Category: Journal

Did You Play in the Creek?

“Whatever I did came from exactly what was there.”

Wendy Ewald

My favorite Wendy Ewald image is one of and by Denise Dixon, taken in Letcher County, Kentucky. In the black and white photograph, Denise is wearing a sundress and a tall, light wig in what looks like someone’s backyard. A dog scurries under her feet. She looks both comfortable and performative. The caption: “I am Dolly Parton.”

When I see this image, I think of the archives my grandmother has of our family’s life in eastern Kentucky, their backdrops often similar to the rolling hills featured in this photograph. I think of my own childhood there, chests of dress up clothes and hours of make believe. I think of the beauty of the eastern Kentucky landscape and, of course, dreams.

As a photographer and Kentuckian, it was a dream to talk with Wendy about her experiences living in Kentucky and what she gains from working collaboratively.


Morgan Hornsby: First of all, thank you for being here and talking with me; I really enjoyed the conversation we had in class last week and getting to hear more about your artistic process. I wanted to start with asking about something totally different. As a person from eastern Kentucky, I’ve always wondered about how you liked living there. What did you gain from living in that place?

Wendy Ewald: It was really, really important. I always wanted to go to Kentucky. I knew about Frontier Nursing Service and Berea and when I graduated from college, I went to work for Appalshop. I went with my husband, and he started the theater there, with their roadside theater. So it was fantastic to drop into this group of artists of all kinds. Before that I had worked in Canada, so it made a lot of sense to me. It wasn’t easy, as you know, to find a place to live at first, because we were from the outside, but we eventually rented a house on Ingram’s Creekand became a part of that community. And that’s one of the things I really liked too, because we did things like grow corn with our neighbors, and we made molasses, nobody had made molasses there in many years. It seemed like a complete way of living and being an artist, you know, being part of all that. I did that for five years, and I worked in three different schools. I just learned a whole lot. I mean, I figured out my practice in a way. Yeah, not in a way, I figured out my practice there.

Wendy’s neighbors, Ellis and Luvena, on Ingram’s Creek. Photo courtesy of Wendy Ewald. Letcher County, Kentucky.

Morgan: What was your house like in Kentucky? 

Wendy:  Oh, well, that’s really a good question. Because I first lived in a little house, and this is all on Ingram’s Creek, but we rented it. I think it was $50 a month. We knew all our neighbors really well. And then we decided we wanted to buy a house. There was somebody who wanted to sell us their farm which was 30 acres or something like that. It had some bottom land and two houses on it. And so we bought it and rented out one of the houses there and were there for five years. And you know, we grew sorghum, made molasses.

Morgan: That’s cool. My family made molasses too. 

Wendy: No one had done it in Ingram’s Creek in such a long time. It was a big deal for everybody. I wish I could get some last molasses! Does your family still make it?

Morgan: They don’t make it anymore.

Wendy: Ah. It’s so good.

Morgan: How did you spend your summers there?

Wendy: Well, we had a big garden, of course, we had animals. We were outside all the time, we went to the creek on the weekend to swim. We had outdoor parties.

Wendy’s backyard in Ingram’s Creek. Photo courtesy of Wendy Ewald. Letcher County, Kentucky.

Morgan: I really wanted to know if you played in the creek when you were there.

Wendy: Yeah, definitely.The whole thing of learning how the landscape is defined by the creeks, where the hills meet and all of that. I just learned so much about all these deep, meaningful things that I hadn’t experienced.Where did you live? 

Morgan: I’m from Jackson County. It’s near Berea.

Wendy: Which town?

Morgan: My family lives in Sandgap, but the county seat is McKee. So I lived there, and in different places, but right now I live in Tennessee. Something else I wanted to know related to your work in Kentucky–on your website, you describe your aim for Portraits and Dreams as for the children you were working with to “expand their ideas about picture-making, while staying close to the people and places they felt most deeply about.” I was really struck by the phrase “staying close” the first time I read that description and have thought of it often since. Do you have any other thoughts on the idea of “staying close,” or of the way photography has of doing that?

“I am Dolly Parton.” Photo courtesy of Wendy Ewald. Letcher County, Kentucky.

Wendy: Well, I was trying to figure out how to do that, but I really did develop it there. I wanted them to learn how to start from themselves, self portraits, and then move to their families and then their community. And after that, more expansive things, like their dreams and fantasies. And then later on I went to do other kinds of projects, but that was really the basis of it. So it was a gradual kind of moving from the child, you know, out into the community and eventually to dreams and fantasies. And I don’t know, is that what you meant?

Morgan:  Yeah, I think so, I have always just liked the instruction of staying close. Growing up, I sometimes felt like having aspirations of having a creative career separated me from the people around me. For that reason, I am really drawn to the idea of using art to stay close, especially in the context of eastern Kentucky.

Wendy: Yes, yes. And for me, working in those schools really helped to understand that. Because I was living right near all of them, we would see each other on the weekends and do projects together and stuff like that. Whatever I did came out of exactly what was there, both in terms of composition and landscape and in terms of topics. I think that’s the most important thing I’ve done in my career, to try and stay close to wherever I was. Even though I didn’t necessarily know it, I tried to get them to help me.

Morgan: I like that a lot. As a photographer, what do you feel like you gain from giving up the complete creative control that you yourself are making the pictures? 

Wendy:  Oh, gosh, I gain so much as an artist from that. You probably know what I’m talking about. But because when I went through school and went through rigorous photography classes, like at MIT, it was great, but it wasn’t necessarily mine. And it wasn’t necessarily the places where I was. Although it was good to have as a background. So when I went farther on, it also gave me some space to try different things and to try different techniques and use materials in different ways. And so part of it was pedagogical, but it also as an educational tool it made sense. So I was always trying to make up things that made sense in both ways, in education and then creativity.

Morgan: What do you feel like you’ve learned about yourself through the kind of creative process that you’ve chosen?

Wendy:  Well, I’ve learned to look and listen, and to understand that I have preconceptions always, and to learn to let them go or be transformed by the situation. That is also very difficult sometimes, and I feel like I’m not doing the right thing. but I just have to wait it out until I start seeing and understanding.


Morgan Hornsby (she/her) is a photographer and socially engaged artist from eastern Kentucky. She currently lives and works in Tennessee. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Guardian, New York Magazine, NPR, Southerly, Vox, and the Marshall Project.

Wendy Ewald (she/her) has collaborated on photography projects with children, families, women, workers and teachers for over forty years. She has worked in the United States, Labrador, Colombia, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Holland, Mexico and Tanzania. Her projects start as documentary investigations and move on to probe questions of identity and cultural differences. With each situation, she uses different processes and materials to shift my point of view and engage with my subjects. Her work may be understood as a kind of conceptual art focused on expanding the role of esthetic discourse in pedagogy and creating a new concept of imagery that challenges the viewer to see beneath the surface of relationships.


How an Artist Needed to be an Entrepreneur in Cambodia

“It has been really starting something from scratch.”

-Lyno Vuth

I met Lyno Vuth in Sapporo, Japan in 2016. He was invited to an event called Art Camp to present his work and I helped with his presentation as an interpreter. He shared how he and his team started an art workshop and artist residency in one of the historical buildings in Cambodia; it was called the White Building which was then gray because of the dirt and aging. The White Building used to be a symbol of modern Cambodia, but it became a low income residence after the Khmer Rouge. Sa Sa Art Project started there, surrounded by communities who have almost no idea what contemporary art is. 

One day, when I was thinking of applying to the Art and Social Practice MFA program at Portland State University, I thought of Lyno, googled his name, and found Sa Sa Art Projects. It had grown into a sort of institution with projects and workshops and young artists. I was blown away by how much Lyno and his team had done. 


Sa Sa Art Project, Public Program, A street -side coffee shop at the White Building was turned into a community theater.  Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2016 © Lyno Vuth

Midori : You started the Sa Sa Art project in the White Building, and then you moved to the current location in 2017, correct? How long have you been working on the Sa Sa art project? 

