to be practicing accents that we were learning. But I just couldn’t crack what we would be saying, I couldn’t figure it out. I was either asking myself, “Should we be reading a text about translation or accents?” Or I was coming up with tedious, obvious solutions. I knew those were all really predictable and bad solutions, boring ones. I talked to this anthropologist friend of mine who knows me and knows my parents too, and he said, “Why don’t you have them write scripts?” and I was like, “Oh my God!” It’s such an anthropologist thing to say. Listen to the subject, you know? I was like, “That is brilliant, that is exactly the right solution.”

Laura: How did you prepare for the exhibit at The Morgan Library in the sense of: what in your life and art practice led you to do something like this? I’m asking for a very specific reason—because that is my dream project! When I was going through the exhibit, I kept wondering if there was a life event or something in your head where you might have thought, “I did this in another project and it worked,” or something prepared you to look at things in this particular way?

Nina: Your question about “Who do you run ideas by?” I mean, it really has to be said that the Morgan show is really a collaboration. I started by saying I don’t collaborate much. I totally take that back. I worked with Joel Smith, the curator who invited me to do this show, and we really made this show together. There were moments where I might have taken the lead a little more, or he might have taken the lead a little more, but there is no way I would’ve made this show by myself.

There’s also no way he would’ve made this show by himself. It is really, truly, a kind of, “We made it.” When we’ve been doing walkthroughs of this show, one or the other of us always says something like, “We’re gonna be using the pronoun ‘we,’ because this was not a kind of artist/curator relationship where the artist’s work is the raw material and the curator decides what happens with it.” I’ve actually worked with curators a lot that way. In some ways, now that I start talking about this, curators are the people who have been my collaborators in more recent years, that is the more common situation. The other person I would name in that category is Veronica Roberts, who is now at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. She’s the director there now, but she was the curator at the Blanton Museum of Art, who organized a traveling retrospective show of mine that we really, really worked on together.

The Morgan exhibit was a really complicated show and the process was really murky a lot of the time. We looked at a lot of stuff over the last three years. The Morgan is full of interesting things and there was nothing that wasn’t interesting to me. Joel, in some interview or Morgan press release, said something like, “Both the wonderful and challenging thing about working with Nina Katchadourian is that she’s interested in everything.” It was really hard to find a structure because it felt like anything and all of this could be in the show; why would I rule any of the things out? We did, of course, rule things out. But it was very difficult for me to see for a long time a guiding principle. For a long time I was like, we have to find a guiding principle. I feel like I’m just awash in amazing stuff and I don’t have a structure. And it was starting to get stressful. 

Then I came up with—maybe this is another kind of social engagement strategy of working—this idea of talking to the staff, picking 15 people at the Morgan and asking them to show and tell me a favorite object. The usefulness of that approach was something I learned while working on a project for MoMA a few years before, which ended up being this project about dust. I ended up making an audio tour for MoMA about dust in 2016 called “Dust Gathering.”  It’s the same sort of idea. You start with the question of “Who’s in the building and what do they know?” There’s a lot of stuff here, but there are also a lot of people here who have knowledge. That turned out to be a really important strategy at MoMA that unlocked what that project became, and I thought, well, it’s unstuck me before, maybe I should ask the same question at the Morgan. Although I didn’t include every single show and tell object, I’d say more than half of them are in the show and it did really open up the collection for me; it brought me to places in it that I wouldn’t have normally found.

Joel is really fun for me to think with. We share a sense of humor and we share an affinity for the same sorts of, “Hey, hey, look how these things look alike. Not just literally look alike, but where two things might have connected to one another.”

He’s very good at keeping a lot of things in mind partially because he knows the collection better than me. He had an easier time being like, “Well, the blah blah blah and the blah blah blah and the blah blah, blah, blah, blah, those could be a group.” And I’d be like, “Wait, what are those things again? I’m still trying to sort of remember over two years of looking like what it was we saw.” Two years of looking and a year of organizing is a little bit how the work of the show took place. He says that it really wasn’t until the week we started hanging the show that we were like, “Okay, yes, there are connections here and they are visible and I think people are gonna see them.” It is kind of funny that we admitted this to one another. I think we were both like, “Is anybody going to see what we are seeing here? This may make no sense to anyone.” I have not had the experience of being so unsure until so late a stage in the game, about what a show was going to be.

Laura: As I was walking around the exhibit, I looked at every employee and I was like “Are you in the show?” 

Nina: That’s nice, I love it. But you asked something else that I hadn’t answered yet: “How do you get to do a gig like this?” Was that what you were wondering about? 

Laura: It’s not like what on your CV qualified you. It’s more of, as you look back on your career—and your practice in general—what sort of internal thing in your brain and heart and soul made you ready to undertake this approach? Because it’s very curatorial, but it’s also a project in the vein of other projects you do.

Nina: The past projects or works that felt like “training” towards this one were definitely the dust project. And also a project I spent most of 2020 making, which became an installation that is an artwork called “To Feel Something That Was Not of Our World.” The shipwreck books that you saw in the show are an excerpt from that big, big project.

In that project I had to be a historian, an archivist, an interviewer, a radio journalist, and I had to be a very good listener. I had to consider a lot of ethical questions and in some ways, that project became about questions that had to do with how you listen ethically and deal with somebody else’s story that you’re working with that isn’t your own.

I had never done a project where that was such a front burner question. But there was also a process of making that piece where I did not know what I was doing for a very long time. It was like I was gathering and gathering and gathering and gathering information, and gathering all these audio conversations, these interviews I did with Douglas Robertson, who was the oldest son in that family that got shipwrecked.

For a long time, I just had to amass stuff and then at some point I could stand back from all of it and be like, “Okay, now there’s enough stuff that I can ask myself, ‘what’s the structure?” That was that place where I was like, “Oh God, I’m gonna get stuck here, if I don’t sort this out, I’m stuck, I’m shipwrecked and this project will never happen.” And the thing that unstuck it was when I realized that I’ve dealt with a 38-day story, a 38-day interview, and the show has to have a 38-day structure. And then it was like, “Wow, wow, yeah. That’s it, now I have a scaffold and now I can fill in a structure.”

There were moments with the Morgan show where I thought, “Alright, learning from these past experiences, we have a lot of stuff, and we just need to see what it’s showing us.” As soon as there’s a little bit of a structure to work with, that’s the key moment for me because then it’s like, “Okay, now I have something I can react to, I can shape, I can move towards this or move away from this, or contrast.” As you saw in the Morgan show, sometimes it feels like things are kind of matched or they rhyme or they’re of a piece.

But other times I think it’s a play of contrast or things that are a little bit like “That thing isn’t actually at all like that thing, but they might look alike in a superficial way, but they’re like and really not alike.” There are moments like that that I like a lot where similarity is actually the red herring. You’re not connecting from thing to thing the same way every time, I hope. I hope that’s how it works. 

Laura: I’m curious about the process behind writing the wall labels and how did you determine the right moment and place to bring your voice into those exhibit points?

Nina: That is something I’ve started doing since that show at the Blanton in my retrospective called “Curiouser.” In that show, we—Veronica and I—made a decision to have wall texts that were written in a first-person voice. And we did that both in the catalog. Have you ever seen the catalog? 

Laura: Yes.

Nina: I did a lot of writing for the catalog. So, what we call the “capsule essays”—which are those short essays where one writer writes about one piece—was a sort of desire to unburden the writer from having to describe what the artwork was. I ended up anecdotally saying “Here’s what the thing is, here’s how I made it, and a little bit maybe about why,” although I would never be so direct about it. But between the lines, you might understand why I would make something like that. Then the writer could have the reaction to the piece, they didn’t have to do any explaining. Veronica was really interested in having my voice be there on the walls, kind of in this first-person present, anecdotal conversational way. People really loved it, they really responded so positively to that in that show. 

When the show at Pace rolled around in 2021, there were so many things for me with that show where I was like, “I want to be really strategic about how I do this first show with this big gallery, I want to really think about the kind of mood I want in this show, and I want it to feel warm and welcoming. I know the building itself is big and imposing and expensive looking, and I want there to be a feeling in the show that is in some ways, very different from that. I want it to feel like I’m present, I’m alive, I’m a living artist.” Maybe I said it even a little obnoxiously, but when we had our first meeting with the Pace team about logistics around the show, I said, “I’m going to be writing wall texts. There’s going to be an intro text that will be in a first-person voice and there will be some texts throughout the show that will be in a first-person voice.”

They do not usually do things that way, and I think there was a little bit of a sort of like “Oh, hmm, unusual,” and a little bit of an attempt to talk me out of it. I really was very insistent about it, and I was very sure that this was an important decision and everyone went with it. Again, I think it was remarked upon as something that set a bit of a mood in the exhibition.

Joel saw that show, liked it, and we decided to do it again for the Morgan show, to have the artist really be there. He has done two of these shows in this series previous to me, like the Duane Michal’s show, where there were a lot of quotes from Duane, in his voice saying things. But we’re not quoting me, it’s me talking, so it’s a little different. What did you think of that? 

Laura: It was like a dream come true. I hesitate to say this out loud but when I go to a museum or gallery, I really want to have a conversation with the artist, I want to know what the artist wanted and was thinking. There’s always a desire to be close to the person who made what’s on display, and wall text written by museum professionals gets me part of the way there, but there’s nothing like hearing from the artist. It’s really special. 

Nina: I like that a lot, too. I push this with my students a lot, too. It’s very useful to have a critic’s perspective, but you should know what the artist was willing to say about what they were interested in doing, or what they hoped would happen. 

I really think one of the most irritating things I’ve ever heard anyone say was while I was teaching at Brown University in the early 2000s, and there was a very well-known New York collector who came and spoke. He said something at one point, like, “Never believe anything artists tell you about their work, they never know what they’re talking about.” And I was like, “Do I walk out of the room now or do I say something pissy or do I say something in the Q&A?” I don’t think I actually did anything, which was terrible because I chickened out. But I was so offended by that. 

I think there’s a way to be autobiographical without being self-indulgent. That’s also something that matters a lot to me. What is worrisome to me every time I make something that feels personal is I don’t want it to feel “me, me, me, me.” I want it to be that I’m a voice in the room, but these things also have their agency and their presence. I’m trying to welcome you into something. I’m not trying to tell you what it is or tell you that you have to pay attention to me. I hope we got that right. 

Laura: I think you did. Because without it, it might have leaned towards the historical museum kind of thing.

Nina: Right, right.

Laura: That could’ve been okay, but I don’t think it would’ve been as fun and meaningful. 

I’m gonna ask some final questions because I don’t want to keep you super long. I have to choose them wisely and I’m torn on which ones to ask. One of the things I have been asking at the end of my grad school life is something I wasn’t going to ask you, but now I just can’t not ask you. What I’m really trying to figure out for myself, especially in the art and social practice MFA program, is “What makes it art?” 

Nina: Oh yeah.

Laura: I’m always trying to figure out how to talk to somebody like the taxi driver who asks, “What kind of art do you study?” I would like to bounce that off of you. And you don’t have to answer it because I don’t want it to be like, “Well what makes what you do, art?” I definitely don’t mean it in that way. 

Nina: No, I get that you’re not asking that. Some people will ask that at artist talks, so it’s kind of funny. It can be a very challenging kind of question. 

I make some things sometimes that I adamantly insist are not art. This can get kind of funny. I’ll end up answering your question via this oblique route, but I’ve made a couple things that I just really made for fun and I made them to put them on YouTube and they’re there to be entertaining and hopefully funny on purpose. I feel like it was really nice to not be burdened by the question of “Are they art?” They were, for me, a fun thing I made with a friend and it’s there for entertainment. 

There’ve sometimes been uncomfortable moments where people have thought, “Well, you’re an artist, so everything you make is art. Therefore, this video is art.” I got a question once about it in a Q&A and I was like, “Oh, that’s not an artwork.” So, I do feel like I sometimes do want to delineate what I consider art and not art. What was the example you used, like a conversation with a taxi driver, is that what you said? 

