Conversation Series
Human Recognition: Honoring What We Know to Be True
Gwen Hoeffgen in conversation with Roberta Hunte
“Resistance doesn’t have to look big. It can look like the normalization of that which is hated. It can look like simply loving people. Or putting forward a model of what care looks like in birth. And doing it in artistic ways so that people, on a feeling level, can relax and have a moment with that. Because that’s our knowing. But whether we honor it or not, that’s the question. I think that’s the thing in this life, can we honor what we know to be true?” – Roberta Hunte.
I first met Roberta Hunte during a visiting artist course, where she generously shared both her personal narratives and her powerful work centered on Black women’s reproductive care. I was immediately drawn to how Roberta told stories about maternal health experiences and the way her work engages with the body, theatre, and resilience. As someone whose own artistic practice explores how stories are carried in women’s bodies—through scars, breaks, and bends—I wanted to explore her work more. I invited Roberta into conversation to talk about the intersection of public health and embodied storytelling, particularly how data points translate into lived realities. At the time, we were only a month into a seismic political shift, and I found myself questioning how, or if, social change is made within an institutional context. What unfolded was a dialogue not only about political crises, but about the role of storytelling in creating a “human recognition”, and in building connection. Looking back, I think this conversation was exactly what I needed to think more deeply about the work I want to do– around care, loving, and storytelling as a form of resistance and social change.
Gwen Hoeffgen: I wanted to thank you for taking time out of your day to talk with me. I was incredibly emotionally moved by the work that you showed us during your visiting artist talk in our class, and I really wanted to talk to you about it.
Roberta Hunte: Thank you!
Gwen Hoeffgen: First, I wanted to know how you feel at this moment, as an artist and someone interested in social change work, with this national, but really, global crisis that we are in.
Roberta Hunte: I don’t feel good.
Gwen Hoeffgen: Yeah, me neither.
Roberta Hunte: It’s bad, and they are going full tilt. They’re eroding people’s civil rights. I don’t think the US Constitution was that strong a document to begin with, and they are doing everything they can to weaken it to just flimsy paper. So, I feel really sad, and frustrated.
Because Trump telegraphed so hard what he wanted to do, and now that we are feeling the repercussions of these hateful policies. Different people are thinking that this doesn’t feel so good. Othering is very seductive. It’s very seductive to view ourselves as separate from the suffering of others and then to allow others to suffer. It’s the idea that somehow others’ suffering isn’t as important as our own or that it’s “better them than me”. We have to realize it doesn’t work that way.
I said to some of my freshmen, what wedge issue have you tolerated? I think that is the agenda for this regime. It’s to create wedges and for people to see how much of a wedge they can get in, and divide us collectively. It’s interesting, I spoke to an immigrant student. She’s very against the anti-immigration systems that are developing. But even in that stance, she said “Well, if they get rid of the criminals, then that’s okay.”
And, and I said, “Well, they’re saying that any undocumented person is a criminal.” We cannot tolerate the demonization of groups. It is a justification for violence against people and violating rights. So I think, you know, that’s just deeply painful.
Gwen Hoeffgen: Yeah. These are manipulative tactics that have been used throughout really all of colonial history. It’s an oppression tool, in this way of “othering”. And now people pained by our systems are ready to inflict pain on other people. It’s an “I’ve had my pain, now I need you to have yours.” kind of thing.
It’s a scary time. And, I think it’s scary to be in education. It’s scary for health care. Thinking about the work you do in reproductive care. I have a friend who’s a gynecologist. And there was this moment, a couple of weeks ago, when all of their resources on the World Health Organization website just totally shut down. And she told me that those are resources that her team uses daily for women’s reproductive care. And they just completely disappeared in the blink of an eye. So not only do we now have an issue with access to healthcare, which we always have had economically, and in a gendered experience in access to reproductive healthcare, but I feel now health resources are becoming even more jeopardized.
Roberta Hunte: It is a crisis for healthcare. It’s an absolute crisis for healthcare, but what I also think is important is state and local government. We will see how my institution responds to these attacks on DEI. Trump’s words around DEI are interesting. It’s DEI and environmental justice. What is emphasized is DEI, but if advocating for environmental justice is a crime, then fighting against pipelines, fighting to maintain the national parks and prevent them from being mined is a crime. So these different people who are like, “Yeah forget DEI, who needs that?” will fall on this sword.
Gwen Hoeffgen: Wow. DEI has been more publicized for sure. But yeah. It sounds like the effects of the climate crisis will be visible soon.
Roberta Hunte: Right. Our national forests will fall. The failure to recognize the interconnectedness of our survival is dangerous. Thinking about trans and non-binary folks. You don’t erase people simply by saying they don’t exist. Because they will continue to exist as they have always existed. However, this administration can pathologize people and make it harder for people to live. More people will die simply for being themselves.
Gwen Hoeffgen: Yeah, I think it’s become normalized to create an exclusionary, unsafe environment for people to just exist as themselves. And thinking about access to hormones, and how much that will be affected, again it becomes a health issue. The danger is not just social and psychological, but also there is physical reality too. Anyway, I’m sorry to bring all of this up, but I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about the context we’re living in, because I think it’s hard to keep up motivation when voices are constantly silenced and the scale just keeps sliding in one direction. I don’t know, I feel like the momentum for social change out here is very low.
Roberta Hunte: Tell me more about this low momentum.
Gwen Hoeffgen: Well, I don’t know. I think as an art student, it just feels like there is not a lot we can do that will change things. Or maybe, I think that the norm has been to just accept it and go on like “business as usual”. It doesn’t feel good. It’s like wait, I’m going to work and going to class while there is an act of violence being committed? And, I want to create some sort of social change, but how? And who is going to listen? Also, this is the second time that Trump has won. I feel like the first time there was a lot of energy and movement towards resistance and fighting it. And yeah, the second time I don’t feel that’s in the air as much. I really don’t. It feels like people have been hit while they’re down. That’s what it feels like in some sense. It feels low and different to me. But maybe that energy shift is fear-based.