Lyno: For thirteen years now. The first six years were in the White Building, and then seven years in the current building.

Midori : That’s amazing! At the conference in Sapporo, I remember you mentioning that there was not much contemporary art education available in Cambodia.

Lyno: It was quite limited. For example, there is only one state art university, and the department is fine arts, but they are quite traditional, mainly doing paintings and sculptures. They are not so keen on contemporary and experimental practice.

On the other hand, there is a very big school in the north of Cambodia, Hmong, and in Paramount province. It’s not a state school, it’s a nonprofit school.They have had a long running art program since the nineties. Many students have graduated from there. Their program started out as informal but has evolved to a more structured four year program. And that opens for contemporary practice very much. And other than that maybe not so much, and that’s why Sa Sa is offering to fill this gap of contemporary art education.

Midori: How did you become interested in art?

Lyno: It’s quite a long story, but maybe I can share some key points. I was born in 1982, which is three years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979 so Cambodia was going through a transition.

It was still like a civil war and recollection of powers between parties. It was not  until 1991 that the Paris Agreement was made to reconcile and not until 1993 that we had a new constitution of democratic state with multi-party parliament. So in a way, because of that political infrastructure, it didn’t allow contemporary art practices to prosper.

It wasn’t until the late nineties that a new important art space called Radium: Arts and Culture Institute opened. Some other spaces slowly launched among Phnom Penh, including the French Cultural Institute which promotes art exhibitions that brought in French and Cambodian artists.

Midori: I see.

English for Artists class co-taught by Lyno Vuth and Prumsodun Ok for Sa Sa’s Art Project’s Education program.  Phnom Penh in 2021 © Lyno Vuth

Lyno: For me, growing up around that time, I didn’t know much about art. I actually studied information technology, but my interest was quite a lot in the visual aspect. Later I was working in a nonprofit and then I became interested in photography.I would go into galleries by myself. At one point, I found out that one photo gallery offered classes. That space allowed me to meet others in the community and after graduating we tried to stick together.

 That’s the beginning of this project journey, we formed the collective with the idea of wanting to do something to contribute to the landscape of contemporary art and to also allow us to continue to be artists.


When the Reyun came to an end in 2009, it felt urgent to build a Cambodian run space and we wanted it to be independent even though we didn’t quite have the skills to do it yet. 

So , one thing led to another. In my practice, studying photography evolved into curating by necessity…and because within Sa Sa, we had to do sales… so it’s like skills that I had to learn as we go until today. It has been really starting something from scratch.

Midori: I see. That was the moment you became an entrepreneur!

Lyno: I am not sure if entrepreneur is the right term. But long story short, we had opened one small gallery already around 2009.

We tested with that gallery and then we expanded into the idea to be more of a space for  education, experimentation, exchange, and learning. 

Midori: Wow. 

Lyno: Yes.  There was a moment of energy coming together. 

Some of my collective members were from the universities, and they just graduated. So we were eager to continue doing something. Also we had a leader, a former team member who was a self-taught photographer. He had developed his practice, and he helped us to become ambitious and to come together.

Sa Sa Art Project, Education, Performance by Yeng Sovannarith at Contemporary Art Class Graduation Exhibition, Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2020 © Lyno Vuth

Midori: Also during that period, you went to the States to study for your master’s degree.

Lyno: Yes, I studied in the US from 2013 to 2015. It was a turning point in my life, because when we started the Sa Sa Art project, I was still working full time in the nonprofit. So, applying to school in the US was like another part time job for me.

I did not know where the funding for the art in Cambodia was. There is zero funding for contemporary art from the government. So we need to think about getting it from somewhere else. I knew nothing.

Fortunately, we were able to meet good collaborators along the way.. We got a small grant and we did a series of workshops in photography and mixed media with young students from the White Building neighborhood.

Over time, we maximized the potential of the workshops and got to know our neighbors. There was a conversation and presentations at the end and students invited their families and the neighborhood to come and see. People were so excited, so happy and proud. 

I asked them what they wanted to do after, and many of them said they wanted to study more. I was like, “Oh, they want to study more! But what do I have to offer?” Then I realized that this was my calling. That’s something I need to really put my full energy into. I needed to put my full energy into learning and my own growth and development. So I decided to pursue this master’s degree in the USbecause there’s no program like that here in Cambodia. I got scholarships and everything came into place. 

When I came back, I continued to think about the way we teach and being an artist and curating.

Midori: How was your experience being in a school in the United States?

Lyno: Oh, it was so hard. The language and terminology, and the compensation of the academic material… I would read one paragraph and boom! Everyone else in the class had already read and finished the discussion. So it challenged me a lot.

It really pushed me so much. I was like, “Oh my God, can I do this? (I don’t think I can!)” But, you gradually get used to things , and hang on to it… and somehow survive.  It really changed my life. 

It really opened up my perspective in the ways that I look at my home country. I look at what’s happening, what happened before, how can we learn from that, what can we do now, and what I find I really appreciate a lot is to look at those things with a critical lens.

I think that the MFA program helps me regardless because it is a history of mostly European and American art. There are some other classes that involve art from Asia as well, but not a lot. I think it helps me to develop a method and a discipline in my thinking, in my writing and in my attitude towards things regardless of whether it’s art or not.

Midori: We need to update art history with more content from other cultures and countries. 

It’s not easy for people from other countries to study in the United States in English when it’s not their first language, but I assume there must be so many more challenges when you return to Cambodia.. What was the biggest challenge you faced? 

Lyno: I am not sure if it’s a challenge, but at the same time it is an opportunity as well. Thinking about the Sa Sa Art Project, when I came back in 2015, we continued to work at the White Building but also at the same time,we heard from the government that there was possible demolition and eviction.

We wanted to think about what we would do if they all agreed to move. If they did not agree, we would stay with and we would continue to look for alternative solutions. , But they decided to move. 

There was also the conversation of, “are we still relevant?” and “Is our work still relevant outside of the White Building?” And if so, what are our strengths and do we want to continue? So it was a collective discussion and we all agreed that our strength is in education and that it’s something that we could continue to grow. We decided to continue in the new space. It’s grounded in an education program and it has also expanded into exhibition.

Midori: Wow. Amazing. So, is it currently funded by the Cambodian government?

Lyno: No, not at all. We were very fortunate to have an amazing funder fully support us for a period of three years from 2019 to 2022. Those three years allowed us to expand on our ambitions in the program and focus on the impact of our work. We were able toprepare and think through how we can be more sustainable and independent.

Midori: So it was privately funded?

Lyno: Yes, we were privately funded by this Japanese-owned foundation based in New Zealand.

Midori: Wow. I am kind of proud. Haha.

Sa Sa Art Projects, Open Studio by artist-in-residence Anurak Tanyapalit, Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 2019 © Lyno Vuth

Lyno: Yes. That’s amazing. It was actually, in fact, after we moved out here, we were also draining our funding and things. So this funding came at a very critical time. So through which we were able to continue to survive, and at the same time to have this time not thinking much about making money for now, but thinking about making money for the future. 

Midori: Right. So now are you guys able to sustain yourself?

Lyno: Agh….almost! Haha…not quite yet! We are reaching a point where we feel okay for one year and a bit difficult for one year.

From the year of 2020, we started this fundraising option. It’s quite amazing. Because after all these years, as you could see from 2010 to the networks that we have built connections with artists in residency program, with partners, with friends in Cambodia, in Southeast Asia, and far beyond that we came into a point where we were able to to ask artists to contribute an artwork to us for our auction.

And 50% go back to artists, 50% goes to Sa Sa Art Project. We started in 2022 and it went very successfully amidst the COVID crisis. Yes. And it was quite, quite interesting because we were learning along the way and because of the COVID. Right. So everything was quite new, a new system upgraded to be online through this new platform, new technology developed online, including online bidding and options.

Midori: I see that now! I hear you say challenging could be a possibility.

Sa Sa Art Projects team during Fundraising Auction in 2020. Lyno is the second from the right. 