Laura: Yes. I was trying to explain socially engaged art and he’s like, “Oh, like flash mobs?” And that stumped me. Even though I know we don’t usually think of flash mobs as art, I still told him, “Yes, kind of. But we don’t credit the people who are in the mob, which makes it different from social practice, but it’s a similar sensibility.”

Nina: I think that there has to be an interpretive element involved, in the sense that the artist has to be willing to have a presence in the work that shapes the work. I feel like there has to be a process of selection and shaping of a thing—it doesn’t just include everything. The shaping of it is “You’re gonna include some things and not include others, and you will have your mark on the thing.” That makes it different for me than things that are made more in a spirit of, you could say, documentary. And obviously I don’t believe that the artist is not present in documentary, of course I agree with every argument around the impossibility of objectivity and so on. But I’d say that when it feels like an artwork for me, it’s because there is actually a deliberate, palpable, and intentional presence of the artist in the work. They are the reason I’m experiencing it the way I’m experiencing it. It’s their meddling in the thing that makes the thing what it is, and I guess I think every artist should recognize that that’s the work, actually.

I’ve had many studio arguments around the idea that “People can think whatever they want when they see my work!” I totally call bullshit on that. I do not believe anyone believes that, actually. I think that art is an act of communication and there is always something you are hoping to communicate, and it’s your responsibility to actually know a bit about what that is.

I always want to say really obnoxious things at that point. “Oh, you think I can think anything? Oh, so what if I embrace this as a completely fascist, racist work? Are you happy with that?” Of course, most people would not be. 

That’s how, at the moment, I would think about that question of “What makes it art.” What makes it art is that the artist is willing to—I don’t want to say “take ownership” in that sense that they have to have their name attached to it—but they need to have a shaping presence.

I’m also obviously aware of arguments about authorship, like not having there be an author, an artist, or a person it all comes back to. I think you could still ascribe a collective authorship to things and what I’m saying, would still hold up. 

Laura: Okay, so…my last question. Have you been to the New York Public Library Picture Collection? 

Nina: I know about it, but I also thought it didn’t exist anymore.

Laura: It almost didn’t, they almost moved it offsite but there was enough lobbying against it that they didn’t do it. It’s still on-site. When I was at The Morgan Library exhibit yesterday, I thought, “I would love to see what Nina would make with the Picture Collection.”

Nina: I need to go. I’ve never been. I remember reading about it in that kind of “This thing is about to become extinct” moment and thinking, “Oh no.” Thanks for putting that back on my radar. That’s great. I will do that when I’m back in the Fall. 

Laura: Well, thank you so, so much.

Nina: Nice to meet you, Laura. I hope our paths cross in real life one day.

Laura: Me, too! Maybe we can go to the Picture Collection together! 

Nina: That would be really amazing. You can be my guide.

Nina Katchadourian (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work includes video, performance, sound, sculpture, photography, and public projects. Her video Accent Elimination was included at the 2015 Venice Biennale in the Armenian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Group exhibitions have included shows at the Serpentine Gallery, Turner Contemporary, de Appel, Palais de Tokyo, Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Turku Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ICA Philadelphia, Brooklyn Museum, Artists Space, SculptureCenter, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Morgan Library & Museum, and MoMA PS1. A solo museum survey of her work entitled Curiouser opened at the Blanton Museum in 2017 and traveled to the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University and the BYU Art Museum. An accompanying monograph, also entitled “Curiouser,” is available from Tower Books, an imprint of University of Texas Press. On the occasion of her solo show at The Morgan Library & Museum in 2023, entitled “Uncommon Denominator,” the Morgan published an exhibition catalog with a conversation between Katchadourian and curator Joel Smith. 

Katchadourian completed a commission entitled “Floater Theater” for the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2016 which is now permanently on view. In 2016 Katchadourian created “Dust Gathering,” an audio tour on the subject of dust, for the Museum of Modern Art as part of their program “Artists Experiment.” Katchadourian’s work is in public and private collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Blanton Museum of Art, Morgan Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Margulies Collection, and Saatchi Gallery. She has won grants and awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation, the Tiffany Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Gronqvista Foundation, and the Nancy Graves Foundation. Katchadourian lives and works in Brooklyn and Berlin and she is a Clinical Full Professor on the faculty of NYU Gallatin. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery and Pace Gallery.

Laura Glazer (she/her) is an artist whose work is socially-engaged and depends on the participation of other people, sometimes a close friend, and other times, complete strangers. Her background in photography and design inform her social practice, and her projects appear as books, workshops, radio shows, zines, festivals, exhibitions, installations, posters, signs, postal correspondence, and sculpture. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been published in The New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and the BBC. Her book of photographs and interviews, I Want Everyone to Know: The Black History Month Doors at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, was published by the Dr Martin Luther King Jr School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) in April 2022. She was a 2022—2023 artist fellow at the New York Public Library Picture Collection. She holds a BFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology and an MFA candidate in Art and Social Practice at Portland State University. Born in northern Virginia, she was a longtime resident of upstate New York and is now based in Portland, Oregon. Visit her website to see her projects and follow her on Instagram for updates.

It’s technically March at the time I’m writing this, but here, in Portland, it still feels like winter. I miss the actual sunbeams that used to hit my kitchen floor in the winter in Oakland and how my cat would stretch out her body to fill the whole space. This image feels like summer to me and reminds me of sitting in a fairy ring of redwood trees. I think sometimes you need to bring the sunlight and warmth into the winter, so maybe this cover will do that for you as it did for me. Some other words we associate with this image are: physicality, grounding, ferns, nature, firs, and “feltness,” which Gili talks about in their interview with Linda. The “Finding the Forest” project depicted in this image brought people together in physical space in a way that feels so distinctly pre-pandemic. As our campus reopens in real time and space, we are excited to make new connections with our greater PSU community. You can see some of these connections in this issue of our Social Forms of Art Journal.

-Luz Blumenfeld and Gilian Rappaport

For this issue of SoFA, we each interviewed people affiliated with Portland State University. Our social practices tend to engage with communities, but as a program we operate more as a satellite of our parent university. Individually, we have our own ways of connecting with campus life— teaching assistantships in undergraduate classes, working on-campus jobs, hanging out in the park blocks, taking Dance Fusion aerobics class at the athletic center, or working in the Social Practice Archive housed in the Special Collections at the PSU library. But because we primarily convene for classes off campus— at KSMoCA (Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School), Harrell’s living room, on Zoom from our respective homes (or favorite coffee shops)— it can feel like we, as a group, are disconnected from our university community. 

This year, as we experience a completely open campus after an era of pandemic protocols, many of us are getting reacquainted, or acquainted for the first time, with our campus; sprucing up our studio space, doing projects at the art department’s Open Studios, or picking up free groceries from the food pantry in the basement of Smith Student Union.

This winter, we found people in departments all over PSU who are engaging with topics connected to our own areas of investigation. We are excited to introduce you to the many people doing incredible research, teaching, projects, and labor across the university. 

In the interviews that follow, we meet a dance professor who wants you to notice your body in the city and the city as a body; a pragmatist philosopher who surmises the whole world is one big role playing game; the lone mascot of PSU’s athletic department who’s willing to shake everyone’s hand; a sociology professor who wants us all to talk more about death; a social psychologist devoted to trash; two graduate students with an intimate connection to their bowel movements; a critical feminist geographer using comics to explore the experience of homelessness; a critical race spatial educator uncovering the hidden curriculum within university culture; and the PSU Provost, who wants more artists’ voices in the room.

Come with us on the most in depth and strange virtual campus tour you’ll ever get!

Your editors,

Caryn Aasness, Luz Blumenfeld, Becca Kauffman

“I was invited into this space with these people who are all deeply caring and deeply welcoming and they told me, you belong here and your art is good enough and you are good enough and we need you.”

Dr. Kacy McKinney

I first met Kacy McKinney in a classroom at a small college in rural Vermont. She was a professor in the geography department and I was a student who didn’t know what I was interested in so I took my friend’s advice and took Kacy’s class about GMOs and was so glad I did!

When I moved back home to Portland in 2017, it felt like Kacy was appearing everywhere I went. First, at Sisters of the Road, a community space and cafe for the unhoused community, and then at the Independent Publishing Resource Center (IPRC), a community art studio, where I was a front desk volunteer and Kacy was a student in their comics program. And then again this year when I started this program at PSU I was delighted to remember that Kacy is a Professor in the Urban Studies department and we can continue to run into each other. 

Kacy is the facilitator, instigator, coordinator of “Changing the Narrative,” a project that “produced a series of ten short comics created through collaborations between PSU students with lived experience of homelessness, Portland-based comic artists, and the research team” that culminated in a book of comics sold by Street Root vendors on the sidewalks of Portland. It was a pleasure to talk to Kacy about this project that brought together ideas and people from the two places we encountered each other in Portland.

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Marissa: I think it would be fun to start with how when I moved back to Portland you just kept popping up. I saw you at Sisters of the Road– I saw your picture on the board members list, and then I started volunteering at the IPRC and I was like “Oh, there’s Kacy again!” It was so fun. 

Kacy: And I think the funny thing is– you didn’t ever take a class with me at Middlebury, did you?

Marissa: No, I did!

Kacy: You did? Okay. Which one did you take? 

Marissa: I took Political Ecology of GMOs with you!

Kacy: Okay, cool. That was a hard one. Nice. I was trying to tell Sage, my partner, last night, and I was like, I think maybe she never took any classes with me. We just were following each other in Portland, but that’s a good class for you to have been in anyway.

Marissa: I was glad to be in it!

Kacy: Did you live in that house too? The house that everyone lived in? With the food? 

Marissa: Yes! I lived in Weybridge.

Kacy: Yeah. That’s where I would’ve lived if I was a student there too. 

Marissa: I wanted to start with how you feel about where you are now as an educator and also as someone who is in the comics and DIY world? And how you feel about how you got here?

Kacy: My path through education began with not going to high school and instead I took a test. So I had this different way of doing school and I did finally start a four year undergrad at University of Texas because I wanted to learn Portuguese really well. At that point, I didn’t have that many people in my life who were excited about education or who wanted me to do graduate school or anything, so I just followed models around me and it was very, you pick a discipline and you do the discipline and it’s all social science, and I was drawn to that. So even though I had art and creativity in my life (I was even making comics then), I didn’t take it seriously because nobody around me did. I sort of moved through undergrad and then into a master’s and then into a PhD, all the while being like, someday I’ll have time for art. Someday I’ll have time to volunteer and do service. And by the time I got to Portland I’m like, I cannot separate these things anymore. I cannot only do art over the summer. I’m trying to retrain myself to not think of art as extra or on the side. When I was at the IPRC I was unemployed, so I had the space for the first time since I was 21 to ask, what do I really wanna be doing? So I found myself in Portland like a teenager again asking, how do I wanna live? What do I wanna prioritize? Maybe not a teenager, but maybe more like my twenties because I have a good position that’s grounded and that fits me, but there’s still a bunch of other stuff that is not in my job description that I need to be doing.

The pages of All My Dad’s Cars (2019) with the artists’ dad, Steve McKinney, the subject of the comic. At a gallery show in California at Toby’s Feed Barn. Photo courtesy of Kacy McKinney

Marissa: When I found myself at the IPRC, I was coming from the fine art department at Middlebury where I wasn’t finding any models and was feeling very out of place. At the IPRC I got to realize that printmaking wasn’t about the fine art world or making a single piece. At the IPRC it’s about hanging out with people, or making zines, or just being part of that intimate world. I didn’t have to fit into the fine art world. 