Roberta Hunte: It’s hella fear-based. Hella, hella fear-based, shocking, and confusing. Particularly in the way Trump stacked the courts. He was doing it in public. And people didn’t organize as strongly against that as they needed to. He created a wall of protection around himself. And also only a certain number of folks really pay attention to what’s happening politically. Artists are incredibly important right now. Whether they are speaking actively against what is happening or whether we are simply telling different stories, it is incredibly important work. For yourself and your compañeros, what are the stories that you need to tell? And how do you get those out? Because what I see in this upcoming generation is that they’re overworked, right? They’re working really hard, harder than their parents had to work, to survive. Even though I worked hard– I was working two part-time jobs and doing my master’s– I made myself sick. But I was still able to buy a house for $127,000.00 and I still was able to finish my master’s at PSU with about $4,000 in debt. And that reality can be very hard to come by right now. So I think students need to understand that they’re being cheated. But, they have to find the right targets.
Gwen Hoeffgen: There is a fight going on, and yeah, that happens when people are angry about reality. There are people at the top and people and the bottom, and maybe when we can’t reach the top, we just start fighting the people down here with us. I think within what I see, it’s that people want to fight institutions, but sometimes I think you have to use it. But I do think a lot of it is economics. It’s transactional– Like I think people sometimes are using school as a transaction. Because we’re paying for the school, and it’s putting us in debt, maybe there’s this idea that the degree should be given to us for that. Because that’s the type of capitalized system that we live in. I’m sacrificing something financially for something in return. But also, what will that get you? Specifically in art.
Roberta Hunte: It’s part of achieving what you want. And no one who’s created anything gets away without working hard. But working hard can’t be what we fight. But I also say that as somebody who works hard and doesn’t really know how to not work hard. I often look at people with this kind of confusion. But one realization I had while I was sleeping the other night was this: As long as my university can fight for me, I can stay at my university. But if my university is not going to fight for my right and ability to do what I do, then I need to find a different place that will allow me to do what I need to do. Because voices like mine are critically important to resistance. And resistance doesn’t have to look big. It can look like the normalization of that which is hated. It can look like simply loving people. Or putting forward a model of what care looks like in birth. And doing it in artistic ways so that people, on a feeling level, can relax and have a moment with that. Because that’s our knowing. But whether we honor it or not, that’s the question. I think that’s the thing in this life, can we honor what we know to be true?
Gwen Hoeffgen: Hm. What you said about “relaxing” is interesting to me. Because it’s tense right now. And when we’re talking, I think an audience can’t hear it when they’re defensive, or already rigid in some way. But putting an example out and allowing it to sink on an emotional level is the goal. I’ve been thinking about how health data relates to your work on reproductive care. I’ve been thinking about how data points don’t stick with people on an emotional level, but people’s stories do. Can you talk about how maybe you utilize that kind of practice in your work? Why is it important to have people tell their stories rather than seeing statistics about them?
Roberta Hunte: Yesterday I was at a hearing for the early childhood behavioral health subcommittee of the Senate. And we were advocating for a bill, 691, 692, 693. These are related to the Momnibus. And so I’m at this event and I think about maybe 30 people testified or so, and they were testifying about substance use disorder and the need for doulas. And what was so real for me in that experience was folks had so much to say. There was so much wisdom in the room. The things that people said were more compelling than the mess I see on TV. It was searing. I felt in the room the human recognition of each other. That hearing was art.
Gwen: Thank you for telling me that story. It’s so simply put, but says everything. I know you have to go soon, but I wanted to quickly also ask about how you transitioned from studying conflict into the work that you do now.
Roberta Hunte: I still work in conflict. This is just a structural conflict. But I work very much in conflict. That’s all I work in, honestly.
Gwen: Thank you so much for your time, Roberta! I’m so happy we got to talk. Hopefully, I will see you again sometime soon.
Roberta Hunte: Yes, of course, bye friend!
Roberta Suzette Hunte is a health equity researcher, facilitator, professor and cultural worker. She is an associate professor in the School of Social where she teaches courses on reproductive justice and social justice. She is a maternal health researcher and uses theatre and film to share her research with a wider audience. In 2013 she co-wrote and produced the play “My Walk Has Never Been Average” with playwright Bonnie Ratner. The play is based on her research on black tradeswomen’s experiences. Other playwriting and production credits are We Are Brave (2016), Push: Black mamas changing the culture of birth (2025). She co-produced the short film Sista in the Brotherhood (2016).
Gwen Hoeffgen is a visual and social practice artist who currently investigates the physicality of emotional experiences, and how those experiences live within the body waiting to be released. After receiving her bachelor’s degree in psychology, she worked as a social worker in the mental health, addiction, and cognitive health fields, and then received her MA in Drawing at Paris College of Art. Currently, as an Art and Social Practice MFA student at Portland State University, she use mediums of painting, drawing, photography, sound, and conversation to explore how we find stories within pieces, creases, breaks, and bends.
One Thing Can Be Many if We Let It
Clara Harlow with Jorge Lucero
“I’m trying increasingly, and have been trying for about three decades, to take those activities that are frequently considered underbelly activities and turn those into the primary activities. Turn those into the works.”
Jorge Lucero
I found Jorge Lucero’s pedagogical work at a time when I needed permission myself. I’d been preparing to teach my first undergrad course on conceptual art and looking for ways to make it accessible and meaningful for my students, while also keeping it engaging and manageable for myself as a working artist and graduate student. In my course research, I was delighted to come across Illinois-based artist and educator Jorge Lucero. I was instantly struck by his expansive approach to teaching as a form of conceptual art in and of itself that reimagines the classroom as potential art material, research site, and experiment for both student and teacher.