Lyno: We knew that there’s some resources available. If you’re talking about art buyers or collectors, there are very few locally who are doing it. So we know that we cannot rely only on the local art collectors. So we need to reach out to the regional art collectors.

An online platform is the bridge. At that time we were still acting, but it is also very important to have the local presence to engage with the audience here so that they understand a bigger picture about the art scenes in Cambodia. For 2020’s auction, we had about 80 plus artworks. We’ve actually got between 80 and 90 artworks as well for 2022.

It includes young artists who graduate from art class to more senior and established artists from Cambodia and to kind of like a range of diverse artists from South East Asia, largely. So in a way, we call it the auction exhibition.

Midori: So a physical exhibition while having an online presence, it’s like a hybrid.

Lyno: Yes. We know that it is important to engage with the existing audience here in Cambodia to have that presence. And so they can see the highlights of Cambodian contemporary art and artists from the region. Also a sense of solidarity, while at the same time having an online presence for the regional art collectors that we reach out through all our networks, possible networks.

Midori: That sounds great. Wonderful! 

So you had 80 to 90 pieces of artworks. Did you sell all of them or how did it go? 

Lyno: No, we did not sell all of them. with 20, 21 days. I think we sold only about 10%, 25% of the artworks. But with strategic high value in combination of established artworks for the original act and low value adverts for the local and affordable for the local collectors, 

Midori: Wow. You guys funded more than $40,000.

Lyno: Yes, that is the one from 2020. That’s quite remarkable and we are very thankful. For example, like the funder that used to support us for three years continues to support us through auctions. 

Midori: Wow. Nice. Congratulations!

Sa Sa Art Projects raised $41,280 through an auction exhibition in 2020.

Midori: This is my last question for you today. How would you encourage children who are interested in pursuing art? What would you say? 

Lyno: That is a hard one. Haha…

Whenever I teach, at least in my class, I want  to know where you are from. To know who were in the way cultivated before you. Learn from strategy. And have a question for yourselves. Learning from the past, achievement, and innovation. What can we learn from? Learn from those and take action for now and future. For yourself, for your community, for your context. 


Lyno Vuth (he/him) is an artist, curator, and educator interested in space, cultural history, and knowledge production. Alongside his individual artistic practice, he is a member of Stiev Selapak collective which founded and co-runs Sa Sa Art Projects, a long-term initiative committed to the development of contemporary visual arts landscape in Cambodia. His works have been presented in Cambodian and international venues including at major exhibitions and festivals such as the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Biennale of Sydney, Singapore International Festival of Arts, and Gwangju Biennale. He holds a Master of Art History from the State University of New York, Binghamton, New York, a Fullbright Fellowship(2013-15), and a Master of International Development from RMIT University, Melbourne, supported by the Australian Endeavour Award (2008-2009).

https://vuthlyno.art/

Sa Sa Art Projects https://www.sasaart.info/

Midori Yamanaka (she/her) is a social practice artist, educator, and single mother. Midori was born and raised in Japan, but is currently living and working in Portland, Oregon. Her practice explores ways to harness creativity based on common values in diverse societies and their respective cultures. She has been working on many international projects as a creative and cultural hub, including Virtual Playdate (2022), World Friendship Online (2020), Asia Winter Game in Sapporo (2017), Esin Creative Workshop in Sapporo (2015), and many others. In 2023, she launched a global mind creative coaching program for Japanese women. She holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Art Center College of Design, and currently is studying and practicing Art and Social Practice at Portland State University. 

https://www.midoriyamanaka.com


Getting to Know Each Other While Doing Things

We are artists who immerse ourselves in social issues and do things that can go well or go wrong. Many of us who work this way don’t do it only for the intellectual class or for people with money that can support our work. In fact, because of the interest in social commitment, we decide to deal with all these structures because they can mutually benefit. I wholeheartedly believe in those exchanges. There is fundamental knowledge in each social group that ought to be connected.

-Chemi Rosado-Seijo

Chemi Rosado-Seijo is a Puerto Rican artist and skateboarder who has created some of the most iconic art and community action projects in Puerto Rico. From painting the facades of an entire town in different shades of green, building a skate ramp/hang-out-spot by the sea, or changing the focus of the voices we pay attention to in the museum, his art invites a new understanding of a specific place and its people.

Chemi is also one of the first artists I learned of  who considered himself socially engaged. La Perla’s Bowl and El Cerro illustrate how his practice embraces social engagement as a life-long relationship with participants and collaborators that stimulates social exchange, networks of support, and artistic thinking beyond the project’s specificities.

This conversation expands on some issues noted in We Did This–a previous interview with Jesús “Bubu” Negron, a friend and collaborator of Chemi, who also works in community organizing through art. Both artists have made significant contributions to the socially engaged art landscape in Puerto Rico, with a particular sensibility towards communities in their contexts and an understanding of engagement that questions the possibilities of this artistic practice inside the larger art world and its institutions.


Diana Marcela Cuartas: I was introduced to your work by hanging out with Bubu Negrón1, and I would like to know how you see the relationship between hanging out and socially engaged art. 

Chemi Rosaado-Seijo: Of course, hanging out is essential for art projects. 

In the construction of El Bowl de La Perla (La Perla’s Bowl), we were all a group of friends. I had a skate ramp set up in my studio, as a part of another project titled History on Wheels, and some skater friends from La Perla had a key to come in whenever they wanted. When I had to leave that studio, the boys asked to place the skate ramp in the coastal neighborhood, La Perla, and in the process of relocating it, we thought about making it out of cement, as our friend Boly was always suggesting, using debris from some torn-down houses in the area recently and were perfect for it. That same day, a friend said he could bring his Bobcat and move the chunks of debris for us, and, in the same spirit, neighboring folks started to help— with certain doubts that we would succeed at making a skating bowl in two months, but collaborating anyway from the beginning. I believe it all came to fruition because we had been hanging out in that neighborhood for a long time, for real. 

Honestly, El Bowl is the best proof of something made through hanging out. The whole time, we enjoyed the process of making the bowl as a pool/sculpture. We worked every day, hanging out and having a great time. We never went there to suffer or have unpleasant times. If things weren’t going well, we would hop on our skateboards and take off. 

La Perla’s Bowl in process. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2006. Photo courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

La Perla’s Bowl as a swimming pool. San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2006. Photo courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

Diana: Part of your work is characterized by an active participation from the communities you are involved with. How do you get your collaborators to participate in the aesthetic thinking or metaphorical aspects of a project?

Chemi: Generally, I try to work from the common knowledge we share in Puerto Rico, and part of what has worked in the projects is that they are related to the history of the site and the place.

In a project like El Cerro2, the metaphor emerges thinking like an ordinary citizen; it’s like a game, “to turn The Hill into a hill”, recognizing there are a lot of other implications like neighborhood pride and the place’s identity. After a while, we would be negotiating super swell about aesthetic issues with the community, for example, deciding which house should be painted next, what shade of green to use, or painting the best maroon house, really considering the color palette in detail. 

I grew up in the countryside, and here in Puerto Rico there’s the imperialistic idea that the rural is the old, the abandoned, and that the city and modernity are the best. So, within that game of actually turning The Hill into a hill, by using green and maroon, we can question everything from our relationship with nature to whether art can really make a social intervention that works for something, and change the perspective about that nature and rurality that people have wanted to reject. 

It is also important that what we do makes sense and has quality. It’s important that my son likes it, as well as my skater friend, and my brother who is an agronomist, and the people I appreciate, who know me and know my work. It is also important to share it with someone like you or Bubu, who has another knowledge of art. It is equally important that my mother and collaborator, a feminist professor and activist social worker, sees it as something beautiful too, as a good metaphor, as a work of art. 

Something about Puerto Rico is that, fortunately, we learned to work as a crew with the homies, and we all do it openly all the time. It’s important for us to share our ideas, to ask each other questions. That’s why my ideas can come with Bubu’s input, or from whoever I am hanging out with at the moment, and I share that without fear. 