Kacy: I’m realizing now that the IPRC was a window into the fine art world for me. I was able to be around that amazing group of people and in that kind of space and work on comics and I could start to believe that I could be in the fine art world. And comics were leading me to painting and drawing and I am sort of like, Wait, am I not doing comics anymore? Am I an illustrator now? Am I a painter now? And I think, for now I’m not really doing comics and I’m okay. Just a couple months ago I finished a giant drawing that is inspired in some ways by comics, like I’m using the same pens I would use, but it’s six feet by four feet and it’s a life size pelican. That is not comics. And that’s okay. So I’m having to sort of settle into the fact that comics are a big part of my life, but I am like, does this mean now that I could have access to this world of fine arts? Yeah. And I’m like, could I do both? You know? How would that look? I wonder for how many people the IPRC leads them into a space of belonging that then allows them to see what they’re capable of and not just in one area.

Marissa: It’s a multi-directional hub. That tracks for me, and it makes me be like, “Ugh, the IPRC is so great!” It doesn’t shoehorn anyone into one way of making art. It’s like, we have these resources and you can do what you want. And I think it’s funny because I talked about the IPRC making me feel accepted outside of the fine art world, but like now I’m in this MFA program. 

Kacy: I know. Look at you. 

Marissa: I’m like, What? But this program is just a little corner of the fine art world that actually is comfortable for me because this program is questioning what it means to be in a fine art world. And I think that’s what the IPRC also ingrained in me. It’s a place of people being radical within whatever space they’re in. And so now I’m in a fine art world where people are asking what it means to be trying to make art. And what does it mean to be an artist and what does it mean to show work in the world and what is an art project even?

Kacy: And that’s the part of it that inspires me, I’m super drawn to this program. Every student that I’ve had a connection with has been amazing. It’s so inspiring to me to think that you could do social science/art and that’s actually the dream. And I think maybe what I wanted all along was this ability to think critically and do social practice. 

I think I wanna say one more thing about the IPRC, which is that because of IPRC, I got connected to Short Run Seattle and I got the Trailer Blaze Residency. And I was so nervous for that residency. I was like, “Will I fit in? What will people think?” But I ended up getting so comfortable there and then got this connection into this Seattle-based women, trans, and non-binary collective. I was invited into this space with these people who are all deeply caring and deeply welcoming and they told me, you belong here and your art is good enough and you are good enough and we need you. It still gives me chills. I realized that I’m looking for that kind of community. That’s why I’m drawn to the program that you’re in because it feels like it offers some of that. Some of the, we are critical, we are welcoming, we are warm, there’s space for all of us.

Trailer Blaze Residency 2019 Residents and Short Run Seattle Board Members (left to right, top to bottom): Lee Bess, Kelly Froh, Graciela Sarabia, Amy Camber, Alejandra Espino, E.T. Russian, Lori Damiano, Leela Corman, Kacy McKinney, Ashley Franklin, Eroyn Franklin, L. Armstrong, Jessica Hoffman, Megan Kelso

Marissa: In academia, especially, there’s such a push for being critical. I love the spaces that are like, you’re here, you belong, but also, what could you be doing? Is that really what you wanna be doing? 

Kacy: Yeah, but that’s like a good friendship, right? You don’t want a friend who’s just like, No matter what you do, you’re wonderful. Everything you do is wonderful. You want the one who’s like, Wait, I just heard you use that word, like, are you sure you wanna use that word these days? We’re not really using that word anymore. And you’re like, Oh, shit. Thank you. Or the friend who’s like, I’ve noticed you’ve been interested in this thing. You haven’t really talked about it. Can you say more about that? I think that’s the right kind of belonging. 

Marissa: Do you wanna talk about Changing the Narrative? And the ways it’s twisted together and pulled in these pieces of your life and your interests? How has that felt? What have you learned? 

Kacy: Yeah, I love that you see that because it feels very natural to me. I have students who want to start right away and I like to express that this took all the things that I did before it. And I’m not young and I didn’t just start out, maybe I wish I could have done it sooner, but the only way that it has been successful is based on the relationships and the experiences I’ve had. Everything has been important: education, certainly the places that I’ve traveled to have been important, the languages that I’ve studied.

The biggest pieces are the pieces when I stepped a bit away from academia, and that was volunteering at Sisters, and I think we did it sort of the same way. I got interested and I got invited to volunteer right after I moved to Portland. And I was sold on day one. I just was like, this is hard and it’s wonderful. I met so many incredible people and started to make friendships. And then at the same time I did the IPRC program and it started to feel like I knew some of the key people and l was getting to know the richness of artists who exist in this area and what they’re capable of. 

By that time, I was at PSU and starting to feel comfortable, and there was a grant application that came up that was from the Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative. And I thought, I can get that. It was the first time that I just was like, okay, like these things come together in my mind and it makes sense to me. I care deeply about students and their wellbeing, and I care deeply about homelessness and dignity and respect and stories, and I care deeply about comics and their ability to tell complex stories in ways that engage people deeply. And it feels right to both recognize that yes, I’m an artist, but like this is not about my art. Let me be a facilitator of this happening. 

It was very exciting to think about being able to compensate students and hear their stories and value their stories in a deeply respectful way. It was exciting to think about being able to compensate artists and I knew there were so many that we would have to choose from. I knew we would be able to find 10 artists who cared deeply about the project and maybe had some lived experience.

I expected from the beginning that the stories would be really wide ranging and so, therefore the art needed to be very wide ranging. I put it out into the world and then when I got it, I was like, this makes sense that I got this. This is right.

Marissa: I’ve been thinking about comics artists as organizers, about the anthologies that people put together and the ways that you can be an artist that taps into these kinds of organizing and synthesizing skills, rather than just being the visual artist for a project.

Kacy: That’s so interesting, yes. That part of it is hard for me because people will say, what was your role in it? And I’m like, Ooh, the editor? Facilitator? Organizer? Researcher? Selector of people? There’s so many skills that I’ve developed in the process. I sort of did everything and nothing is kind of how I think about it. Right? I made the whole thing possible and they’re not my stories, it’s not my art, you know? I’m trying to understand true collaboration– collaboration in which you are that person, just like you’re saying.

Marissa: What are you thinking moving forward? Like what are the things that need to stay and what are the things that are more flexible within the project, for the future? 

Kacy: I think I was just talking to students yesterday about the process, because I’m teaching a methods class and we were talking about how much you have to know in advance to be able to do it. Olivia’s working on a project with me called “Epilogue,” that is requesting the participation of all 10 artists, all 10 storytellers, the three interns on the project, and the two research assistants to come back and creatively reflect on what their experience was with the project. It’s less of what we should do differently next time and more of what did it mean for the artists and what did it mean for the participants? I think I’ll learn more about what to do differently next and how we can build and how can we do more? How can we work more with IPRC? How can we work more with Street Roots to make it easier for them, but also to engage vendors in meaningful ways?

And then I’m trying to raise funds to do the whole thing again. And I do think in this process of reflecting with the whole group of people, there will be some really concrete things that I find I wanna do differently. But the biggest and most important part is like finding the right team. And I’m hoping to do another one in two more years. I’ve doubted whether the right thing to do is to do the same thing again, but if the whole point of it is to share as many wide-ranging stories as possible that are unique and beautiful, then like we just need more. If it’s working, why would we stop? The social scientist in me is like, but what questions are you asking? And are you asking hard enough questions and are you building more data to inform the academy? I have to remind myself, that’s not what this is. This is creating more opportunities to tell stories and trying to change how people think about homelessness. 

Marissa: Yeah, and the structure’s already there. There’s such a pressure to do something different, to ask different questions. But since we’re working with people it’s gonna be different and you’re gonna learn different things every time even if you use the same structure.

Kacy: And that’s the point, right? I’m always talking about Chimimanda Adiche’s idea of “the danger of a single story.” I’m always asking: are we telling one story about this really complex thing? Homelessness is a perfect example. We’re telling like one or maybe two stories that supposedly apply to everyone. And anyone who’s experienced housing instability knows that there are so many different reasons why this could happen. It’s so systemic, right? It is so based in discrimination and inequality and poverty. Can we stop selling the same story? Of course we need as many stories as we can have. 

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Marissa Perez (she/her) grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a printmaker, party host, babysitter and youth worker. She’s interested in neighborhoods and the layers of relationships that can be hard to see. Her dad was a mail carrier for 30 years and her mom is a pharmacist. 

Dr. Kacy McKinney (she/her) is a critical feminist geographer and Senior Instructor in the Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, and Affiliated Faculty in Comics Studies. She is an artist working in comics, painting, illustration, and textile design. She is a graduate of the Certificate Program in Comics from the Independent Publishing Resource Center, and has had residencies with Short Run Seattle’s Trailer Blaze, Mesa Refuge, The Sou’wester, and The Verdancy Project. She has received grants from Regional Arts and Culture Council and Portland State University for her work in the arts and comics scholarship. She served on the Board of Directors of Sisters of the Road from 2018 to 2021. Her current research: Changing the Narrative Through Collaborative Comics is funded by PSU’s Homelessness Research and Action Collaborative and is in partnership with Street Roots and the Independent Publishing Resource Center. Courses of particular interests to art students that she teaches include: USP410/510: Arts and Community Change (Spring 2023), USP407/507 (and WR407/507): Comics into Research (Fall 2023), and USP325U: Community and the Built Environment (Fall 2023).

“I could care less if we win or lose. I think the experience for me is more, is everyone having a good time?”

‘Z’ aka Victor E. Viking

What makes a good time good? I suspect that a hallmark of the “good time” is, quite often, a felt sense of togetherness. Yes, good times can be had alone, and yes, bad times certainly happen in the company of others, but it’s around people that we are reminded of our common humanity; physical proof we are not alone; a temporary dissolution of the hard lines we draw around ourselves. As Elias Canetti says in Crowds and Power, “Only together can men free themselves from the burdens of distance.” And that’s good, right?

It makes sense, then, that within the extraordinary scenario of being en masse (say, at a sports game), there would be an additional element (say, a mascot) to serve the purpose of emphasizing that good time. A mascot acknowledges our value as spectators and rewards us for our presence, amplifies our enthusiasm and reflects it back to us. In the chaos of whistleblowing umpires, aggravated coaches, injured players, fast talking commentators, fouls and buzzers and wins and losses, the mascot acts as a hospitable interlocutor to guide us through, reminding us to enjoy the hubbub, smile for the jumbotron, and accept a fist bump when offered. 

I don’t know about you, but mascots are what keep me in the game, when I’m at a game (which I rarely am). There’s something about a seven foot tall, plush dolphin that hits different than a mortal human of flesh and blood. It helps that the mascot even physically scales up in size to proportionally support the crowd’s massive, collective spirit. That seven foot dolphin creates a larger than life fiction you might actually, for a moment, believe; a world where it’s safe to really care about something, to get on board, to root for some basketball team just because they play for your college, to embrace your regional pride or even some kind of newfound patriotism, if only for a couple hours.

Mascotry strikes me as performance art woven into a genre—sports—that we rarely associate with creative expression. And this is where it gets interesting for me. As a self-identified entertainer, I treasure the theatricality and clownish sensibility of these costumed cheerleaders. I relate to their keen consideration of the crowd (what’s a performance without spectators? We need them!) and their ability to distribute equal attention to the players and the audience like a cordial party host. A sports arena is effectively a theater in the round, where everyone watching the game also gets to watch each other. We are all implicated in the experience, and we all play a part. The lively group nature of a sports game recalls the participatory culture of ancient and Elizabethan theater, when it was customary for audience members to respond with loud utterances and a lobbing of stones or a goblet of wine. I love that mascots become a conduit for the collective buzz of the spectacle.  

I recently started hosting a weekly public dance happening at Lloyd Center Mall in Portland called Public Acts of Dance Company, and realized that I am effectively a mascot for the “game” of dancing publicly at this half empty shopping mall. In front of the shuttered Hollister or the former Champs, I observe Saturday shoppers walk past us with perplexed or piqued looks on their faces, and I respond by smiling, dancing harder, and beckoning them to join us. I’ve coaxed a few passersby, but I have to wonder if my success rate would increase if I were dressed as a giant sneaker or an absurdly proportioned saxophone.