In a moment when folks are eager to draw boundaries around life and work, Jorge wonders what might happen if we emphatically embrace the opposite. Through Jorge’s envisage of his daily roles of professor, administrator, colleague, and parent as an opportunity to embody his art practice, he offers an invitation into what else might be possible when we don’t change what we’re doing, but rather how we’re relating to it. On the last day of school, I sat down with Jorge to parse through the potentialities of art, education, and work, and was left with something far more resonant than any singular answer could provide.
Clara Harlow: I want to know a little bit more about the way you’re approaching the intersection of art, life, and teaching. What has that been looking like for you lately?
Jorge Lucero: It’s a more precise version of something that I have spent many years trying to articulate and carry out in a way that feels true to how I understand myself as an artist and increasingly, as an artist who has a lot of other activities that don’t immediately read or register as studio practices. So it’s about trying to figure out how these practices exist as hybrids, but also how the variations in all the different kinds of practices give permissions to each other for new ways to enact those things.
So, for example, I now hold an administrative position here at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and when that was offered to me, I was reluctant at first because I didn’t want anything to take away from my artistic practice, which is what has been driving me professionally for the last 25 years. But then again, I never wanted to be a professor, because I thought that was going to get in the way of being an artist, and I never wanted to be a high school teacher before that, because I thought that was going to get in the way of being an artist.
But what has been revealed in taking on all of those different types of tasks is their materiality. There’s a ton of permissions that these forms exchange with each other, and I’ve become increasingly attuned to how they speak into each other. And I give myself the latitude, which I try to pass along to my students and even to my colleagues, to be able to take methodologies, approaches, and discourses from each other. So I do think that there are a lot of things that being an administrator opens up for being a creative practitioner, and vice versa. It seems like a counterintuitive pairing or formula, but it has proven to be complementary practices.
Clara: Yeah, reading your work was making me think a lot about my own history with work both inside/outside of the art and design world in New York, and always trying to find that balance between the two. Do I need more time or more money right now? Do I want to work in proximity to the art world where my actual role isn’t going to be associated with being an artist, or do I want to work outside of that, and have free time to be working on my own practice? I feel like I’m always moving around between those axis.
Jorge: I think the reason that we make a difference between those types of activities is because we have different levels of tolerance for their arduousness. So let’s take a ceramicist, for example, who has to do the arduous work of either calibrating glazes or reclaiming clay, or fixing works that crack in the kiln or something. There’s a lot of labor and finickiness, and maybe what we could call banal activity that is a part of those studio practices. While the enjoyment of those activities may fall on a spectrum, they certainly don’t question their necessity as part of the sequence that allows for them to make the kinds of inquiries that they want to with those mediums.
Yet when it comes to finding that work-life balance, we tend to categorize things like filling out paperwork or working a “day job” or teaching as something else, as if those weren’t the equivalents of pugging clay or trial and error testing of glazes. It’s not like I teach or have managerial tasks in support of some other practice that I call my art practice. It’s that I’m trying increasingly, and have been trying for about three decades, to take those activities that are frequently considered underbelly activities and turn those into the primary activities. Turn those into the works.
Now, in order to do that I have to obviously reconceptualize my idea of what art is, but also how the work is put into the world. Because, you know, so much of the work that I do as a creative practitioner within the institution is never put on display, and, in fact, is incredibly difficult to document because of its expansiveness. So there are a couple of mind shifts that need to occur in order for me to get there, but that’s been the activity all these years.
Clara: What are some of those mind shifts for you?
Jorge: Well I’ll start with documentation for one. Even when it comes to social practice, there’s the expectation that even a blurry or bad photograph, or a partial recounting of the events on some level serves as the currency that emerges from the practice, event, or activity. But what I’ve been thinking about is what happens when the prioritization of documentation takes a backseat, or even proves to be impossible? What occurs then? So then you have an art practice that I would call an art practice of invisibility, meaning not that there isn’t something there, but that it’s very difficult to perceive. And it’s particularly difficult to perceive within the limitations of one lifetime. So there’s this kind of immateriality to it, or a kind of length, largeness, or impossibility to the materiality that invites us to be at peace about not being able to see it.
I get really curious about the extremes of that, about the projects that are so small that you can’t get them down on paper. You can’t photograph them, or you can’t talk about them. And then I also get really interested in the ones that are so big that they’re equally very difficult to capture. Even if you do something that has a large footprint like, for example, the Social Practice program there at Portland State, that has an incredible footprint that’s probably going to outlast, or probably has already outlasted its founders and many of its contributors. But even then, it’s gonna have a lifespan. Eventually people will come around and will either defund it, dismantle it, or there just won’t be any interest in it anymore. And then it will have lived its life. But it’s just too big to capture it all in even one very nicely designed website.
Clara: I’m curious how you talk about this sense of scale with your students? How do you share with them what you’re doing and the ways in which you’re playing with the expectations around what learning is and how it can happen. Do you find that it’s more of a showing and less of a telling?
Jorge: Actually, it’s funny that you pit showing versus telling because I actually think it’s more of a telling than a showing. And what I mean by that is I think people know that these things are true, we just don’t have the language to describe some of those things. So I do a couple of things, actually.
One being that there’s a difference between education and schooling. They all sort of intuitively know what schooling is, because they’re doing it and it’s being done to them. But they haven’t all thought about what their education is. However, when you can present to them something like their Instagram scrolling or hanging out with their friends as an educational activity, then things start to shift in their brain a little bit. Because when you’re scrolling on Instagram for 2 hours, you feel guilty about it afterwards, you feel like you wasted all that time. But didn’t you also engage with the world in some way? Didn’t you also learn a bunch of things?