Diana: I became a social worker after I moved to the US and couldn’t find a job in the art field, and I would like to know what kind of  possibilities you see between social work and the arts from your experience with your mom?

Chemi: We collaborate a lot. My vision of social work is not that of a worker sitting in an office but one who is really for and in the neighborhood. There are methodologies we have developed together, such as asking questions, getting to know the neighborhood’s history and the needs people tell you about, and then coming up with solutions. 

I think that is important, the methodology of social work that asks, learns, and builds relationships, which can also be done through art. If, as artists, we hold ourselves accountable, work at a site, learn its history, and think about what needs to be worked on in this specific place, we will end up doing social interventions with a social work approach. 

Color charts for the El Cerro project. Each participant chooses a green of their preference to have their house painted in green for free. Photo courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.
El Cerro hill houses painted in green. 2002, Photo by Edwin Medina, courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.
Neighbors in El Cerro painting their houses green. Naranjito, Puerto Rico, 2028. Photo courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

Diana: How do you approach your projects when working with communities you’ve had no previous relationship with?

Chemi: When I worked with the guards at MoMA3, we started a year and a half earlier, for example. We would meet once or twice a month for three or four days to develop the project. We gathered their ideas, which were terrific and there were lots of them, then honed them to the real possibilities and brought them closer to what interested me, which was their voices. What ended up happening is that the project was them talking about artworks and reinterpreting the museum. The title was also a semi-democratic process; we were all together discussing ideas and voting until Beyond The Uniform came up, and it had immediate consensus. We established a very solid relationship over a year; we called ourselves The BTU Family.

Diana: When you gave a talk at the KSMoCA Lecture Series4, you mentioned that El Trampolín (The Diving Board) sparked your interest in doing art with the people. How was that process?

Chemi: El Trampolín arrived like a hyperrealism of a cultural phenomenon that is very interesting to me. People arrive from all over Puerto Rico by car or public transit. Kids, teenagers, and adults come to jump from the Puente De Los Dos Hermanos, a crucial point in our history. That bridge, at its moment, came to connect the big island with the islet that is Viejo San Juan, which is where the colonization by the Spaniards first took place. It is in that spot where we go to have fun.  

We installed a diving board, which generally would be in private pools, on the bridge, and suddenly there were lines of people ready to jump. That’s what happened with El Trampolín. The kids loved it so much, and people were sharing and celebrating one of our most beautiful resources in Puerto Rico: the ocean, and that was something we didn’t expect. It even allowed us to meet a boy that was so agile that he deserved to be in a university league or professional diving. That type of impact is what later took me to try El Cerro and other projects.

El Trampolín (The Diving Board). San Juan Puerto Rico, 2000. Photos Courtesy of Chemi Rosado-Seijo.

Diana: At what point did you decide to call yourself a socially engaged artist?

Chemi: I think I first learned the term in a Creative Capital course. That was the first time I heard that, as artists, we should be taking time off, and that we can manage money well, among other concepts that I had a different perception of. It was there that a pair of colleagues told me, “No, Chemi, now we do socially engaged art,” and I realized what we do had a name and everything. It is no longer like, “my projects that nobody understands;” instead, it is precisely the moment to do them.

An “art of social engagement,” sounds really good. Before this, we would call it “interventions.” When Bubu did the project with the cigarette butts, and I did El Trampolín, those were interventions through art in the social field. El Cerro, for instance, was really a social engagement, we practically married that project; there is an engagement forever and ever.

Diana: Talking with another Puerto Rican artist, I told him that I was doing a master’s in art and social practice, and he said that I could probably be living in a contradiction. For him, to claim as art something that has been done with others is, in a way, a colonizing act. I’m not sure if I concur, but I think it is a valid question. Do you think there is a paradox of socially engaged art as a colonizing practice?

Chemi: I think that is a statement that can come from people who don’t work with people, or who don’t relate with social classes other than theirs. It is easy from the intellectual field and from the artist’s circle to say that “we are colonizing and using the people.” But they could go to the neighborhoods and ask. We are not smarter than the people in the neighborhood, they will know if they are being “used” or not. However, there are some projects in which it does happen, where there is a more calculated approach to social practice. I don’t see that a lot, but it can happen.

I also believe there is a difference between social practice and socially engaged art. A practice with social elements, where society is used for an art project, without a need for commitment, is another practice, and I think those terms should be completely separated. I have seen places where they offer courses on things, for example, “how to convince people to participate in projects,” and you must take that with a grain of salt, knowing there is still a lot to learn.

About ten years ago, Mary Jane Jacob invited a group of socially engaged artists and collaborators to discuss what she was researching, which was the possibility to academize or not the artistic practice we were carrying out. There was Rick Lowe from Project Row Houses with the accountant for the project, Pablo Helguera, Tania Bruguera, me with my mom, and several others. We met twice over the summer for two weeks, and the result was that it was not possible. It was very intense; there were many discussions and lots of great things, but we understood at that moment that it should not be academicized.

Diana: How did the group come to that conclusion?

Chemi: In my perspective, if I understand one thing about this socially engaged art, it is that it is not academic. Painting, engraving, and being a designer or sculptor can be academic, and that is super cool. I love what we learn in art school; composition, techniques, and everything else. But, for some reason, I am more interested in installing a trampoline to create a space of freedom and pride in what we do. 

We are artists who immerse ourselves in social issues and do things that can go well or go wrong. Many of us who work this way don’t do it only for the intellectual class or for people with money that can support our work. In fact, because of the interest in social commitment, we decide to deal with all these structures because they can mutually benefit. I wholeheartedly believe in those exchanges. There is fundamental knowledge in each social group that ought to be connected.

I think the art world needs to come down to earth at some point because it creates very distinct relationships and wisdom that aren’t going to happen otherwise. If we share more between artists and people from all spheres of society— children, adults, skaters, teachers, guards, surfers, the homeless, millionaires, curators, and the public, we create a better society, and that does not need to be written in any academic book. 

However, regardless of what I may or may not believe in, I think it is great that there are people who dare to academicize this madness of practice.

Diana: I also have understood that you are very good at creating workshops. What is Chemi’s method for coming up with workshops quickly and easily? 

Chemi: Well, you can do workshops on everything. Draw your own skateboard, make your own shirt, the history of your neighborhood… There are a thousand possibilities; it depends on you. You can use the same artist system I mentioned before; it can be about a place and all its particularities. The important thing is that something is accomplished. There must be an outcome of the workshop, something that is done in a group. 

Diana: It sounds like intentional hanging out.

Chemi: Workshops are a form of hanging out. Like the weekly meetings with the guards at MoMA to discuss the ideas that each one brought. Or El Cerro, where we started with a workshop to paint your house and in the same week we were also doing a Making-your-own-El Cerro- t-shirt workshop. What these types of gatherings allow us is to get to know each other faster, and while getting to know each other, we are also doing things.

Footnotes:

  1. Jesús “Bubu” Negrón is a Puerto Rican artist who has supported and volunteered at some of Chemi’s projects. He was also interviewed for this publication; you can refer to his work in “We Did This,” the conversation preceding this one.
  2. El Cerro is an ongoing project by Chemi Rosado that started as a proposition to the residents of El Cerro, a community on the hillside of the town of Naranjito, Puerto Rico, to paint their house facades in green as a symbolic way of going back to the color of the mountain where the village is settled. Reference: Puerto Rico ’02 [En Ruta], published by M&M Proyectos, 2002.
  3. In 2020, Chemi was invited to collaborate with MoMA’s Department of Education; he set out to tell visitors stories from voices they don’t typically hear, working with the MoMA’s Department of Security. The project, titled Beyond the Uniform, is an audio playlist featuring personally meaningful stories about art narrated by the officers who protect them every day.
  4.  During the pandemic lockdown, the King School Museum of Contemporary Art (KSMoCA) hosted a series of virtual artist talks designed for elementary school students, their families, and members of the public of all ages. Chemi was a guest speaker in May 2021. The talk was presented by Moe Ali Hassam, a 5th-grade student who also participates in the conversations in this book. For reference, read “The Moe Show!”