 

For all the output of energy and attention toward the crowd’s experience, though, you have to wonder: where does that leave the mascot? What’s it like behind those eyes? For answers, I turned to the closest mascot within reach: Victor E. Viking, the official mascot of Portland State University (PSU). 

Mascots aren’t allowed to speak, but the people who play them are. Inside the Athletic Pavilion on campus, it’s “a well known secret,” who the human being is underneath the plush covering of the PSU viking costume, but the identity of “Z” must remain anonymous to the general public. Z works in the marketing department, which is a nod to the fact that mascots are, in truth, a branding strategy. Plus, this position helps conceal his true affiliation with the sports department— only the tennis team, with whom he shares a locker room, and the cheerleading squad, who sometimes teach him a routine, are in on it. His second life will be revealed at graduation, where tradition will have him walk in Victor’s enormous, plush sandalled feet: “It’s supposed to be a final, Oh, this is who it was the whole time.” 

Until then, Z, who possesses the mascot’s holy trinity of athletic, theatrical, and hospitality experience, lives an anonymous dual existence as the one and only mascot of Portland State. As I learned from talking with him, that can be “a weirdly alone experience.” Maybe that’s what, in part, propels the presiding social nature of Victor’s personality. After all, shouldn’t everybody be having a good time?

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Becca: How did you become Victor E. Viking? Did you have mascot experience? How long have you been doing it?

Z: I was an athlete, but I was also big into theater. I did a bunch of musicals in high school every spring when I wasn’t playing sports, and that was one of my big niche things that I really liked doing. So when I heard about the opening—which I found out about through a friend, they hadn’t had a Victor in two or three years because of COVID— I remember telling them at the office, Hey, I can just do my best and it’ll be a lot of learning on the job. I showed them some of my theater work, and it just lined up. This was last summer. So I’ve been on the job for six months now.

Becca: How did you train? Or audition?

Z: There was no audition. It was like, Put on the outfit. It fits. Let’s take you to a couple of games, let’s have someone come— they call it a handler— with you; make sure you’re comfortable, and then they’ll report back to us and we’ll get an idea of how you did. My first couple events, I was really worried about how I looked. I’d be like, Hey, does everything look normal? They were like, Yeah, dude, we’re just happy to have a mascot here, you’re overthinking it. So a lot of it for me was understanding that it’s really about just being there and being seen. You don’t have to go so hard and constantly do everything. A lot of it is tough, especially interacting with so many different people, and with limited vision. You can’t see very well at all. 

Becca: Through those two eye holes?

Z: That’s it, that’s all you have. So a lot of it is just sort of winging it. I’m way more comfortable at home games because I know the Pavilion really well. It’s been a great season for me personally, because I’ve been able to grow into it and get more interactions with the players. It was a good confidence boost, I think.

Becca: What does growing look like? What’s your vision for where you want to be as the mascot?

Z: As a mascot, you’re like a mime. You can’t speak, but you need to display some sort of emotion. That for me was really hard. I may have done theater, but I’m not the most creative person. So a lot of it was like, Okay, I can do this, and people are responding well, so I’m always going to do this every time there’s a situation like that. I do a lot of repetitive action. You want to kind of stay reserved. One thing I do is I’ll taunt the other team when they’re shooting free throws. But you don’t want to go too far, because they’re college athletes too. Even if we’re playing them, I want them to do well, and I don’t want them to feel like it’s a mean thing. That’s just how Victor is. 

Becca: That was a question of mine: who is Victor E. Viking?

Z: Uh, I don’t know. He’s way more confident than I am, I will say that. He’s definitely more cocky than I am. And he’s probably a little annoying. But I think those are all good traits for a mascot. When I put on the Victor outfit, if I see a player complain about a foul, I’ll start doing the crying [motion]. I guess he’s like a troll. A nice one. I always clap for the other team and go visit with the visiting fans.

Becca: So he’s slightly provocative to keep a competitive edge, but still supportive of everyone in the room.

Z: Yeah. I would rather be a bit more empathetic with my approach, versus, if we lose I still want the players to know they did awesome. I could care less if we win or lose. Most of the time I don’t even know the score because I’m walking around trying to shake hands and take pictures, rather than actually pay attention to the game. I mean, I think it’s important to win, but I think the experience for me at least is more like, is everyone having a good time? Did the families, did the kids, or the little brother, little sister, get to dap up the Viking? Because when I remember my experience with mascots, it was always a family thing.  

Becca: What kind of value do you feel like the people that you interact with get from getting close to the mascot? Do you feel like they see you as some kind of celebrity? Is there a kind of larger than life excitement getting up close to Victor?

Z: There’s definitely different reactions. A lot of students are too cool for it. I’ll try to dap them up and they’ll kind of look at me and I have to just kind of get them to go. But then there’s other students who are just totally into it, absolutely love it. I try as best I can to give everybody attention, but those are usually the people I will float towards just because it’s easier to get that confidence. When the dance cam is going, you want to be dancing next to people instead of just dancing by yourself. Families are always very easy, because kids don’t care that nobody’s ever heard of Victor E. Viking. You float towards the people who are more into it. 

Becca: You’re finding your audience.

Z: Even the game we had here last Saturday, I think most of the people were fans of the opposing team. I was waving at this one little section of the audience and this lady was not having it. She was just like, “Can you move?” She was just like, not about it. A part of me wants to stand there, and just wait as long as I can, act like I didn’t hear her. Another part of me is like, Well, I could just like go say hi to this family who, yeah, they’re all from the Eastern Washington team, but they’re all super into it. Maybe they give me a thumbs down, but they’re very nice about it. It’s very vibe oriented.

Becca: Do you think of yourself as an entertainer when you step into that space? 

Z: It’s like pantomiming. You can’t speak, and I have always thought that the best thing about acting is being able to convey something without words. I think that’s the whole point of it.

Becca: The wildest thing about wearing a mask is that you can’t communicate through facial expression and instead you have to translate everything to your limbs and the way that you’re holding your body.

Z: Posture is a big thing, I realized.

Becca: Are you making facial expressions underneath that head, even though his face is out there, never moving?

Z: Absolutely. I’ve caught myself doing it a bunch of times. And I have to make sure I don’t make a noise. I don’t know about other mascots, but I definitely still hit all the facial expressions. I honestly think maybe that’s better for the performance because it’s more natural. 

Becca: How does suiting up as Victor affect how you approach the rest of your life? Do you find that the attitude seeps out?

Z: It does for a couple hours. During football season, I went to the grocery store after a game and I felt like everyone was looking at me. And it’s like, No, they aren’t. It’s just because there were two hours of that straight. You have to catch yourself a little bit.

Becca: Totally. Sometimes there’s a real afterglow when you’ve been in the position of entertainer or someone in charge. Like you’re somehow carrying it on you. So maybe they really were looking at you, who knows?

Z: I wouldn’t be surprised, especially because you look kind of crazy after. I’m a pretty fair skinned person, and my face looks extremely red, and my hair is still a little sweaty. I’ve definitely, on my way out, had teenage kids say, Oh that’s the mascot! So I give them a thumbs up.

Becca: When your own humanity is obscured by this costume, does it ever get a little lonely?

Z: There are usually four to five mascots at a university, but because it’s a smaller program, I’m the only one. I’m friends with Benny the Beaver (of Oregon State University)– it’s my friend, Ryan. He tells me he hangs out with the other mascots like every day. So I think the only negative is that it can get a little lonely in that sense. My girlfriend will come to the games and my mom will sometimes come. The social media team I’m very close with, because I do a lot of work with them. But it is sort of a weirdly alone experience. You’re the only one feeling it and you’re the only one going through it. Especially if you don’t have the best interaction with somebody or maybe the night didn’t go as well as you hoped it would. I think that’s why I am not a big fan of the anonymous rule. I love that I’m close with the tennis team, because they know, and there’s a sense of trust there. It’s a little bit of a shame that the basketball team and football team aren’t supposed to know, because I feel like that would only bring us closer, right? 

Becca: I relate to that loneliness as a performer. People can fall in love with that thing they see up there, but then at the end of the day, you’re you under there, and you haven’t necessarily been seen. Do you feel like being incognito at least gives you license to amplify some part of your own personal expression?

Z: Yes, it does. But you are also taking on a different persona, right? So the self expression, the creativity, that part of it is great, but there is also still a sense that, this is Victor, it’s not… It is me, right, and I’m the one controlling it. But I think the anonymity factor kind of makes it so… I don’t know.

Becca: It’s like you can’t quite take all the credit, because you’re not being perceived as yourself. You’re pulling the strings of the puppet.

Z: And there’s definitely a sense of freedom to that. I’m not the sort of person who would be in the center of the court, dancing. But when I have that on, who cares? No one sees that it’s me. That’s what they told me in the office about the anonymous rule. So I understand that part of it. But I think that people should be able to be that person, if they have it in them. Maybe the mask, the head, the costume isn’t always a good thing, in that sense. But if it ever got to the point where I was having a hard time with it, or it felt like something I needed to get off my chest, or something I talk to my girlfriend about when I get home, then I would mention it to them. But I don’t really care, it’s just the formal thing. It could be worse. I could not enjoy doing it.

Becca: It is interesting that one of the main purposes of the mascot is to bring everyone in the room together and represent this act of gathering, the athletic spirit and the excitement of a game and togetherness, all inside a culture of teams, and then here you are, the only one that’s not on a team.

Z: I think that’s more a product of us being a smaller program. Oregon State, there’s definitely more of a team aspect to it. But, you’re not totally alone— a lot of the cheerleaders I’m pretty close with; I go to their practices once a month or poke my head in if they have choreography for me to learn. There’s definitely still a sense of community, but it’s just probably less so than other programs. But that’s not a bad thing, right? Like, that’s also just a product of where you are and who you are, and the school you go to. 

Becca: Has there been any talk of the team name and the character of a viking coming from an ancient, Nordic, plundering, settler culture?

Z: There hasn’t since I’ve been here, but I’m just a big fan of an animal mascot more than any human mascot. So like, I get it. I’m new to the Pacific Northwest, but I pretty much had the notion that a lot of people here have some sort of Nordic background. That’s a bit outdated, probably. I would hope that one day, they adopt an animal. I think that’s an easier thing to root for. It’s a little less creepy to have an animal mascot versus a spartan or a viking or a pirate. You know what I mean? A big thing for me is like, cuteness, right? If I see a mascot as a cute animal, I’m more prone to interact with it, versus that dude with the big muscles. I think that’s just a me thing, because I’m the one inside the costume. I don’t want to be creepy.

Becca: You’re like, I know how I look right now, so I’ll factor that into how I behave and interact with people. 

Z: If you get kids who are really young, a lot of the time they might get a little creeped out or scared. You see that and you’re like, Man, if I was just a dog, or a bird, people would not feel that way. At least to me, it’s like, maybe don’t give him a golden beard. Give him like, a black beard or— especially because I’m a history major, and that’s a big thing for me is the historical value of it. There’s definitely a weird fascination with the entity of a Viking, where it’s like, you just go in and do whatever, and you’re more brutal than anyone else. No one can stand up to you. And I think that’s like a very American mindset. I’m not sure if that is cool. I think that there’s just a mythos to it that is very American in that sense, where it’s like, no one can tell me what to do. I’m stronger than you, even if I’m not smarter than you. It’s one that I personally do not relate to. I always, in my head, I’m like, Well, I hope I’m the only one thinking that. 

Becca: You’re probably not, and I think that’s a good thing, that people be a bit more critical of it. I also wish that the mascot was a cute animal. 

Z: When I was a little kid, I was always a Dolphins fan. Their mascot was the cutest and the most out-there animal that’s in the league. It’s a dolphin wearing football pads. How could you not love that? 

Becca: A dolphin with feet! That takes the fiction to another level. 

What does it take to be a mascot? 