And in order for that to make sense to them, I have to pull it back from the activity having been productive, right? So the instinct is, it’s not useful, or it’s not a good thing that I did because it’s not productive, but not all education has to be productive. That’s a schooling paradigm, but it’s not necessarily an education paradigm. Sometimes we go for a walk, and our body registers the temperature, the pace, the passage of time, the nostalgia of it all, the beauty of nature, all of these things which on many levels you could say are “unproductive,” yet at the same time we don’t downplay that as something useful or not useful, but simply as an enriching experience.
And I’m not saying that everything that we do has to be enriching, but that I try to bring my students to a place where they can be more attuned to the things that they perhaps dismiss, or have been told to dismiss, and that actually opens up a whole other field of experience that helps them to rethink what their education could be. Once they stop thinking about school as the only place you get an education, and they start thinking that you can get an education at any moment that you’re awake, or even that you’re asleep, then all of a sudden there’s a kind of curiosity that is enlivened in the students.
And then you can really talk about so many things that happen in art, and so many things that could happen in art that still haven’t happened that are on these edges that I’m talking about, like the edge of visibility, the edge of documentation, the edge of artist currency, the edge of thinking and experience. And then you’re really tapping into the idea that living life is a kind of material.
Clara: Yeah, that has been very top of mind lately for me in thinking about how I approach my process in making work that’s relational and often anti-capitalist in nature, and then coming up against my own conditioned and self-imposed expectations in the process of making that work. I’ve been holding this tension between wanting to make things and spaces where productivity culture is being challenged or questioned, then finding myself also having to do a lot of internal work alongside that in unlearning the ways that I can reinforce this productivity value system in my process. Even in my learning, my real impulse to be like, “Oh, okay great, this is a thing that keeps coming up, now I’m gonna continue to research it and see it from all these different sides.” But I’m trying to learn when it’s sometimes just about being in the experience and trusting all the different ways that we can access learning and knowledge, that it doesn’t need to be a certain way for it to work.
Jorge: Sure, the only other thing that I would say in addition to that is that it doesn’t have to be either/or because we’re really elastic. We have a lot of capacity for imagination and for multimodality. So there’s also a lot of room to say, I’m a person who gets things done, and a person who enjoys and can be enriched by the process.
I try to get the students to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I do want them to think about being more conscious of the fact that they might be contributing to projects and work that are way beyond them that will outlive them, that may not be recognized until way after they’re gone, or may not be recognized at all ever. But at the same time continuing to keep in consideration the ability, pleasure, and sense that we get when we close a circuit, either on a daily basis or moment to moment basis, whatever that circuit is. Whether it’s the conclusion of a 15 week class or the making of a singular meal, or the completion of a 4 year project, I believe we can have both.
Clara: Yeah, you mentioned you taught your last class of the school year today and I’m curious how you reconcile this idea of students’ learning and contribution to something that’s way larger in scope than they might realize at the time while also working within these real temporal constraints of the class length. How did you close the circuit for your course today?
Jorge: This is going to be really corny, but I try to hold true to the idea of commencement, which usually schools do at the end of the year, but the term actually means beginning. So today, I had my last class called Art, Design and Society. After 15 weeks of giving lectures to 160 first year students about things like ecology, Utopia, invisibility, and absurdity, I ended with a lecture about permissions. That lecture is an attempt to give a singular tool that I’ve been kind of modeling throughout the entire semester. And the tool is, how do you look at the work or the creative gestures around you and take what you need from them in order to compose your own toolbox in your own imagination that you can go forward with?
Conceptualist Permissions for Teacher Posture. Photo courtesy of Lucero.
I give some examples of a project that I did where I tried to examine as many of the posture permissions that I’ve gotten from artists over the last 30 years in my life. So I end the class by offering this project as a tool for how the students can go forward in the construction of their own education. And my hope is that it’s a kind of examining tool, a kind of microscope, that they could use to encounter all sorts of creative practice, not just art, design, or scholarship, but that they can use that tool to engage in the next 3 years of their undergraduate experience, and hopefully in all of their creative practices thereafter.
Clara: I’ve been thinking about that project a lot recently in my own life and practice, and I made a little list myself of all the different members of my MFA Program in this moment and the things that they’ve taught me.
Jorge: That’s great!
Clara: And my family, too. That practice was really meaningful to me because it almost felt like a kind of gratitude practice, grounding back into the idea that we all have something to teach, and we all have something to learn from each other. And even in moments of conflict or miscommunication that naturally arise in relationships, remembering that there’s no right way. There’s no expert here. We’re all kind of figuring it out together and what if we instead choose to see the material around us and each other as a kind of gift? It’s hard to phrase without sounding corny, but thinking of it as a practice that wonders how else we might see each other in this moment.
Jorge: I mean, it’s not. I know it sounds corny, but maybe the only reason it sounds corny is because it’s elementary in a certain way, you know? Like the way that I think about it is not very different from Show and Tell, a gift that I was given when I was very young, which was to have this opportunity to have the floor. And so here I am, 6 years old bringing in my treasured Star Wars action figures and I’m given the chance not only to show them, but to speak on them as if I have some expertise about them. Which of course I did, because I’m the one who plays with them, I’m the one who treasures them, I’m the one who knows where they come from, right? And I’m not saying that that wasn’t a shared sensibility with other kids in the room at that given moment, but the gift of being given the opportunity to hold the floor was like being told something that you like matters.
Maybe the learning objectives of participating in Show and Tell were to encourage me to come out of my shell or learn how to tell a story or something like that. But the hidden curriculum of that was being empowered to say the thing that I am drawn to is important. I think that the permissions project is just one step more sophisticated version of that same activity.