Diana Marcela Cuartas (she/her) is a Colombian artist, educator, and cultural worker transplanted to Portland in 2019. Her work incorporates visual research, popular culture analysis, and participatory learning processes in publications, workshops, parties, or curatorial projects as a framework to investigate local cultures and their contexts.

Before moving to the US, Diana was Head of Public Programs at Espacio Odeón, an organization for interdisciplinary creation in Bogotá, Colombia. Formerly she was part of the lugar a dudas’ team, an art space dedicated to contemporary art practices with a global focus in Cali, Colombia. As an independent researcher, she has been an artist in residence in La Usurpadora (Puerto Colombia), Bisagra (Lima), Tlatelolco Central (Mexico City), and Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), studying different popular culture phenomena and socially engaged art practices in Latin America. In 2021 she founded the Centro del Conocimiento Migrante, an initiative for enjoyment, experimentation, and cultural exchange between migrant communities in Portland; this project emerged from Diana’s experience in the social work field, working with Latinx families in different public schools in East Portland.

Chemi Rosado-Seijo (he/him) is a Puerto Rican socially-engaged artist whose practice consists of community-based interventions linked to the site where they have been developed. Often his artwork, projects, or interventions are set and/or developed with the communities that have inspired them.

He graduated from the painting department of the Puerto Rico School of Visual Arts in 1997. In 1998, he worked with Michy Marxuach to open a gallery that transformed into a not-for-profit organization presenting resources and exhibitions for contemporary artists in Puerto Rico. In 2006, he inaugurated La Perla’s Bowl, a sculpture built with residents of San Juan’s La Perla community that functions as both a skateboarding ramp and an actual pool. From 2009 to 2013, Rosado-Seijo organized exhibitions in his apartment in Santurce, creating a center for meeting and exchange in the Puerto Rican contemporary art scene. In 2015 he started El Festival de Chiringas, an annual kite festival in collaboration with residents from the La Perla community in Old San Juan.


Obsession in Itself is Interesting

“People like to have transcendent experiences. You have that with religion, with drugs, with art. It’s just changing the nature of reality. Everyone wants that, in a way, they want things to be different.”

-Jeremy Deller

I keep thinking about this thing the artist Jeremy Deller said to me: “People like to have transcendent experiences. Everyone wants things to be different.” All I’ve ever wanted was for things to be different. All I’ve ever wanted was to transcend! I think Jeremy’s work gets me closer. 

As a musician, performer, and dance club frequenter whose socially-oriented art is guided by the presence and participation of crowds in public, I am propelled into a kind of ecstasy when I look at Jeremy Deller’s work. His signature crisscrossing of conceptual art and popular culture— an AP high school course about the 90s rave scene, a deep dive into Depeche Mode fandom, a movie about a genderbending pro wrestler— transfers the gloss of pop idolatry and fanaticism onto the typically more formal, and less peopled, context of the art world. It can be as exciting and alive as an underground nightclub (sometimes it’s even in an underground nightclub), and that’s because Jeremy Deller knows the essential ingredient for making the kind of work you can see yourself in: he looks to what people care about. 

His work is about life— its absurdities, amusements, pitfalls, and pleasures, its personal triumphs and monumental tragedies. Through collaborative large scale public events, documentary films, interactive sculptures, posters, banners, a contemporary folk archive, concerts and musical collaborations, Jeremy Deller gives a platform to sub/cultural phenomenons and attitudes of devotion. In doing so, he spotlights the innate artfulness of collective activity and the shared passions of everyday people. 


Joy in People, 2013, the first mid-career survey of Jeremy Deller’s work and a book I open often for inspiration. 

Becca Kauffman: I want to talk about the ins and outs of your large scale projects, how you generate ideas, the behind the scenes process, exhibition strategies, and your relationship to your collaborators and participants. I keep your book, Joy in People, on my nightside table and I look at it all the time. I’m a big fan of your projects Open Bedroom, Acid Brass, So Many Ways to Hurt You, What is the City But the People, all of that, and the way that you tune into the offbeat quirks of people’s passions and shine a light into the corners people don’t tend to look into very often. It has a really comforting and validating and thrilling effect on me. It makes me just giddy to be alive, through learning what other people have reason to care about and what they get obsessed by, what they’re devoted to. What draws you to people’s obsessions? 

Jeremy Deller: Well, I think if you’re going to work as an artist, it’s good to work with people who have a strong interest in something, because they’re enthusiastic. But also, obsession in itself is interesting. Maybe I have a mildly obsessive personality, but not really at all— a little bit, in as much as we all do— so I probably identify with people who are into things. I find it quite endearing and interesting in its own right. And so, you know that if you’re working with people who are very into something, they probably are going to be quite into making an artwork about that thing, or working with you to make a film about something. So fans of a band, like Depeche Mode, they’re really into the band, so if you ask them, would you like to be in a film about the band? they’re going to say, and they did say, yes, of course, we would love to be in a film about the band, that would be an honor for us. And so in a way, it’s quite easy or straightforward working with people who have strong interests, if you’re going to make work around those interests.

Procession, 2009, organized for the Manchester International Festival, culled niche groups of citizens—buskers, smokers, alternateens, this collection of mascots—for a “social surrealist” parade “celebrating public space and the people occupying it.” Courtesy Jeremy Deller.

Becca: I’m really curious about the behind the scenes process for Procession. How did you convince people to participate in something that was so offbeat and quirky? 

Jeremy: It doesn’t take that much. People are up for doing things. I mean, this is the thing about working with the public: on the whole, the public are really interested in doing unusual things, or displaying their interests, or talents. With Procession, I just went around and explained what I was doing: a procession about the city that these people lived in. I was saying, I’d like to feature you in this procession in some way, because of this. It’s always good to explain why and give motivations. I think that it’s really good for people to know the motivation for doing something, because it gives them something to look at and think about. And so I connected with people. So that was really straightforward. You can’t make someone do something, even if you’re paying them. If they don’t want to do it, they won’t do it. So it’s a self-selecting group of people, often, that you work with, which is great. So I was very happy to work in Manchester. And processions happen all the time, don’t they? People understand the format. They understand what it is. Everyone likes processions on the whole, they like displays like that, and parades. They’re attracted to them. They’re showing things that are unusual. And so it’s like alternate realities. So it’s not that difficult. That’s not the problem, the people on the whole are not the problem. 

Becca: What’s the problem? 

Jeremy: Well, sometimes the problem is when you try and make it work in a gallery that involves people or a museum. Museums, often, are less… actually they’ve improved massively in the UK, I don’t know what it’s like in America. From my experience in America, it’s more difficult. But people in Britain now, in museum culture, in gallery culture, they’re much less afraid of the public now, but they were when I was starting out. They really didn’t know what to do with the public. When the public were in there making work or part of the work, that’s where problems happened. Because there are rules and regulations in museums that are not really in the street or in life. There are less rules and regulations about things. Galleries and museums are very controlled spaces, for a reason, because there’s the value of the objects within them. So when you bring chaos into that environment, or potential chaos, in the form of human beings, galleries and museums get slightly concerned.

Becca: So then, how do you see the street and open air public space as an important site for spectacle and for the work that you make?

Jeremy: You’re working with the public, for the public. You’re not working for an institution where, again, it’s a self-selecting group of people who go into museums. It’s small, it’s a percentage of the population. It’s not the whole population. In the public realm, it’s there for everybody who’s out in the public realm. So it’s a much wider group of people. And that’s more exciting, when you work with big groups of people like that. I like working in public, because you don’t really know what to expect. There’s a randomness to it. There’s an unexpected element, a loss of control, which is interesting, when artists lose control of a project. 

For Acid Brass, 1997, Jeremy worked with a traditional British brass band to cover a collection of acid house songs, colliding what he saw as two forms of distinctly British folk art connected by their political relationships to the industrial era. Courtesy Jeremy Deller.