Z: I think it takes being a proactive person, more than a reactive person. When I worked in hospitality, I always saw myself as going that extra step forward. I think that that’s why I do well in the mascot outfit. For example, I went to the Phillip Knight tournament this year, which has a lot of bigger schools like Purdue and Florida, West Virginia. The Florida mascot was a gator, and he was sitting down the entire time, and I was like, I don’t want to be that guy. Even if I’m not the gator, I’m just like this obscure mascot, I’m gonna twirl my arms around a little bit. I think it is having a sense of confidence that is also boosted a little bit by the fact you are anonymous and you’re wearing a costume. 

Becca: How do you maintain a sense of optimism in adversity, inside of a game situation?

Z: I have the approach of, don’t give up and just keep going. If the clock is running, then you need to be going, going, going. And maybe part of that is just a sense of work ethic. Even if you’re getting beat real bad, you can act like you’re worried about it or you don’t like it, but you still have to be performing, you know what I mean? When I’m down there, and I can feel that nobody has a good vibe, nobody is reacting, I think that’s where the work ethic part of it clicks in, where I’m like, Well, it’s my job. Even if it’s not the only job I do, I’m gonna do it the best I can for the three hours I’m in this costume. No matter what the circumstances.

Becca: Imagine a team that had no mascot at all. How would that team suffer? What happens in the absence of Victor?

Z: I think you lose some of the ambiance. You lose the feeling of having that host. You can still have an awesome experience, but would that kid on his way out be saying, “Go Viks,” if he didn’t see the Viking there as a symbol of the team? I’m not sure. I do think you lose a symbolic value. 

Becca: Do you have any mascot ambitions beyond PSU, now that you’ve gotten a taste?

Z: I’ve thought about it. Maybe a local sports team, or even if they needed somebody at the high school [I worked at] to wear the suit for a year, I would do it right away. But professionally, I don’t think so. I think there are people who are built better for it than I am. I’m 25. So it’s like, how long can I even do this for? It’s a tough job. I feel it the next day, a lot of the time. But I also wouldn’t rule it out. I enjoy being a performer, but I enjoy other aspects of my life more. I remember listening to interviews of professional mascots. A lot of these guys are in their 30s and their 40s, and they’ve been doing this for a long time. They dedicate their lives to it. Maybe if teaching didn’t work out, and I was like, I just want to be a mascot, maybe. But I enjoy being myself. I think anyone who works as a mascot for that long has to really enjoy being that character, at least on equal par with themselves. You know?

Becca: Have you felt different since you started embodying Victor? Do you feel like you’ve taken notes from Victor’s personality in any way or discovered a capacity for one of those traits that you weren’t aware of before?

Z: I think I became a better dancer, which is cool. When I take off the costume, I’m me, right? If anything, more of me has rubbed off on Victor. 

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Becca Kauffman (they/them) is a socially inclined artist working in Queens, New York and Portland, Oregon. Practicing art as a public utility through interactive performance, devised gatherings, and neighborhood interventions, their work is currently situated at the local shopping mall and has also taken the form of an unsanctioned artist residency in Times Square, a public access television show, wearable conversation pieces, DJ sets, music videos, choreographed stage shows, original pop music under the moniker Jennifer Vanilla co-created with NYC producer and technologist Brian Abelson, a pedestrian parade with a group of fifth grade crossing guards, and a comprehensive artistic campaign to get a crosswalk painted in Queens. beccakauffman.net

Z (he/him) is a 25 year old originally from Virginia and now living in the Portland Metro area. He is pursuing a degree in history with the hopes of teaching his own students one day. He enjoys spending time with his dog and his girlfriend and doing various outdoors activities such as fishing, gardening, and hiking. For him, mascoting feels like a natural extension of his background in theater and something he does to connect with fellow students, athletes, and the school as a whole. 

Diana Marcela Cuartas with Taravat Talepasand

“Regardless of where you are, who you’re working for; if you’re working with yourself, or if you’re working with others. That’s the moment where a magic is happening. It’s about how we can talk about things so we can feel like we’re all sharing a safe space where we can speak freely without judgment.”

-Taravat Talepasand

I first met Taravat at the closing party of the Dream Girl exhibition by Sa’rah Melinda Sabino at One Grand Gallery, Portland, in October 2022. While dancing and sharing our excitement at how good the DJ was, I learned she was one of the new faculty at Portland State University School of Art. I started following her work and found myself delighted by its rebellious, vulnerable, and fun nature; a powerful combination very much needed in the academic landscape. 

Later on, she had a solo show in Minnesota where, among works from the last 17 years of her artistic career, she presented a video of herself dancing on public TV at age 10. Even as a little girl outside the art-world context, a captivating playfulness was present in her performance, embodying the same inquiries as her adult-life artistic work, as a masterpiece created in advance for future questions. In the PSU Art and Social Practice classroom, we call that “retroactive claiming.” The term, coined by Harrell Fletcher, the program founder, references the possibility of revisiting the past to claim elements of it as artworks. 

I reached out to Taravat, interested in hearing how she, as a studio practice artist, could relate to social practice terms. In the process, we ended up talking about the relationships between body expression, safe spaces, critical thinking, and how they arrive together on the dance floor.

Baba Karam dance by Taravat Talepasand. Still from the video. Image courtesy by the artist.

Diana Marcela Cuartas: I’m intrigued by a video you included in your current exhibit in Warsaw Gallery, where you appear dancing on public TV when you were a child. I would like to hear how you arrived at the idea of sharing it as an artwork.

Taravat Talepasand: That video of me dancing when I was ten years old on public access TV in Portland, at the time, was just embarrassing. I didn’t want to do it. I got coaxed by my mom, and she wanted me to do it because she wanted to show off to the Iranian community that I can dance. “Look at my daughter. She’s on TV!” It was definitely a place of narcissism and self-absorption, which is just part of Iranian culture—and other cultures can probably mirror that as well. But I knew at that time that it was something that was always going to be with me. I questioned myself, “What if people can see this any time, any day, at any moment that they want?” As if I knew this idea of the internet would be quickly unfolding in the future.

These videos came around 1990, and I found them on the internet around 2000. The Iranian station of that show uploaded all of their videos on their YouTube channel. It had like 60,000 views. Some people were like, “Isn’t this a weird dance? What is this?” But most people were like, “This is adorable,” or “Oh, she knows how to move.” For me, it was about realizing how I could turn something that I thought was kind of shameful into something that could be educational or informative, really grappling with a young Iranian American girl’s life in existence and identity. So I kept it; I knew there would be a time to share it. 

Diana: Are you familiar with the term “retroactive claiming”?

Taravat: Retroactive claiming? I know what retroactive means, and I know what claiming is.

Diana: Harrell Fletcher wrote a book compiling his thoughts on terms and topics related to social practice. It includes retroactive claiming, which says: “An artist can retroactively claim elements of the past as artworks. That could apply to both object-based things—like photographs or a garden—and experiences—like going on a walk or having a discussion. To formalize retroactively claiming as an artwork, an artist can reframe it by giving the object or experience (or even a thought) a title, date, location, description, and potentially documentation […]”

Taravat: I like the retroactively claiming! I think that I do a lot of that in my art practice. That is a terminology that I can absolutely use to describe my practice, my way of thinking, and where I’m getting my inspiration. My ideas come mostly from personal experience or experiences that I’ve heard of, read about, or had been shared with me and given consent to work with, but those are all things that happened in the past. Reclaiming them now and making them into art, in a way, makes them almost a relic because things that we keep in our memory or our journals are personal. Most of the time we don’t share it, or they get forgotten or lost when we leave this world. But when you do work, publish something, or make it as an object, when you share it publicly, that becomes something else. And it also grows out of what is personal or what you thought was more isolating.

Diana: How did you decide to include the video in your latest show?

Taravat: I thought the exhibition at Law Warschaw gallery in Macalester College, Minnesota, was the right place to do it because it surveys a lot of my paintings, drawings, sculptures, and installations over the last 15-plus years. I needed something fun, a good grounding reset because you’re seeing all these works that you can see as beautifully painted or made, but the narrative is very political or can be controversial, a thread of female empowerment and conversation about the oppression of women in the Middle East. I needed something like when you buy perfumes, and they give you a bowl of coffee beans to reset your senses. The video is the reset for the exhibition. It was a place for people to see, “Oh, well, this is really just coming from this girl. This is her. She’s lived with this culture for a long time”. I thought this video would be a place for people to calm their senses, smile, or have that feeling you sometimes get when you see a child do something cute or playful. That’s what the video is for in that exhibition.

Diana: You seem so joyful and graceful in your dance, I wouldn’t tell your mother had to push you to do it. How was the preparation for it? 

Taravat: There was a mixture of feelings when I was making that video. I was excited that people liked my dancing, and my mom was really proud. She was very, very excited for me, and as an Iranian girl, you get wound up into wanting to keep your parents happy. I understood at that age that assimilating into American culture was very hard for my parents as refugees. This was a place for them to be seen in a greater community and within the Iranian community that also existed in Portland. I did it more for her than for myself. I think this is one of the first moments I remember having a dissociative experience. I was like, “You don’t want to be here, but you’re here. Your mom is putting makeup on you; you’re wearing these ridiculous outfits; you’re going to dance to the music you’re so used to dancing to in private homes and parties. And now you’re very much in a public space.” So I left my body and danced my heart out the whole night, which turned into three videos.  

I particularly like the one with the hat. It’s called Baba Karam. Baba means father, and Karam is  a name given to a man. It’s supposed to be for men to dance only, but there are a lot of women that dance it too. I took on that challenge, and I knew in my body that there was some comfort in me wearing this non-feminized outfit; I wasn’t in a dress, I wasn’t in a skirt –I didn’t like those things as a child. It was the hat that really charged me. I was like, “Yes, I can play that part of a man or a boy,” knowing that I’m a girl and that my genetic makeup is feminine. That was the first moment that I got a challenge that stuck with me my entire life. My work is about these challenges, these roles that women are up to and are often told to play, and how we can erase those lines and boundaries as to what a woman should or should not look like, do or not do, say or not say.

Baba Karam dance by Taravat Talepasand. Stills from the video. Images courtesy by the artist.

Diana:  I read you have an artwork installed at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Peace in the Middle East, that fell from the ceiling, and you were hired to repair it. In the article, you mention that, while fixing it, you wanted to reimagine your intentions about the installation more collaboratively. I would like to hear more about that. From the social practice perspective, there is this idea of studio practice work being isolated, not really in a dialogue with the community. Can you share how you worked to pursue a collaborative approach with that specific piece?

Taravat: That piece was part of the Bay Area Now in 2018 at YBCA. It’s a bunch of neon signs that say peace in Farsi. I had made these neons in a previous exhibition, and they wanted to have them in the show. They installed it with a very fine type of wiring, and what was supposed to only be there for a year ended up being there for three years. Something happened when there was a big windstorm, and they fell. YBCA was very unhappy about it because they had lived with this neon piece for so long, and they reached out asking how to get it back. 

When I had to redesign this piece, the phrase that kept coming to my mind was, “You’re not alone in this. We can’t do this alone”. I wanted to seek a neon artist that was not necessarily Iranian or Middle Eastern but from a different community that could have a hand in this together. I picked the artist Ames at Rebel Neon in San Francisco, who goes by they/them and has fought for their human rights. It was important to me to have their hand bend this neon. Even though they say, “Oh, I’m just fabricating this,” to me, it is more “I sought you out. You are a part of this dialogue now”. 

I reached out to several of my Iranian artist friends, designers, filmmakers, and people not necessarily in the fine art world to hear how they could see this reimagined. I also spoke to a lot of the museum’s employees and staff members who had daily contact with the piece to learn how people felt about that installation. I reached out to various gender, race, and socio economic positions, people that were included in the museum and people that were not, and I came up with this other version, very similar to the original it’s the same colors and neon; but positioned to drop down lower, so it can be seen as you’re walking up the stairs. It took a larger space that it needed to take up. It says Peace in the Middle East, but it also gives respect to the sacred geometry that is a part of the art history of the Middle East and Morocco and Egypt. It’s something that wants to encompass it all and doesn’t want to isolate whether you’re Muslim or not, or you’re Shia or Sunni.