It’s connected a little bit to the word “like” and the way students who are new to an art critique setting are oftentimes told they need to give more sophisticated responses beyond expressing that they “like” something. And I understand why teachers do that because we think there’s a more robust way to talk about what we’re experiencing. But I also think we don’t give enough credit to the expression “I like.”
The etymology of the word “like,” which is also where we get our word alike, has to do with an echo, an echoed body or a mirrored body. And it basically means something that is similar to you, so when we say “I like this,” or even when we give a like on Instagram or Twitter, we’re kind of saying, here’s an echo of me. And that for me has become a really important thing to highlight in the way that I, as an artist, move through the world, but also in the way that my students move through the world because I don’t want them to discount that feeling that they have as if it’s not a smart feeling. I think it is a smart feeling. It’s an incredibly intellectual response to phenomenon in the world, right? I like this song. I like the green in this painting. I like the risk that you took here. I like you. This kind of thing where we express similitude to something else, I think, is an underrated, but very potent way to be in the world.
Clara: Well, I like that. I like that a lot, in fact.
Jorge Lucero (he/him) is an artist from Chicago who currently serves as Professor of Art Education in the School of Art & Design and also as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
As part of his decades-long work to test the creative and conceptual pliability of “school as material” Lucero participates in and around the academy in every manner possible. He has exhibited, performed, published, administered, and taught through his work all over the U.S. and abroad. Lucero is an alum of Penn State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to working in higher education, he served as a high school art teacher at the Chicago Public School Northside College Prep.
Clara Harlow (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator interested in the question of how we can make today different than yesterday. Her work operates as an invitation into themes of celebration, exchange, and alternative ways of measuring time and value. Through parties, workshops, and interactive objects, Clara is invested in how we can turn the dilemmas of the everyday into an opportunity for experimental problem solving and collective delight. Her practice aims to create responsive public containers for unexpected joy and connection, but if she can just get you to forget about your To Do list for a little while, that’s pretty good too.
What if We Became Artists?; The Audacity To Try It
Domenic Toliver in Conversation with Xavier Pierce
“I see a little me in my students, and I want the kids to see they can be all of these things. You can be an athlete, an artist, a lover of music, a scholar, all of these things together. You don’t have to pick just one. That drives my creativity now.” – Xavier Pierce
What if the question wasn’t “Who do I want to be when I grow up?” but “How many things can I become?” I sat down with Xavier Pierce, a first-grade teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary and the Spring Artist in Residence at the King School Museum of Contemporary Art. In him, I saw a version of myself, a Black male teacher, an artist, a quiet disruptor of expectations. We discussed growing up, the scarcity of role models beyond sports, and what it means to create space for kids to see themselves differently. What unfolded wasn’t just an interview, but a reflection on what it means to become, again and again. Through our similarities and differences, we realized that questions aren’t always meant to be answered. Sometimes, they’re just invitations to grow.
Domenic Toliver: Lately, I’ve really been thinking about art as life, and art as a way of being. For me to view life that way, it really gets me to be excited for each day, because it’s what you make it. We have these opportunities to learn, grow, and change. And I feel like listening to you talk at KSMoCA, you might be able to connect to that?
Xavier Pierce: You know, I’ve always been excited to get up and go teach, but now I got this project to do with y’all and now I see the excitement in the students, and they wanna make sure the academics are taken care of so that we can get to the art. And it’s just fun to watch the kids be really excited about something. And, I’m really excited. The whole community is excited about this thing.
Dom: Yeah I can definitely sense the excitement. I think part of it comes from not many people knowing you as an artist.
Xavier: I don’t know if you were in the room when Laura asked me if I tell my students that I’m an artist, but I really don’t ever tell anybody that I’m an artist because I feel like art is just kind of ingrained in being human. Because humans have been doing art forever and ever. It’s natural. I’m always wanting to be creative in life. Do something new with my day, learn something new with my day, wake up and figure out how am I gonna experience this day to the fullest. Sometimes it’s through putting some paint onto a canvas. Sometimes it’s making a good meal with my loved ones. And I feel those are the same thing.
Dom: Yeah, they are the same. Do you feel like this project at KSMoCA brought some of that out of you?
Xavier: I do. Now I have this new resurgence of creative energy. And it’s because KSMoCA invited me to do this, but it’s also helping me understand now that this source of creativity is nostalgia, and this source of creativity comes from being a role model at school. I see a little me in my students, and I want the kids to see they can be all of these things. You can be an athlete, an artist, a lover of music, a scholar, all of these things together. You don’t have to pick just one. That drives my creativity now.
Dom: No, you don’t have to pick one. The kids definitely need to know that.
Being at King School helps reinforce this process of focused creation. The object really doesn’t matter there as much as the process. It makes me think of how you mentioned how naturally humans want to create. Like in cave drawings, it wasn’t about the drawing on the rock, it was the process, the hunt, and how to express that to others.
Xavier: Yeah and they were using berries, charcoal from the fire of the night before, or whatever they could find. That’s something I always think about when I’m painting. Maybe I’ll run out of colors. So I think of how I can find a substitute or how to morph this idea so that it still has the essence of what I’m trying to say. LIke how we used cardboard as a paint brush for this last workshop. That’s what I feel art is all about, the process, adapting, learning, way more than the product itself. Even when I don’t like the product I appreciate the process. That raw art is real dope to me.
Dom: Yeah. I think it’s really about being more present. I feel that with photography. Especially when traveling. I’d have my camera and sometimes I would forget to take a photo. And that’s what I fell in love with. Being a photographer that takes no photos. Building relationships and listening to people. I’m currently doing a workshop with older adults and I feel like the conversations, the honesty and vulnerability is what it’s really about.