Becca: When your work happens outside of an institution, and it’s not as readily identifiable as a work of art, is it important for you for your project to be perceived as a work of art by the people who are there?

Jeremy: A little bit. Not really. They might know an artist made it. And they might see it as an artwork. But it doesn’t bother me that much. I’m just glad I could do it. I know some artists and friends and colleagues get slightly bothered when things aren’t seen as artworks. On the whole, if people know you’re an artist, and you’re making something happen, the participants, at least, sort of understand that they’re part of an artwork, or at least part of something that an artist has initiated. So there’s an art component to it. 

Becca: There was one group in Procession called the Unrepentant Smokers. Is that the way they described themselves, or a phrase that you came up with together, or?

Jeremy: I came up with it. I came up with the whole content of that procession. I kind of mapped it out, I curated it, if you want to use that term. That’s the narrative. But I knew what I wanted from traveling around Manchester over a period of six months to a year, and knew exactly what could be made and what would work. The smokers, it was to do with recent laws being changed in the UK where smokers were being sort of edged out, they were being banned from smoking [in] buildings. And so they’ll be seen on the streets a lot. And it was weird that smokers have never been so visible, because they had to be outside all the time, in all weathers, smoking. So you’d see them everywhere. 

Becca: They got smoked out.

Jeremy: Yeah. In Manchester, a lot of people smoke. It’s a former industrial town, and people tend to smoke and drink maybe a little bit more than other parts in the south, maybe. It’s this kind of cultural thing, almost. I just thought, I’m not a smoker and I don’t really particularly like it, but I just thought it was an interesting change in the visibility. Manchester has very varied weather and can be very wet, and so you see people out in bad weather and rain and wind and cold, still smoking, a sort of heroic act. And so I just thought, well, they are unrepentant, let’s celebrate them. Which made it a problem, because we were effectively promoting smoking. So we had to have a sign behind them, a banner saying, “Smoking kills,” behind us as a warning about that work. I was very happy.

Becca: That the disclaimer had to be applied? 

Jeremy: Yeah, legally, we had to do it. 

The Unrepentant Smokers on a smoke break at Procession. 2009. Manchester, England. Courtesy Jeremy Deller.

Becca: You’ve talked about your work as being both social and antisocial, which I thought was really interesting considering how much it deals with people. I know you have an art history background and I see a perspective that views large groups, mobs, crowds from a sociological distance, rather than a more intimate one.

Jeremy: Yeah, there is a distance, but that’s what I’m like anyway. I’m not a big joiner-inner, I’m someone who’s more often on the fringes watching something happen in front of me, like a demonstration or an event or something. I don’t like being in the middle of crowds, I like to be on the fringes looking at things, looking at people. Often you go to a concert, and the people are more interesting than what’s on stage. I’m more interested in the people that attend events than the main attraction. So I’ve always been a bit of an outsider in that way, and it’s just how it is. That’s actually quite helpful when it comes to looking at things. I didn’t take part in certain things at the time, but I was observing it and looking at it and thinking about it. So maybe that helped me because I wasn’t within it, I could actually have a different kind of opinion looking onto it, and trying to analyze it, rather than be inside it. 

Becca: I very much relate to that. I’ve never been a joiner. Do you think that being analytical and observant at a distance is mending for you, in some way, are you trying to correct that distance? 

Jeremy: It’s not mending, it’s just research. It’s just finding out things, and trying to work things out. So the miners’ strike, The Battle of Orgreave, that was definitely a personal work, but it was just a huge public event. But it was really about me and about my trying to work out what was going on when I saw the event on TV as a teenager. It extrapolated out to be this huge public event with thousands of people involved. I think emotionally, overall, when I saw it, I was sort of cold to it, and I think you have to be, because if you aren’t, you’ll just have a heart attack. Because it’s so overwhelming. And it’s nerve racking. So that actually makes you weirdly calm, not excitable. If I get nervous, I get quiet and sort of retreat into myself. I can’t be running around or happy, or be like the ringmaster of these events, because it’s just not in my nature. I don’t really want to be like that, either, it takes the attention away from it, in some way. It’s not really my thing.

The Battle of Orgreave (An Injury to One is an Injury to All), 2001, restaged of a violent confrontation between striking miners and riot police during the 1984-5 UK miners’ strike using 800 historical re-enactors and 200 local people. Courtesy Jeremy Deller.

Becca: So during the execution of these large scale events, what role do you play on the ground when they actually take off? You’ve called yourself a director. 

Jeremy: It depends on the work, but usually by then my work is done, there’s nothing I can do. Once something starts, there’s very little you can do to stop it, literally, or change it, it’s too late. So in a way the work is done and you could walk away from that event or whatever it is, and it will be exactly the same whether you are present or not. And I quite like that. My dream is to start some huge thing and not be present almost, or to walk away and not have to get involved.

Becca: Right, you’ve done your job up until that point, and the show can go on without you. 

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly.

Becca: How much do you delegate inside of these projects?

Jeremy: Tons. You have to. It’s like being a film director– you have to work with people who have proper skills, who can help you and do work with whatever their skill is. So you find a team, or a team is put together on your behalf, and you work closely with them. And you motivate them, and they know what you want, you tell them why you’re doing something. That’s a lot of work for other people. But I delegate a lot. The vision or the idea, let’s use the word “idea,” should be unmolested, in a way, or untouched. And that’s my role. It’s other people’s roles to make sure that it’s fulfilled.

Becca: How do you arrive at that kind of agreement? I mean, you’re so far along in your career that that expectation is probably laid out pretty clearly at this point. But often when one gets collaborators involved, they want to have creative license.

Jeremy: I think people are looking to you as an artist to do something. If you’re the boss, effectively, or you’re seen as “the person,” then people will ask you, and they will, on the whole, do more or less what they’re told. Especially certain things, like We’re Here Because We’re Here, which worked with thousands of people around Britain, the rules and regulations were very strict, and that was for good reason. Whereas with other events, you want the public who are taking part to maybe improvise on the idea, and you can tell them that, you can let them know that. So some things are quite rigid, and other things are more free flowing and open. 

Becca: Is “film director” the analogy that you use to think of yourself in these projects the most?

Jeremy: Maybe, because often the film director gets all the credit. The artist gets all the credit. You don’t really know who did the cinematography, even though it’s great. On the whole, you are the person that either gets the blame or the credit. And that’s just how it works. It’s like architects. So and so built this building, but of course, he or she didn’t really build it. Other people built it. The architect designed it, but with a huge team. But it’s usually one person that gets credit. Having said that, a lot of the work I do, other people get credit because they’re involved, and they’re recognizable groups of people or individuals with certain skills. It’s the way things are, isn’t it? A lot of artists have assistants, you never hear who they are, the people who actually physically make the work, cast it or paint it, even. Virtually anonymous. At least with what I do, it’s clearly a group effort. And people are credited. We’re Here Because We’re Here, we credited all the theatre groups and the head of the National Theatre. That was clearly a collaborative process. Much more so than traditional art, I think. But people are often shocked, they can’t believe that sculptors actually don’t even make the work, physically touch it, even. They just get it made. 

Becca: Considering how much that behind the scenes process is obscured, it makes sense that it’s so shocking. Something that comes up a lot with social practice work is crediting. It distinguishes itself from other forms of art, in one regard, through the act of crediting everyone that contributes to a project and kind of pulling the veil off of that mythology that one person made it.

Jeremy: Yes, and often it’s clear that other people made it, because they’re in it, they’re present, you know, their faces, their skills are there. It’s clearly not made by one person, because you literally see other people do things. So in a way, it’s much more open, this sort of work. It’s clearer. I mean, that’s the kind of cliche, that you’re exploiting people because you’re working with them. I think we’re sort of beyond that discussion. Maybe not in America. But it’s possible. I think the public understands much better than a lot of people in institutions do, almost, instinctively. They’re not afraid of it. They’re intrigued by it. That’s what I find. 