Peace in the Middle East, 2017/2022, installation view, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2022. Photo courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photograph by Tommy Lau.

Diana: I was told since childhood that you shouldn’t talk about politics, but I like to imagine a world where you can talk about politics with your mom, your grandma, the neighbors, at the school, the museum… As an educator and first-generation immigrant, how do you cultivate the ground to start conversations to unveil taboos?

Taravat: My work is all about that. I’m pretty sure that students signing up for classes are smart enough to look up their professors. I would say 99% of the students that come into my classes know what they’re walking into. That the professor is a woman, a person of color, Iranian but also American, first generation, and can talk about this kind of displacement and constant negotiation of identity. And whether they can relate personally or not, students are intrigued and supportive of my work and know that they’re walking into these possible conversations in the classroom. So far, they enjoy the conversations that I am supporting. 

One of the many things I tell students is that I’m trying to create a safe space here. I want everybody to be able to share how they feel honestly and openly. Whether that means they want to leave the space or if they want to say, “I think that there is enough about this conversation.” I love that challenge; I would love to be a safe person and a mediator. 

We are constantly talking about what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in academia, what’s happening in the art world, and how we feel about it. I think it enables them to leave the classroom and have these conversations, go see work, attend a lecture, meet new people, and have an open mind. That is really the core of what I’m trying to promote.

Diana: What do you enjoy the most about teaching?

Taravat: I enjoy the kind of back-and-forth in the conversations that happen in the classroom. It can be ignited by the student or by me. When we start engaging and having a dialogue where we’re sharing our ideas, feelings, and research collectively, that’s the moment when it feels really good, that is very helpful in the real world, and I can feel that energy from the students as well. It doesn’t mean that they’re all smiling and in agreement. It’s that conversation; it’s that engagement; it’s “Share what you know about this topic” or “Share what you don’t know about it. What makes you feel enraged or uncomfortable? What can we really learn from this and take from it?” 

Regardless of where you are, who you’re working for; if you’re working with yourself, or if you’re working with others. That’s the moment where a magic is happening. It’s about how we can talk about things so we can feel like we’re all sharing a safe space where we can speak freely without judgment. That’s the core of it for me. I learned that in college, and it did a lot for me, and I want to give that back to the students.

Diana: How can we harbor that kind of thinking and conversations outside art school? Because in a college-classroom context, we are somewhat safe, but in many communities outside the art world, a safe space for critical thinking is a privilege of difficult access and is not a priority.

Taravat: That’s interesting because you’re talking about the inclusivity of higher education, and that’s why I think KSMoCA is so rad. You are all getting in there at such an important time in these children’s lives and education to say, “Look at me. Look at what I’m doing. You can do this if it interests you. Let’s talk about it.” I never got that. My parents were like those parents “I don’t know about you being an artist. What kind of artist?” –Maybe an architect, maybe a graphic designer, you know.

As an educator, I think it is important to insert yourself to open conversations and invitations to younger classes and students. What I have learned here at PSU that I didn’t get from the previous institutions that I worked for is how important it is to be a part of a community outside the institution and be able to share who you are, your work, and how you teach in a very open way that can meet people that don’t have to pay the tuition to be at school. However, l know that that is still very narrow. But I’m always very much accepting those types of invitations. I’m seeking it, trying to be as open as possible. 

Diana: The day that I met you, we were in this gallery, and we were amazed at how fun that was. It felt like a vortex to Portland in a parallel universe. Am I wrong?

Taravat: Yes. Sa’rah Sabino’s opening, where she had a DJ, hip hop music. It was like, DIVERSITY, all caps.

Diana: Why were you so surprised by that event having an out-of-this-Portland vibe?

Taravat: Okay, I was born and raised here. I can tell you firsthand the lack of diversity that the city and state have had forever. I mean, I have never been in one place with that many brown and black people in my life in Portland. So, I was so excited, it was really special and unique. I didn’t see that a lot, I hadn’t experienced that in Portland before. When I was a kid, I was the only brown person there; no one even cared where I was from; they just assumed that I was, you know…

Diana: Sort of Mexican?

Taravat: Yeah. And I was just like, “Okay, cool.” The thing is, in the 80s, you had to learn how to take it; today, nobody is taking it. We all are voicing our opinions, feelings, and preferences regarding how we want to be seen, right? When I was in my 20’s, going out to bars, clubs, and stuff, there was still a lack of diversity in those scenes. I remember around 2010, I was living in San Francisco and would come to Portland once a month, and I wanted to go to bars and clubs with hip-hop music, but It was so hard to find places that play that music here. There were all these articles that would put out something like “entices the wrong type of people.” So that opening was very special, one of a kind. Really exciting to meet you there as I was dancing.

Diana: What can we artists do to nurture that kind of Portland? 

Taravat: I think that Sa’rah Sabino did it right. She created multiple events during her exhibition that generated many different communities to come together. She invited our undergrad students for a gallery talk. She had a couple of DJ open nights, and she just so happens to have a very diverse group of friends. I think that if we can have these kinds of events like just come and dance, just that alone. I mean.., do you know of any places where you can go and dance freely?

Diana: Only my living room.

Taravat: The pandemic really stopped that. There’s just a rad space in the huge lecture hall in the Shattuck Hall, the main floor. It’s just an open, huge auditorium, and I always think, “Can we have a dance party here? An Artist’s Ball?” I believe that the only way to break those barriers of inclusivity, and inviting communities to come together is to hold these types of events.

Diana: I couldn’t agree more.

Taravat Talepasand (she/they) is an artist, activist, and Portland State University art practice professor whose labor-intensive interdisciplinary painting practice questions normative cultural behaviors within contemporary power imbalances. As an Iranian-American woman, Talepasand explores the cultural taboos that reflect on gender and political authority. Her approach to figuration reflects the cross-pollination, or lack thereof, in our Western Society.

Diana Marcela Cuartas (she/her) is a Colombian artist, researcher, and curator transplanted to Portland in 2019. Her work incorporates visual research, popular culture analysis, and knowledge exchange processes, in publications, workshops, parties, or curatorial projects as a framework to investigate the relationships formed between a place and those who inhabit it. With her projects, Diana is interested in shaking off the rigidness of the systems we are inserted into by cultivating spaces to invite people to slow down, think together, share questions, and have fun.

“None of my friends were surprised that I devoted my life to trash.”

Dr. Christa McDermott

A hodgepodge interest is my favorite kind. I feel my own work and interest is a hodgepodge of language, garbage, compulsion and how following them changes our relationships to objects and others, textiles, craft processes, sensationalizing, serving, and question asking, among other things. I get excited when I see people doing work that feels unprecedented in its specificity yet vital in its nicheness and connected to so many topics in previously unexamined ways. I get especially excited when the work touches on topics that compel me, but exists in the world of research and science, which feels so outside of my own realm. When I read Dr. Christa McDermott’s bio on PSU’s website that mentions the environment, women’s studies, and the “emotional relationships with possessions, how we construct identities through consumption, and hoarding,” I was enthralled and knew I wanted to talk to her. Our conversation was just as rich and varied as I had hoped and inspired me to think in new ways about trash, responsibility, community, and equity.

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Caryn Aasness: To start, would you tell me a little about yourself and what it is that you do?

Dr. Christa McDermott: Sure, My name’s Christa. My background is in psychology and social psychology, my specific degree is Personality and Social Context, and I have a degree in women’s studies so I’ve always had this weird hodgepodge thing, because I’m interested in that and I apply it to recycling [laughs]. I went into psychology and women’s studies with my interest in environmental stewardship of objects and my own personal interest: I’m the person who pulls things out of the trash, have been since high school. None of my friends were surprised that I devoted my life to trash [laughs]. I take pictures of trash on vacation, I take pictures of people’s recycling bins. But I’ve always been interested in the people aspect of it, how we display our identities or understand ourselves through the things we own or want to buy, and the tie-in to capitalism and the fact that our economy runs on consumption and so, of course, we’re oriented to express our psychology through our stuff. I don’t think this is explored a lot in psychology outside of marketing and trying to sell people things. So I was particularly interested in terms of gender studies; consumption has always been tied more to women and women’s identity, like shopping, caring for things, and maintaining them is much more of women’s labor burden. Our relationships to things are also gendered. As a grad student, I made up a course that I taught called the Sex of Things. I’m just trying to lay out the relationship, the genderedness of our consumption. 

In graduate school you have more opportunity to explore what you want to do. At that time, the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu were really influential to me and all of his ideas around different kinds of capital and social capital. And he’s got one book [Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste] where he did a survey of a bunch of different French people of different backgrounds about the kinds of things that they liked or had in their home. So, he’d ask, Do you like this painting? One painting is boats with rope on it, and another is ballerinas or different things. He did this with a very large sample of people and showed that people’s tastes are not as unique as they think, and they’re very much tied to their social class identities. Things that we feel are very much our own personal preferences are very socially constructed, and it’s not that we don’t have our own personal preferences, but I think we really underestimate how much they’re influenced by our social structures and things like our affinities towards other people who are like us, or our desire to make ourselves dissimilar to other people that we don’t want to be like. 

But then, as I actually try to do work in this area, it’s not easy. All the things I’m talking about I rarely get to actually do. It depends on funding in the world, and much more prosaic things. So I’ve spent a lot of time doing energy efficiency work. Right now, the work I do at PSU is around recycling. It’s what other people are willing to work with you on or pay you for. I try to bring my lens, the social structure lens to that work, especially in recycling, people are obsessed about how to get people to sort things differently, and I’m like, that’s not the issue at hand.

Caryn: What is the issue at hand?

Christa: The issue at hand is getting people to use less, reuse more: how do you have social structures that enable people so it’s not just an individual thing? How do you have a society that helps people fix their things? How do you get companies to make things that are fixable? It’s less mechanical and more social. What gaps need to be filled in people’s lives? Right now, what if owning things and shopping and especially turnover of things is what is helping them feel better? Or holding on to things? I’m very interested in hoarding because I see so much good intention in hoarding, but it’s often good intention gone awry. From what we understand, hoarding disorder is mostly driven by anxiety, but there’s different levels of hoardingness, and in a lot of environmentalists, I see a lot of almost-hoarding. We’re all trying to salvage objects and maintain them. That’s something that doesn’t get discussed as much. 

Caryn: You mention how lots of this work is tied to institutional support and funding: do you see people doing work that is effective or could be effective, but is outside of that institutional support? 

Christa: Yeah. There’s lots of organizations working on these issues from different angles. I don’t exactly know that I’d say there’s one place where people have a more holistic view. What’s important is the coming together of all these stakeholders around different issues and making sure that you have a whole range of people represented: the activists and the nonprofits. Something that’s been really eye-opening for me is some work I started doing with canners, or waste pickers as they’re called everywhere else in the world. That’s a group that makes you think very differently about the structures around recycling and what it can offer people. I met Taylor Cass-Talbot with WIEGO, [Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing], a global organizing group of women’s informal laborers. She works with waste pickers all around the world and also helped start up a co-op here called Ground Score, a cooperative of canners advocating for their needs. At first, when I thought about canning, I was like, Well, that’s something we just have to phase out, this sounds like a terrible life, people picking through people’s trash, hauling things all around, why are you not just trying to end this? And she’s like, No, this is empowering. This is low barrier, flexible work. People build a community around it, and do you want to know who’s actually making sure most of your recycling is working? It’s the people who are coming through and pulling out the recyclables. And I had a 180. It totally changed my perspective, these folks are crucial to the system of recycling, and yet the system is literally designed to either not include them or to be actively against them. For example, the BottleDrop system [the system in which individuals can redeem recyclable bottles and cans for the refund value, often at grocery stores or dedicated recycling centers] was not designed for them at all. It’s not designed for people with hundreds of cans. There’s actually a limit on what you can bring in and grocery stores don’t want to deal with them. Canners experience a lot of stigma and prejudice. So they mobilized something called the People’s Depot where canners can drop off large quantities– it’s run by canners so they also aren’t experiencing discrimination and stigma and being hassled and looked down upon. It’s been eye opening to see the community around it and that social structure aspect of people being able to support each other. I find waste picking to be a really rich place for thinking about how we handle materials. These are people who know how to fix a lot of things or want things to be more fixable. They pick up all different materials for resale. People are finding ways to get by in a way that fits them better than the typical system even though maybe Waste Management isn’t going to hire them to drive a truck. 