Xavier: Exactly. Man, and that is such an important thing too. Intergenerational communication. I grew up with two sets of grandparents and a set of great, great grandparents. My dad’s great grandparents raised him. And so they’re my great-great grandparents. And they were alive. They died when they were 99 and like 89. So I got a chance to kick it with my grandparents so much. I think that really taught me how to listen. It taught me how to have a good conversation and how to just take people where they’re at.
Dom: I was close to my grandma. Most of the conversations I remember or moments as a kid that have really sat with me or, you know, had some type of impact. They all come back to something she did or said to me or told someone else.
Xavier: I really think kids listen to their grandparents more, they watch them. I mean they’re so cool, they have so much wisdom, and they’re chill. There’s something about that communication, right?
Dom: I think it has something to do with the two both not being listened to.
Xavier: Yeah, no, that might be it. Both aren’t being listened to. So that communication with each other is, I don’t know, like one has a lot of patience. Because your parents want the best for you, but they also see you as that extension of them so they don’t exactly listen. They tell. Whereas grandparents are usually more patient. Makes me think of my parents. I grew up playing football and running track and I knew that I didn’t want to go to school for it. I was always pretty grounded in my academics. I wanted to go to college and focus on school. My dad ran track for Oregon and he was a track coach most of my life. While he never actually told me the plan was for me to run or be an athlete I felt it. So when I chose to go another route the energy was kind of, “so… what ARE you going to do?”. My sister ended up throwing at Hawaii U and Biola down in Orange County so they (my parents) still had a star athlete.
Dom: Man same. My dad was my coach my whole life, I ended up playing at Idaho State, going the avenue paved for me. About halfway through college though I lost the passion for it. I had other things I wanted to try.
Xavier: Yeah exactly, and so they say, “so what are you gonna do?”
Dom: Man, yup!
Xavier: And so I had to really figure that out, what am I gonna do? Because our guidelines for us were to go to school, get a scholarship so you can go to college and then you figure it out from there.
So I went to North Carolina AT right after high school. Greensboro, North Carolina for a semester. I didn’t really like it ’cause the town was just too small. It was fun though, HBCU, real cool. But I had walked that small town a few times in that short span. I decided I was just going to go home. So I went to PCC, got my pre-reqs. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I started going to art shows just with the homies. That was real tight. The community was tight. Everybody’s having fun, everybody’s doing something. I started thinking to myself, “man, I’m not doing anything but just coming and drinking a little wine and, you know, head banging at a house show from time to time. But what am I contributing to this? I was living with my homie from high school at the time, and he was like, “man, what if we became artists.” I was like, “What are you talking about? How are we just gonna become artists?”
Lo and behold, I was sitting around one day, I was playing Super Mario Sunshine on the Game Cube, on this big TV that I dragged into the house. I was tired of it. So I went over to Scrap, and just started looking for things that I could maybe make something with. That’s really how I started painting. Was just out of boredom and I like trying to figure out how I could be a contributor to the communities that I operate in.
Dom: Dang. That’s crazy, just a big what if question led you down a new path. What if I became an artist, what if I use something other than a paintbrush? That’s dope. I had a real similar experience with my roommate, he wanted to act. At the time, we were all like okay man, go act then. But over time, that childlike mindset got contagious, I was asking myself what if I wrote scripts, what if I acted too. We fed off that energy, that childlike imagination. It led us down this creative path, trying new things and really just pretending to be what we wanted to be. Soon enough you start to be it.
Xavier: I figured out like you really can’t take yourself that seriously, man. If you take yourself too seriously, you’re missing out. You have to stay open to change, growth, and trying new things.
Dom: I agree. I think you have to be curious and vulnerable so you’re not stuck in doing one thing your whole life.
Xavier: Do you think traveling influenced you to be more open-minded?
Dom: Yeah most definitely. I think traveling introduced me to that openness. Seeing all types of perspectives, different lifestyles, honestly different ways of coping with life. It definitely changed me.
Xavier: Travel puts you in situations that influence you for sure. This one time Hannah and I, we were on a road trip down to California and we ended up having to get gas in Trump territory. This dude, I’m just sitting there chopping it up with him.
He got his little Make America great again hat on and we’re just sitting there having a conversation and as a black dude I have to play a cool, you know, or I’m gonna mess around and get shot. I have to play it cool, gotta be the mediator.
I’m laughing with him and talking with him. We get on the subject of teaching and he says “You some kind of communist?” I’m like we just started talking about teaching bro. Like how did you get that? But after talking to him again, I still don’t agree with everything he was saying, but through talking to him, I was like this dude is just another dude. That just made me realize that I do need to talk with the opposition more often. Especially right now, everybody is so divided, so polarized and like the only way to get over that is not to move to one side of the spectrum more. It’s honestly to move closer to the middle.
And it’s not that my beliefs have to change, it’s just that I need to be more comfortable talking to those people who make me uncomfortable. And also in that process, making them more comfortable talking to people who they might not agree with. Through that you can start to kind of heal. cause man, it’s getting weird. It’s getting really sticky right now. I feel like people need those conversations with outsiders to start to change their minds a little bit.
Yeah. And I’m not, I’m not saying like I’m gonna go out to every single place. I, you know, I walk in and I’m gonna change somebody’s mind, but at least I can have a conversation with them and I can better understand. If they listen to me, they can better understand my stance. Maybe over time, like we were saying before, like they might not change their mind right then and there. They might sit on it for a little bit and then later on when they’re met with the same question or. Met with somebody who has the same conversation. They can bring that different idea and then through that, just like those little, those little trickle effects, you know?