Becca: A topic that comes up in work that involves people is the risk of instrumentalizing human beings. But we can also operate in good faith that we generally have best interests at heart.

Jeremy: Yeah and you can tell if you’re being exploited, and you can tell if an artwork is exploitative as well, I think. You can instinctively see there’s something not right happening.

Becca: I read an interview where you talked about how sometimes in socially engaged work, there can be an agenda of “do-gooding,” where it has to have a positive outcome for the people involved and be about the quality of experience rather than an aestheticized outcome. You don’t like that prescription. Do you have your own agenda in your work when you’re making it? 

Jeremy: Not really. The work is quite different. Maybe certain works have different agendas, really. But overall, I tend not to think about it too much. I tend not to self-analyze too much. And I don’t read about my work when someone writes about it. Because I don’t really want to know what it is. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I try to just not get too involved in what people think, or in discussions about it. But yes, there was for a time this idea that art was a way of healing wounds and bringing people together, which of course it does, sometimes, but it doesn’t have to do that all the time. It shouldn’t do that all the time, because that’s sort of boring in a way. It has many uses and many things it can do, many facets to it. With the Battle of Orgreave, I wanted the opposite. I wanted to make people more angry, not happier, actually more upset about something, if that was possible, or provoke them, rather than placate them. So some works are that: they are confrontational. 

Becca: Your collection of quotes for London train conductors, What is the city but the people?, was a lighter project that inserted delight into the routine of the daily commute. What was your intention there? 

What is the city but the people? (2008–09), a book by Jeremy Deller in collaboration with London design studio A Practice For Everyday Life. Passport-sized booklets of quotes were given to operational staff on the Piccadilly line to use in their daily communications with the public. Courtesy Jeremy Deller.

Jeremy: It was for staff on the Underground to have and maybe use the quotations in their everyday interactions with the public, either putting them over the announcement, or putting them on display boards and writing them on information boards. It was just a way for the staff to have some communication with the public by using wisdom and interesting quotations through history. Very straightforward. That little book was never seen by the public. It was just for every staff member on the Piccadilly line. It was a very lovely little book as well. It was their little book in their pocket, and if there was a delay or something they could whip it out and quote from history to comfort people. 

Becca: A lot of your work uses communicative mediums like graphic posters and bumper stickers, T-shirts and street signs. I was wondering, who did you at the time, or now, consider yourself or those pieces in conversation with, since they’re kind of dialogic?

Jeremy: Well you know, anything you put in the public realm is for anybody and everybody. Whoever’s going past. There’s absolutely no distinction in that. It’s a very wide spectrum of people. For me it’s just very, very broad.

Becca: I relate to that, too. I like to puncture that seal of normalcy that we’re used to abiding by in pedestrian space. I’m always drawn to these acts of mischief that stand out from the mundane, but use a familiar vernacular.

Jeremy: There’s no substitute for seeing something in public. And it changes the reality of a place or situation, if only very quickly. And so, for me, I love showing work in public. It’s really the best thing, that you can affect public space like that. If only for a fraction of a second.

Becca: What do you think is the service or use in making reality feel surreal?

Jeremy: I think people like to have transcendent experiences. You have that with religion, with drugs, with art. It’s just changing the nature of reality. Everyone wants that, in a way, they want things to be different. They want to be surprised and delighted and maybe even challenged, and art does that in the public realm. It just shows a different version of reality. And I think that’s something everyone is looking for. That’s why they go to sports matches, concerts, anything, join a choir, it’s to just change their environment, with culture or with an experience, and art provides that as well.

Becca: What is the power of the crowd, do you think, and immersion in a crowd experience?

Jeremy: Well, it’s just being around human beings, isn’t it? I mean, I find it quite scary, but it can be thrilling as well. But if you can work with that as an artist, that’s a great thing to have, if you can harness that power, that energy. But personally, I don’t really like crowds. So I would prefer to be away from that. I don’t really like confrontation either, but you know, I make work about those things sometimes. I’m interested in masses and bodies, which is why I was interested in rave. It’s a huge, phenomenal amount of people, these gatherings. It’s exciting. 

Becca: I share that draw, from afar, of mobs, and rave and sports culture. I love looking at a crowd of people in a stadium, but from that distance. And maybe it’s about control too, I don’t know. I also make work that takes place on the street. The idea of the pedestrian, as an identity, and the anonymity of that, that all it takes to be a pedestrian is moving through public space on foot or wheels at any given time, and you can opt in or opt out of it. It’s kind of slippery.

Jeremy: We’re all sort of equal on the street, as well. Even if you’re rich, you’re just on the street with other people. There’s a kind of democratic nature to it. It’s not like if you’re in a car, you have a really fancy car. But on the street, and you’re walking, regardless of what clothing you have, whatever, you’re just like everyone else. I think that’s really interesting. 

Becca: Have you read this book, Crowds and Power, by Elias Canetti?

Jeremy: No.

Becca: A friend recommended it to me. It’s really interesting. It starts with a chapter called “The Fear of Being Touched,” and then, “The Discharge,” “The Eruption,” “The Crowd is a Ring,” “Attributes of the Crowd.” It covers all the different natures of critical mass and different environments that groups congregate in, and the kind of transcendent shift that happens to human behavior once there’s a certain amount of people united around a certain thing. He talks about the dissolving of differences and identities in that moment.

Jeremy: That’s when it gets scary. It can get out of hand, when you stop seeing yourself as a person but you’re a part of a group. Things get violent. Or it’s all good, but often not. That psychology, I’m interested in that. But, you know, I’m kind of repelled by it as well. 

Becca: Right. It’s hard not to feel on the defense as an individual thinking about this insatiable hunger of a crowd, that it just wants to grow and envelop us into it. That’s where the destruction can sometimes set in. Canetti talks about crowds literally breaking down doors and pulling people out of their shelters. It’s almost druglike, in a way— the more that you get this taste of groupness, the more you want everyone to become a part of that group too.

Jeremy: To join you. I understand that. Definitely.

Becca: Do you want to share what you’re thinking about and working on now? Are groups and large crowds figuring into it at all, that large-scaleness?

Jeremy: There’s something happening, a public event in London, but it’s difficult to talk about because I have no idea what it’s going to be. But it’s good because it’s sort of a challenge. I like a challenge. It’s high profile and it’ll be for the National Gallerie in London. It has a working title of “The Triumph of Art.” At the moment, it’s just not clear what it’s going to be. But that’s fine. It’s two years away. 

Becca: I’m so curious about your process of generating an idea. At this point in your life, it seems like you get opportunities or commissions and then maybe reverse engineer and work backwards from the venue and the budget and the scale, and figure out how you’re going to fill in the gaps from here to there. So what is your thought and research process like? How will you begin to start thinking about this idea? 

Jeremy: Well, I just have to sit down and think about what I would like to see and what’s possible. I have to sort of work out what kind of things are on offer. You have to work out what’s possible within the budget. You just have to get two or three decent ideas for an event, and then it kind of works from there. I’m working quite closely with curators, so every project is very different. And they’re creative people, so they’ll be helpful. I’m quite confident, but it’s so early. There’ll be research about the collection of the National Gallery and the building and the environment that it’s in, and where it is in London, where it’s placed. So all those things are starting. That’s basically where I am. It’s really early days, but it will take two years til it happens, more than two years, two and a half years, almost. Thank god.

Becca: It seems like something of that scale would require years of preparation.

Jeremy: Yeah. Two years minimum, for a big thing. That’s how it works.

Becca: Are there things that you’re googling or reading about or listening to that are inspiring you and influencing your lines of thinking right now?

Jeremy: I consume the daily news. That’s really the thing I pay attention to. I’m obsessed with it. There’s some voter suppression going on in the UK at the moment, which is quite unusual, really. The government is now requiring everyone to show photo ID, and there are 2 million people who don’t have photo ID. They’re usually poor people and young people and people of color, who are just the kind of people our government does not want to vote. It’s so blatant and so obvious and so corrupt. That’s annoying me massively. That’s the thing that is obsessing me. 