Caryn: What do you think is the best way for an individual to get involved or make an impact?

Christa: I’m a big believer in advocating for structural change. A lot of folks are very passionate about zero waste, and it’s individual behavior based, right? Which I mean, I engage in a lot of that as well. I’m constantly sorting all my special recycling, all my little caps, even though I know deep down that this is not really helping. But I also work on these other things at a larger structural level. So if someone has this interest, I say engage in structural advocacy.

I’ll give one example of how I found my way into this. After graduate school, I moved to California, back to Berkeley. There was this group there that combined meditation and environmental activism all around waste [Green Sangha], they were really great. We met about once a month, there was meditation and then a talk about plastic pollution, for example, and what we can do about it. We did some activism, writing old school letters. There was a guy who was like a little Al Gore, going around showing a PowerPoint. Because it was mindfulness based, they weren’t as interested in just looking at why all these things are bad. The PowerPoint had a section that was like, here are all the reasons why we all love plastic or why plastic is great in our lives, this is what it represents and does for us. But we also recognize that it has all these different problems. So it was very much open problem solving. What can we all do to reduce these impacts in our lives? Mostly, we need corporations to change their practices or to lobby legislature to make a different policy. So I’d look for those kinds of groups. I find them to be the most helpful.

Caryn: The group you run on campus is doing things that students can get involved in, right? Can you talk a little more about that work?

Christa: Yes, I run CES, Community Environmental Services, at Portland State. It’s different from the SSC, the Student Sustainability Center. We are entirely off-campus oriented. So all my staff are students— not everyone has a huge passion for trash but I’d say 90% of them do. We do a lot of technical assistance for local projects. Right now one of our big projects is for Metro Regional Government. They are replacing the decals on cans in multifamily housing and providing signs to update multifamily enclosures with clear signage. The reason why Metro is investing so much in this is because multifamily housing has had inadequate recycling and trash services— it is an equity issue. The whole reason CES got started was actually out of a student project around improving recycling in multifamily housing, because the recycling of multifamily housing has always been lower than in single family housing and the rhetoric around it is that those people don’t care. It’s impossible to reach out to people in apartments, it’s just easier for them to throw everything out, blah blah blah. And we’ve shown for more than 30 years that actually all the services and the structures in multifamily housing are inadequate and they’re not on par with those in single family housing where you have your own little cart, a weekly service, a newsletter from the city, if you live in Portland. It’s just so much harder in multifamily housing to access that. So Metro is invested, I feel like they’ve really stepped up their efforts. So even though we are putting decals on trash cans, it actually has an equity component. It’s meant to be a step towards making services equitable for all residents, whether you live in your own single family property or an apartment. So we do that kind of work and other kinds of work.

Caryn: That’s interesting. How would you say the public perception of environmental issues and the role of waste has changed in the time you have been doing this work?

Christa: Well for people who are environmentally-minded and have always been pro-recycling, unfortunately, and I feel like this is constant, there’s been a lack of trust and if anything we’ve seen trust go down in the recycling system. It’s totally understandable that people think, why am I bothering doing all this? I think amongst certain groups, there’s more of an acknowledgment that all of the stuff is a problem, and there’s a cycle of popular news stories that say we’re drowning in our stuff. But to a lot of people, the abundance of things is just seen as a good thing, like how can we get more things to people to improve their quality of life? I don’t know if you want to specifically talk about hoarding. I think there’s been a shift in our understanding around hoarding. I have an interest in it, but I don’t have a clinical psychology background. There’s a really great group in the area called the Multnomah County Hoarding Task Force, who started up a series of workshops for the public and also do a lot of training for social workers called Buried in Treasures. There’s a total disconnect with the environmental side. So for one, hoarding disorder is mostly driven by anxiety and depression. So even though these workshops are about the problem of the stuff, the stuff is a symptom, and the real treatment needed is around helping people with their anxiety and depression, often after a loss, wanting to connect with loved ones through their things and the anxiety that comes from separating from things. So I wanted to work with that group because for some of the people, a lot of their rationale is that they want to see their things go to a good home, and I think that’s my own personal rationale for a lot of my stuff that I have too much of but can’t let go of, I just have more appropriate space and bins to put it in. It’s not squalor. Something I learned from them was that people can live in squalor, which means living in an unhealthy situation, and not have hoarding disorder. They might have executive functioning problems and they’re accumulating trash. You could also have an extensive hoarding disorder and not live in squalor, most often if you have a big enough house or more resources. People want to see their things have a life. It’s hard to think that someone else doesn’t value them or that someone can’t use them. They’re very wary of donating them to Goodwill feeling like they’re just gonna be thrown out. I just see a lot of similarities in the impulse of that with environmentalists who are trying to save or recycle for the same reasons. So I wanted to bring that into it and also maybe do some sorting and categorizing peoples’ stuff to understand what it is that causes the most problems, but that group is still very social work focused and all about delivering treatment around anxiety and the public service implementation aspect and the greater need for access to services. There are the more urgent needs and my more esoteric questions around environmental motivations aren’t as pressing. But they’re an interesting, good group. They regularly have these workshops and trainings. I hold out hope that there could be some potential overlap. 

Caryn: Yeah, that is really interesting, especially because, like you’re saying, there’s so many different elements that feed into it.

Christa: It’s a way of coping. Who are we to take away people’s ways of coping? We’re all trying to find ways to cope in the world that are hopefully more adaptive than maladaptive.

Caryn: I like to ask everyone, is there anything that you collect?

Christa: I’m the processor for my community. I live in a cohousing community, and even before I lived in cohousing I did this, but if someone needs something funneled out to the community, I am your person. I deal with it and put it on my porch until someone picks it up. I don’t know if I have something specific I collect. I definitely have my own small collection of pictures of trash can and recycling bin setups all around the world. I don’t necessarily collect a set thing, but I’m always shepherding.

Caryn: That kind of leads into another question that I have. You mentioned people are often wary of recycling or wary of sending something to Goodwill that might just get thrown out, what are your personal best practices around getting rid of something?

Christa: Yeah, I’m a big fan of the local Buy Nothing groups like on Facebook. Have you used them?

Caryn: I haven’t used the Facebook ones, but I have the app and it’s great. I get all kinds of stuff from there, and give away all kinds of stuff.

Christa:  One nice thing with the Facebook group, that’s also sometimes frustrating, but understandable, is you have to live in certain neighborhood boundaries to join a given group, so it really keeps it local. I also have big questions and would love to do some research on what happens to things from Buy Nothing? I don’t care if people resell things, more power to them. Some people get very upset about that. But I also wonder how much of it is being hoarded. For some people, the accumulation part of hoarding disorder is what speaks to them. 

In the Portland area, we have so many phenomenal reuse groups. I moved here from the East Coast. I love the infrastructure here that’s not governmental. Like the Rebuilding Center, which has a new director and is really moving in a great direction, Community Warehouse, and all the local thrift stores. I live near Take it or Leave It, where you can consign things. There are so many baby goods stores, all the vintage shops. Or Free Geek for any kind of e-waste. Then my last resort is usually bringing things to Goodwill. I feel like they’re better than some (donation organizations). There are some groups like Veterans for America that will come and pick up your things, so people like that a lot, but they’re just selling things to secondary markets. So that all of our junk is being dumped on the Global South and destroying their clothing markets, and for the business it’s a revenue source. Whereas others like Goodwill, they sell things more locally, though they get so much more stuff, more than they could ever, ever sell locally. But we have a lot of really small local nonprofits that I think are really phenomenal. So that’s my hierarchy. 

Caryn: Yeah, thank you. Are there any other recommendations you have, books to read, films to watch, things to listen to, or places to go, to wrap up?

Christa: One of my all time favorite books, if I ever am on campus, you could borrow my book, is Projects by Nikki Lee, a Korean artist, and she transforms herself. It’s fascinating to see how the way someone looks can change how we understand them. So much is based on the things that they put on themselves or have around them. In terms of other more practical things, the Institute for Local Self Reliance, I really appreciate how they think about the community’s own consumption and the ties between production and consumption. I also listen to a million podcasts. The podcast Drilled I think is a really excellent look at the oil industry and how it’s pushing for plastics as a way to save itself. They’re pivoting from making fuel to (making) stuff.

Caryn: Thank you so much for talking with me! Do you have any lingering thoughts to share?

Christa: I’m always interested in questions like, how have we gotten to this place? How are we going to move away from it? I live in cohousing, and part of the appeal of it is thinking about how much do we share? I would love to do a study, though my neighbors have not agreed to it, or I haven’t asked [laughs]. Are we reducing our consumption by living in this more shared setting? It’s a whole larger ecosystem and there are lots of different consequences of reconfiguring our structures in this way.

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Dr. Christa McDermott (she/her) is a social psychologist whose work focuses on reducing consumption of resources, re-using more, using a lifecycle approach to sustainable materials management, and improving social equity and environmental health through waste prevention. She has served as a fellow in the U.S. Senate, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Energy on projects that ranged from climate change policy to toxics to energy efficiency. She holds a joint Ph.D. in Psychology and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan where she conducted research on the relationship between personality and environmental attitudes and behaviors and has a special interest in our emotional relationships with possessions, how we construct identities through consumption, and hoarding.

Caryn Aasness (they/them) is an artist living in Portland Oregon. Caryn can be found climbing into dumpsters and pulling over to see discarded items on curbs and in alleys. Their first SoFA interview, Abandonment Issues, with their dad Jon Aasness, covered similar topics from a different angle and can be read here. You can find more of their work here.

“It’s such a wild thing to watch someone you love so much grow up and experience the world for the first time.”

Olivia DelGandio

In my first year of graduate school, I decided to just ask the questions I had, even if they embarrassed me or felt stupid. I realized it wasn’t helping me to stay quiet in the hopes that someone else would ask my questions first, or that a professor would happen to cover it. Now I find that I learn a lot by asking questions.

I work as a teacher at a preschool in Portland, and lately I’ve been attempting to conduct short interviews with my 3 to 5 year olds. In one recent interview, which happened during snack time, I talked to Ben, age 3, about his dreams.

Luz: Ben, can you tell me about a dream you had?

Ben: I had a really crazy dream.

Luz: Okay, tell me about it.

Ben: If I tell it to you, my other friends might hear it and think it might be, like, spooky.

Luz: Oh, was it a scary dream?

Ben: It wasn’t scary, it was kind of fun ‘cause I got to watch it in my brain.

I apologize to the readers because you never do get to hear the details of this crazy, spooky dream. Ben got distracted and inevitably, so did I. 

I see my work as a preschool teacher as an extension of my art practice. As a socially engaged artist, I’m interested in the way conversation can be framed as a project or a piece of art. The conversations I have with 3 to 5 year olds at my work are sweet and weird, funny, but also often profound. 

Our task for this issue of SoFA Journal was to speak with someone associated with Portland State University, so I decided to conduct a similar interview with some of my colleagues. I wanted the questions to be direct, but leave room for stories, as I have tried to do with my preschoolers. I asked my colleagues about karaoke, what was on their mind that they thought worth sharing, for something they recommend, and, as a bonus, a little show and tell.

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Luz Blumenfeld: What is your current go-to karaoke song?

Olivia DelGandio: Karaoke makes me anxious and I will never do it.

Morgan Hornsby: My first and favorite karaoke performance was “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” by Shania Twain, with my friend Jordan at a bar in her hometown.

Ashley Yang-Thompson: Phantom of the Opera. I don’t think there could possibly be a better karaoke song, but I’m willing to be proved wrong.