Dom: That’s true. While travelling I’ve met so many people with conflicting ideas and beliefs but I think just being honest, you’ll find those common things that’ll make you both reconsider why you differ with each other in the first place.
So where do you go from here, what are some ambitions you have?
Xavier: I think I really wanna try being a professor. But not in a traditional sense. So I think it’ll take a lot of building blocks to get there, I feel like it’s gonna be a long process. ’cause there’s not necessarily a department or a class for what I’m thinking. I gotta kind of wiggle my way into an institution and then you know make that class. I’ve always had this idea of taking a class where it’s more focused on questions. A conversation class, but focused on asking questions. Cause I like questions more than I like answers. It gets people’s minds moving. You just learn so much about another person through asking questions. I guess I’m just overall more of a listener.
Dom: Lisa Jarret always says, “Live in the question.” Right now that’s my favorite quote. Crazy part is I could totally be wrong but I guess the way I interpret that is like living in the response really. Not the answer to the question, but the response to the question. So like if your question is “what does it mean to be a, a black man in America?” What does that really mean? There’s no answer. Because everyone’s experience is different, you know. But there’s a response to that question that we live in and it changes overtime too though.
Xavier: If I think about how many times I’ve been asked that question and how many different responses I’ve given based on the time in my life, or the person who I’m talking to. I’ve been thinking about representation in art, in making these new pieces, I was like, okay, it’s gonna be in King. Kids are gonna be walking past this every day. They do need to see themselves in the work. Reflected in some way. So I just tried my hand at it and I got out my anatomy books and tried to figure out how I’m going to do this, so that they are reflected in some way. They’d see full lips, a wide nose, an afro. Then I got some gold leaf. I put gold in his mouth instead of teeth. It came out pretty good. It took a lot for me to bring that out. One of the hardest things, it’s just not in me to do portraits and portray us like that. It became a study of the body as well.
Dom: I get that. I think I struggled with that too. When I was in France, I used to send my pops a few photos I would take. One time he was like, man, there ain’t no black people out there.
He made me really look at all my photos. There were black people everywhere, all around where I was staying. But in the photos, no black people. It made me think for sure, maybe there’s some resistance in not wanting to mess up. I got to get the lighting right, I can’t portray us the wrong way. There’s a lot to think about. And then also, to me, there’s also a fear of doing it wrong. And misrepresenting your own culture, you know what I mean? Who am I to be representing all of one people?
Xavier: That was a huge fear with this portrait that I did. Because I knew I wanted full lips.
I wanted a wide nose, but I don’t want this to be a caricature. I have to do this right. I’ll probably still keep tweaking it until I have to give y’all, cause it needs to be right.
Dom: I feel that. And I think that’s always going to be evolving. You’ll always ask yourself if you’re doing it right. You might try to do something new every time. For me there’s a lack of knowledge there too, as far as in film and photography. They don’t really teach how to light for darker shades of skin so you have to learn by just doing it, by trying. Then I think once you mess up a few times or you feel you might have misrepresented, that might lead to a version of avoidance too. I know a lot of filmmakers and painters that are black that resist black topics or subjects, and I think it’s because you don’t want to be wrong. Or you don’t want to be put into a box.
Xavier: Yeah, I’ve always tried to figure out like, why, why do I resist it so much? Yeah. And it is, it’s because I don’t wanna misrepresent it.
Dom: Yeah. And maybe there’s a privilege to it. Like, dang, I have the privilege to be speaking for all my people. I don’t want it. That’s too much responsibility, so you resist it. And I think once you stop resisting it, the intentions in our art might be clearer. But within that, we also get put in a creative box, being categorized as a black artist who only makes black art, rather than an artist making work, who is black.
Xavier: We have to have the audacity to do something different. That’s kind of what I’m trying to show. I am a black man making art. Making abstract art. I do also want to start representing more of my culture though. So breaking that wall with this painting I’m working on. I’m excited honestly to see how the kids receive it and how my community receives it because that feedback will also inform how I continue. Art is a conversation like that.
Dom: I think it’s gonna be important for them. Like in terms of how the art is presented. It’s been up to an amazing level. Last term, Napoleon’s work was up and he had the blind boys of Alabama. You got these three dudes with glasses, singing, with the gold behind them,
That hit me, because it was the culture. Represented for the culture, in collaboration with the culture. Man, so I think your work is gonna speak on that level. Displayed in a professional way for the culture. I’ve noticed a lot of the little black boys at that school and they don’t look at the walls as much. Especially at that age, I feel like they’re learning a lot about their masculinity and masculinity is different for us. Being a painter or a dancer isn’t a common option. That’s a different level of masculinity. But having that representation and knowing the possibilities, knowing they can go hoop but they can pick up a paint brush too. That’s different.
Xavier: Exactly. That gets me so excited to read the commentary from the kids. Once they start looking at their own work on the wall. How they see mine. That’s gonna be crazy, that’s what I’m most looking forward to!
Xavier Pierce is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, emotion, and the act of being present. Raised in Northeast Portland just off Alberta Street, he received both his undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies and a master’s in Education from Portland State University.
Pierce draws inspiration from his lived experience, using art as a metacognitive tool to navigate the emotional currents of life. What began as a personal process to make sense of change and growth has become a lifelong practice rooted in the belief that creativity is essential to the human experience.
As a teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary and now visiting artist at the King School Museum of Contemporary Art, Pierce continues to develop a body of work that invites reflection, groundedness, and emotional clarity.
Domenic Toliver is a storyteller. Working across film, photography, performance, and socially engaged art, he explores how personal and collective narratives shape memory, identity, and community. Whether through photography or collaborative projects, Domenic invites others into the storytelling process, creating space for layered voices and shared meaning. Currently pursuing an MFA in Art and Social Practice, he sees storytelling as both an artistic method and a tool for imagining new ways of being together.