Becca: Since you’re hooked on that right now, does your mind go to, what’s a project that I could make about voter suppression that might influence or comment on that?

Jeremy: I’m thinking about it. I’m probably gonna make some posters and stuff like that. Seems like the most direct way of doing. Yeah. So that’s one of the things I’m thinking about at the moment. We’ll see. We’ll watch the space. If you follow me on Instagram, you might see some of it at some point.

Becca: I have a question about exhibitions. How do you decide what form or medium your ideas will take? Do you have certain strategies that you use to convert your public, experiential projects into gallery and museum contexts?

Jeremy: The word strategy is not one I would use at all. But usually film is good. On the whole, film is a very understandable medium, and it’s a medium that’s very controllable, because you edit, you make the cuts. So film is always good. If there’s objects produced, then maybe objects, and research, maybe. But in a way, research isn’t so interesting to look at in a museum. I mean we all do it, we all show it, but I just don’t know if it has limited value since it’s more archival. But film, installation, something that’s exciting to look at. If the project is exciting, then convey that in your installation.

An exhibition around So Many Ways to Hurt You (The Life and Times of Adrian Street), the documentary film Jeremy made about a pro British wrestler from a coal mining family who was known for his flamboyant costumes and outlandish antics in the ring. Courtesy Galerie Art Concept.

Becca: Do you think of it as a kind of fictionalizing of real things that took place, by transposing it from one place to another, into the museum?

Jeremy: It’s not fictionalizing, it’s just rearranging really. And trying to order it. Maybe that’s fictionalizing, but not really, because the thing itself is fiction in a sense, because it’s an artwork. It’s fictive. I think it’s just trying to make sense of it again, and to try and make it look good, and attractive. So when people look at it, they’re not gonna look at 600 pieces of A4 paper, which might be a notebook, but they are going to look at film, something that’s colorful and engaging. 

Becca: So for example, if you were interested in the topic of—this is my interest—dancing crossing guards, which is kind of a phenomenon across the world, there’s a lot of YouTube footage of them, just biding their time by dancing in the middle of the street. If you were going to somehow convert that into an aesthetic presentation, an exhibition, what would you do? 

Jeremy: I think, show the films. People watch films forever. People’s attention span for the moving image is insane. Often in Britain in exhibitions, I’ll have a film about the artists outside the exhibition itself; people will spend more time looking at the film about the artists than they do looking at the work. So I just think a compilation of interviews with them and stuff like that, that would work. But more than what you’d see online. But that’s up to you to work out what that might be. 


Jeremy Deller is a British conceptual, video and installation artist who makes projects that grow out of an interest in vox pop, giving vent to the views of ordinary people and focusing on ordinary people’s lives. He seeks the involvement of common people in the making of his work as well as focusing on events that have had a major impact on people’s lives. Deller won the esteemed Turner Prize in 2004 and has continued to make works which investigate the interface between art and popular culture, normally with a strong political and social aspect, although often the works are funny and witty. 

Becca Kauffman (they/them) is a social practice artist with a background in multidisciplinary performance, long stationed in New York City and now living Portland, Oregon. Practicing art as a flamboyant public utility, they collide fantasy with everyday life by choreographing new forms of social infrastructure through poetical actions. Their work uses communicative mediums like radio and video broadcasts, signs and fliers, telephone hotlines, group spectacles, interactive sculpture, music compilations, and renegade traffic direction to transform spectatorship into participation, and can look like an unsanctioned artist residency in Times Square, a neighborhood variety show in the middle of a NYC dive bar aired on public access television, or a seven year pop persona project called Jennifer Vanilla. They are an unofficial Mall Artist at Lloyd Center Mall, where they invite you to join the Public Acts of Dance Company on Saturdays at 3pm, sponsored by their fabricated city agency, Department of Public Dance.


Care Tactics

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.


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.

March of Dimes Poster featuring Donnie Dieckman. Image courtesy of Janet Aasness.

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.

Advertisement for Mitsubishi Visitel, a product similar to one Mrs. Dieckman bought from the Home Shopping Network. 

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.

Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger. Image courtesy of Carl’s Jr.

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.

A scan of some of the gloves that were in the collection of Dorothy Dieckman. Long Beach, CA. 2023. Photo scan courtesy of Janet Aasness.

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 Aasness, Elvis Costello, and Janet Aasness. (left to right) Los Angeles, CA. 2011.

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. 


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.


Cover

Image from Gilian Rappaport’s interview with Linda K. Johnson:
Tim Warner frame installation in ‘Finding the Forest’. Conceived and Directed by Linda K. Johnson. 1991. Forest Park in Portland, OR. Photo by Julie Keefe.

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


Letter from the Editors

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


A Space of Belonging

“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.


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. 


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).


Is Everyone Having a Good Time?

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
A vintage Victor E. Viking figurine spotted through the blinds of the Science Education Center
on PSU campus next to my studio. Portland, Oregon. 2023.

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.

Still from the 1 hour video of Public Acts of Dance Company: Public Dance 01, brought to you by Department of Public Dance.
February 2023. Shuttered Hollister store, Lloyd Center Mall, Portland, OR. Image courtesy @deptofpublicdance.

 

The Public Acts of Dance Company sign propped up against the former Champs storefront for Public Dance 02.
February 2023. Lloyd Center Mall, Portland, OR. Image courtesy @deptofpublicdance. 
The infinite possibilities of mascot costumery. Would you dance with this shoe?
Saxophone courtesy of aliexpress.com. Sneaker courtesy of redbrokoly.com.

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.” 

Z striking some of his signature Victor poses during a behind the scenes tour of his pre-game routine.
PSU tennis team locker room, Portland, OR. February 2023. Photo by Becca Kauffman.

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?


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. 

Two examples of [subjectively] cute animal mascots. Cat courtesy of keystonemascots.com.
Orlando Magic’s Stuff the Magic Dragon courtesy of rocketsport.com.

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

The feet that will one day reveal the true identity of Victor E. Viking.
Portland, OR. 2023. Photo by Becca Kauffman.

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. 


Trash Talk

“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.

Photo from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal collection of trash from around the world.
Evora, Portugal.

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. 

Photo from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal collection of trash from around the world.
Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport. “The ‘trash to energy’ label is deceptive marketing.
It is meant to make people feel better about throwing
out materials that will be incinerated.” Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

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. 

Screenshot from Caryn’s collection of notable Buy Nothing posts, 2022. Portland, Oregon.

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. 

Trash at the 2017 solar eclipse gathering, from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal collection
of trash from around the world. Madras, Oregon. 2017.

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.

Oregon coast recycling center, from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal collection
of trash from around the world. Oregon.

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.

Trash and redeemable container collection bins from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal
collection of trash from around the world. Hawaii.

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.

Multifamily housing enclosure, from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal
collection of trash from around the world. Portland, Oregon.

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.

Screenshot from Caryn’s collection of notable Buy Nothing posts, 2022. Portland, Oregon.

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?

Nikki S. Lee: The Seniors Project (19), 1999, C-print.

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.

Reusable container collection integrated into trash/recycling bins on
Oregon State University campus, from Dr. Christa McDermott’s personal collection
of trash from around the world. Oregon.

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.


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.


The Social Forms of Art (SoFA) Journal is a publication dedicated to supporting, documenting and contextualising social forms of art and its related fields and disciplines. Each issue of the Journal takes an eclectic look at the ways in which artists are engaging with communities, institutions and the public. The Journal supports and discusses projects that offer critique, commentary and context for a field that is active and expanding.

Created within the Portland State University Art & Social Practice Masters In Fine Arts. Program, SoFA Journal is now fully online.

Conversations on Everything is an expanding collection of interviews produced as part of SoFA Journal. Through the potent format of casual interviews as artistic research, insight is harvested from artists, curators, people of other fields and everyday humans. These conversations study social forms of art as a field that lives between and within both art and life.

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