Marissa Perez: ​​I don’t really do karaoke! Maybe I’ve done it twice? And the songs I chose were: Rockin’ Robin and I Can’t Make You Love Me. I think they were both bad options so if you have any good suggestions I’ll take them.

Caryn Aasness: I don’t really ever sing karaoke, I think I might be working my way up to it or maybe I’m just building up a list of songs I think would be fun but will never perform. On the current list of possible songs though, is, Tempted by Squeeze (I love any song that lists objects), I’m the Man by Joe Jackson (about a cartoonish conman, “I got the trash and you got the cash so baby we should get along fine”) and Too Busy Thinking About My Baby by Marvin Gaye which I listen to at least three times in a row every time I drive my car. 

Luz: What is something you want to tell me about right now?

Olivia: My little brother had his first girlfriend (he’s in 11th grade) and he really liked her for like a week and my mom just told me he broke up with her because she wanted attention all the time. Last time I was home he told me he was thinking about having sex and he also drove me around a bunch. It’s such a wild thing to watch someone you love so much grow up and experience the world for the first time. It fills me with love and nostalgia.

Morgan: I just discovered the album Preacher’s Daughter by Ethel Cain and can’t stop listening. I also love the photos taken of her by Silken Weinberg.

Ash: When I was in the 8th grade, I had a habit of polling my classmates on various topics (How do you fall asleep at night? What kind of mental illness do you have?) (the latter question got me sent to the principal’s office) which I compiled into my first book ever called, “I’m normal and everybody else is crazy.” I was very excited about this project, so my AIM username was imnotcrazy93 and so was my YouTube account.

Marissa: I want to tell you about how much I love talking to friends on the phone. I just talked to two friends today and it made me feel so good. And then I listened to that song by Labi Siffre called “Bless the Telephone” and you know, he’s right. 

Caryn: I want to tell you about this thing that happened when I was in elementary school that I think about a lot. I think I’d like to use it in a project somehow someday but mostly because I want an excuse to keep talking about it and figure out how to best get the peculiarity across. 

At the audition for the Helen Keller Elementary School talent show, about 2004, 2 girls showed up and sang I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world somewhat unenthusiastically but in relative unison and a cappella. The PTA mom running the show told them they needed a backing track, a CD to sing along with. The next rehearsal they brought a CD with the song but it had the words so the PTA mom tried to explain to the confused 2nd or 3rd graders that the CD needed to have the instruments but no one singing. That must have been the last conversation they had about it because on the night of the talent show the girls sang with the same intensity and lack of enthusiasm to what must have been the only CD they could find in somebody’s dad’s collection that seemed to fit the requirements: I’m a Barbie girl in a Barbie world backed up by completely unrelated instrumental smooth jazz. 

Luz: What do you recommend?

Olivia: Annie’s white cheddar mac and cheese. I shouldn’t eat it because it makes my stomach hurt but it’s so good and it is a major safe food at the moment. You don’t pick the safe food, the safe food chooses you, right?

Morgan: I recommend writing letters to people you love.

Ash: I recommend being wrong about your most deeply ingrained beliefs.

Marissa: Charli XCX. She’s great. I’ve been listening to a couple of her albums since the summer. 

Caryn: I recommend asking this exact question! People give great answers.

I also recommend asking people what their favorite question to ask other people is, and then asking their favorite question back to them.

I also recommend tying your shoes in a nontraditional way, eating Cheerios and goldfish mixed together as a snack, wearing a short sleeve t shirt over a long sleeve t shirt to please your inner child, getting audiobooks from the public library, and the documentary Dogtown and Z-boys.

Luz: And, lastly, the optional bonus: Show & Tell, which is something my preschoolers do every week. Their favorite question to ask each other about the shared object is, “What do you like about it?”

Olivia: 

It’s a groundhog made out of rice krispies that I saw at the Groundhog Day party Marissa brought me to last weekend. I love thinking about the time and energy someone put into making this. 

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Luz Blumenfeld (they/them) is a transdisciplinary socially engaged artist. Third generation from Oakland, California, they currently live and work in Portland, Oregon. Their practice involves teaching, listening, observing, and taking notes. Luz is in their second year of PSU’s Art & Social Practice MFA program. You can view their work on their website and their Instagram.

Olivia DelGandio (she/they) is a storyteller who asks intimate questions and normalizes answers in the form of ongoing conversations. They explore grief, memory, and human connection and look for ways of memorializing moments and relationships. Through their work, they hope to make the world a more tender place.

Morgan Hornsby (she/her) is a photographer and socially engaged artist. She was born in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky and currently lives in Tennessee. Her photographic work has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, NPR, Vox, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and The Marshall Project.

www.morganhornsby.com @morganhornsby

Ashley Yang-Thompson is a ninety-nine time Pulitzer Prize winning poet and a certified MacArthur genius.

ashleyyangthompson.com @leaky_rat

Marissa Perez (she/her) grew up in Portland, Oregon. She is a printmaker, party host, babysitter and youth worker. She’s interested in neighborhoods and the layers of relationships that can be hard to see. Her dad was a mail carrier for 30 years and her mom is a pharmacist. 

Caryn Aasness (they/them) is an artist living in Portland Oregon. They love asking and answering questions. You can find more of their work here.

“I look pretty white on the outside, but my intestines are indigenous.”

-Joaquin Golez

Joaquin and I met in October 2021, as first-year students in PSU’s Contemporary Art Practice program. Ever since then, we’ve been talking about sex and anuses and poop and our daily existential crises. Whenever I talk to Joaquin, I write things down; it’s as if I’m pulling a cassette tape of poetry out of his mouth. Who else describes their hair as a “persian cat in a rainstorm?” Or their visage as an “anthropomorphic catsuit?” Joaquin is a professional illustrator; he has a weekly comic about the previous week’s events called “GAYMO.” I also consider him to be an unprofessional expert in contemporary queerness. He is the only person who has ever sent me a picture of their poop, and I’ve asked a lot of people. When he isn’t fulfilling his ontological imperative to draw, Joaquin is having diarrhea. 

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Ashley Yang-Thompson: Why do you think you have so much diarrhea?

Joaquin Golez: Good question. I think there’s a few answers. I think it’s a combination of things. We contain multitudes. I’ve been violently lactose intolerant since I was a baby. I was allergic to my mother’s breast milk. When I would breastfeed I had explosive diarrhea. 

Ash: Really?

Joaquin: Yeah, I have mommy issues. She let me know right away– as early as I can remember being able to hear stories. My dad’s parents are indigenous people from other countries, so they did not encounter lactose in their countries. They’re both from fishing villages, so no cows. I look pretty white on the outside, but my intestines are very indigenous. And so they react to pretty much everything in this climate. Furthermore, as a Virgo rising, all of my stress manifests physically in the form of rashes or intestinal distress.

Another reason why I have diarrhea is because I’m a bottom. 

Ash: Do you get diarrhea from being violently pegged?

Joaquin: Yeah. I feel like I’m a power bottom.

Ash: How do you become a power bottom?

Joaquin: I think it’s confidence. It’s a combination of selfishness and selflessness, where I’m really meeting my own needs, but I’m also empathically aware of the needs of another person. The right kind of selfishness empowers me to be a very aggressive bottom.

Ash: Have you ever pooped during sex?

Joaquin: Almost, but not quite. I’ve definitely farted quite a few times and I’ve peed.

Ash: Intentionally?

Joaquin: Both intentionally and unintentionally.

(long pause)

My diarrhea is like a family heirloom. My dad is always pooping, too. I inherited his intestines.

Ash: When you were growing up, was your dad primarily in the bathroom?

Joaquin: I would say 30% of the time. We talk about our diarrhea a lot, and it really bothers my white mom. She can’t relate to it because she likes dairy. My dad and I try to take ownership over our poop issues by joking about it and talking about it a lot. And our bathroom habits are really loud compared to my mom, who swears to this day that she doesn’t poop. She says she deposits a single rose scented cube once a month. Which we all know isn’t true. But still I’ve never smelled it or heard it. So there’s a hierarchy there.

Ash: Do you feel ashamed about your diarrhea?

Joaquin: It’s a shame that I own.

Ash: We’ve always talked about diarrhea openly, and I never felt remotely grossed out. I mean, we’re talking about diarrhea and I’m eating my lunch and it doesn’t bother me at all.

Joaquin: I just know that every time I eat, I’ll have so much IBS stuff. It’s always present. It’s definitely normalized. 

Ash: So your diarrhea is tied to both your racial identity and to your queer identity.

Joaquin: Yeah, that’s a good point. I haven’t made that connection. Maybe that’s why I’m so proud of it.

Ash: Ok, now I have a big queer politics question to ask you: Does it bother you that companies like Target and Urban Outfitters have co-opted queerness and pride, and use identity as a promotional tool? 

Joaquin: I don’t think it bothers me in the way it bothers some people because I love the feeling of being a normal person with money. I like having cultural value. I like to imagine my child-self going to Target and being able to comfortably consume like everybody else in America. I want to be included in predominant culture. I want to be a market. It’s normalizing, and I don’t mind being normalized. I would love to comfortably go to the bathroom and date– why is that bad? I think it’s great! No matter how normal being queer might be in a predominant culture, it still has enough stigmas where it’s fun and racy. There’s still queer gay bars, there’s still legislation trying to destroy people’s lives, there’s still places where being queer is very taboo. It’s something I appreciate about sex, too. I want to be comfortable enough to express myself and explore, and because it’s sex, it’s always going to have an edge of tabooness that’s going to make it fun and hot. To me, it can’t be too safe. Everything that I am into has become so basic that it’s codified in some Target end-cap display, and I think that’s hilarious. 

Ash: In a milieu where almost everyone is queer (i.e. Portland, art school), does it bother you that anybody can claim queerness, without having the sort of experiences that you’ve gone through? 

Joaquin: You said something once that I thought was really true, you said that people need rituals and initiations to step into different cultural territories. And I think it would help people to have initiations. I don’t think those initiations have to be oppressive. They could be celebratory. 

I guess that’s when the queer marketability gets in the way, like during Pride, which is supposed to be an initiation, but instead it’s about getting everybody to buy Absolut Vodka. There’s so much alcoholism in queer communities and so much drug abuse, so companies like that taking over Pride is a problem. 

But back to anybody being able to say they’re queer… I feel like if I said it doesn’t bother me, I’d be lying. It bothers me because I have an ego. When it does bother me, I have to check myself because I’ve literally been there. I’ve been super super trans but still not validated as being trans because I wasn’t on hormones. Or because I didn’t grow up wanting to play with trucks. 

It’s not a great narrative for your pain or your oppression to be what makes you who you are. I understand people saying, Oh you’re not x enough because you haven’t suffered the way I have, but if that’s what defines your identity, then that’s an opposition to marginalized people having success.

Ash: Do you think success and suffering are diametrically opposed?

Joaquin: People don’t thrive when they’re suffering. Thriving can come out of suffering but it doesn’t happen when you’re in it. Unless you’re a masochist. 

Ash: I feel like suffering is a fundamental part of any growth. 

Joaquin: I think so too.

Ash: You have to go through a threshold and the threshold is uncomfortable, maybe even unbearable. You’re entering a new form like a plant that has to break the sheath of a seed in order to grow.

Joaquin: I think the friction and discomfort is important, but I don’t think we need to have specific, terrible experiences and all share them as a certain identity. There should be people having shared identity with different experiences.

Ash: Do you believe in universal experience?

Joaquin: Yeah, we all die and suffer and get hungry and have diarrhea. 

Ash: Some more than others. 

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Ashley Yang-Thompson (I respectfully opt out of the protocol to include pronouns) is a ninety-nine time Pulitzer Prize winning poet and a certified MacArthur genius. ashleyyangthompson.com @leaky_rat

Joaquin Golez (he/him) is an illustrator, writer, and tattoo artist. He is currently getting his MFA in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University. @bruisedfroot