Pollyanne Birge
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Pollyanne has a long and remarkable history with the Center, as a volunteer, Board member, Board Chairperson, Development and Community Resource Coordinator, Managing Director, and, beginning mid-2014, as the Director.
Ms. Birge holds a Master’s Degree in Non Profit Management from Portland State University. Previous to IPRC, she worked for five years as the Arts and Culture Outreach and Policy Coordinator for Commissioner, then Mayor, Sam Adams. In that role she helped initiate the Creative Advocacy Network, RACC’s Art Spark outreach program and the RACC Public Murals process and several other policy related initiatives. Another major component to her work was curating and managing monthly art shows and seasonal music concerts at City Hall. These events were unique and completely community driven, and acted as both a place to highlight the regional art community, as well as educate on matters of local government and public policy. An avid supporter of Oregon’s nonprofit creative community, she also serves on the board of Oregon Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Know Your City, and has formerly served for Stumptown Comics, Inc., and the PDX Bridge Festival.
Judy Bluehorse Skelton
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Judy Bluehorse Skelton has worked with federal and state Indian Education programs throughout the Northwest for 18 years, creating cultural activities focusing on traditional and contemporary uses of native plants for food, medicine, ceremony, and healthy lifeways. Judy is author of six collections of essays for teachers, including Native America: A Sustainable Culture (1999), and Lewis & Clark Through Native American Eyes (2003); she wrote and recorded 24 segments on Health & Healing and Sacred Landscapes for Wisdom of the Elders radio programs, airing on Public Broadcasting and AIROS (American Indian Radio on Satellite). As Senior Instructor, Judy is full-time faculty in Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University, teaching Intro to Native American Studies, Environmental Sustainability – Indigenous Practices, Indigenous Gardens & Food Justice, and Indigenous Women Leaders. She received the Oregon Indian Education Association’s award for Outstanding Indian Educator in 2006 and serves on the boards of the Urban Greenspaces Institute, Portland Parks, and the Native American Community Advisory Council. Judy received an MA in Educational Leadership and Policy’s, Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning program at Portland State University. Collaborative work includes the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) and Wisdom of the Elders, Inc., integrating permaculture principles with traditional ecological knowledge to address Food Sovereignty/Justice and reclaim the urban forest.
Kris Cohen
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Kris Cohen is trained as a media theorist and an art historian. These two fields come together in his work on the technological mediation of social life. His first large scale research project, now complete, takes up this history near the end, with the advent of electronic networks and the building of new collective forms in networked environments. Future projects will extend this history back in time as a way to better understand the present. One will consider the relationship between art practices and changes to the intellectual property laws that govern creative labor and the commons. Another seeks to write a history for the bitmap as a mid-century screen technology that significantly transformed techniques of visual representation. Kris’ PhD is in Art History from the University of Chicago (2010). He has written for the journals Afterall, New Media and Society, Continuum, caareviews, and a number of exhibition catalogues. He has also recently been involved in starting a new online journal, Open-Set. At Reed, he’s taught “Video, Media, Politics (1968-Present),” “Figuring Relation,” “The Art of Capitalism,” “Theories of Forms,” and Humanities 110.
Janet Owen Driggs
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Janet Owen Driggs is a writer, artist and curator who, along with Matthew Owen Driggs, frequently participates in the collective identity “Owen Driggs.” Her interests focus on those physical sites where one meets the other, which may be a public street, a garden that buffers public sidewalk and private interior, or the skin that holds ‘me’ in and mediates between ‘us.’
Janet’s work has been exhibited internationally, including in the United States, Europe, Scandinavia, and Brazil. She has curated exhibitions and screening programs in the United Kingdom, United States, People’s Republic of China and Mexico. As part of Owen Driggs (with Matthew Driggs), she curated Performing Public Space at Tijuana’s Casa del Tunel (February 2010), and generated “Mapping Biointimacy,” a series of workshops, conversations, and a combined mobile ‘phone app/guided walk at Montalvo Art Center and the ZERO 1 Garage (2013)
Atsu Nagayama
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Atsu started working for Campus Rec in July 2008. As the Associate Director of Business Services, she enjoys having the opportunity to work with students and a supportive team of coworkers. After living in New York, Chicago, and Tokyo, she is enjoying the great expanse of the West. She has started a long-delayed outdoor pursuit in hiking, camping, and rock climbing, while keeping up with her lifetime passion of yoga.
Rex Burkholder
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Trained as a biologist, Rex Burkholder worked as a science teacher and in the Northwestern forests. He started the bicycling revolution in Portland, Oregon as a founder and policy director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. An early leader in sustainability and equity, Burkholder also co-founded the Coalition for a Livable Future, bringing together over 100 diverse NGOs in the greater Portland region.
He was elected to the Metro Council in 2000, serving 12 years, where he led efforts to reform regional transportation policy and to integrate climate change into the decisions of all levels of government in Oregon. He has served on key task forces as well as national boards including Rail~volution and the Association of Metropolitan Planning Organizations. Recipient of numerous local awards, his work has been recognized internationally as well, being invited to speak in countries throughout Latin America on sustainable transportation and climate change. He was honored in 2010 as a Global Ambassador forCiclovia, an international movement to reclaim cities from the automobile.
Robert Bellows
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Robert Bellows is an artist engaged in creating a sculptural park that symbolizes the journey every soldier must take the return to civilian life. The park, a gathering space and a field of expression for both civilians and veterans will be called the Warrior Storyfield.
warriorstoryfield.com
Inspired by the idea that collaborative art projects can move culture, Robert is inviting a number of veterans and civilians to bring in their own creative process into the building of this project. As a founder of Focus 12 Inc, Robert has a business background in public relations, product development, marketing and distribution.