Sofa Issues Spring 2025
What if We Became Artists?; The Audacity To Try It
Domenic Toliver in Conversation with Xavier Pierce
“I see a little me in my students, and I want the kids to see they can be all of these things. You can be an athlete, an artist, a lover of music, a scholar, all of these things together. You don’t have to pick just one. That drives my creativity now.” – Xavier Pierce
What if the question wasn’t “Who do I want to be when I grow up?” but “How many things can I become?” I sat down with Xavier Pierce, a first-grade teacher at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary and the Spring Artist in Residence at the King School Museum of Contemporary Art. In him, I saw a version of myself, a Black male teacher, an artist, a quiet disruptor of expectations. We discussed growing up, the scarcity of role models beyond sports, and what it means to create space for kids to see themselves differently. What unfolded wasn’t just an interview, but a reflection on what it means to become, again and again. Through our similarities and differences, we realized that questions aren’t always meant to be answered. Sometimes, they’re just invitations to grow.
Domenic Toliver: Lately, I’ve really been thinking about art as life, and art as a way of being. For me to view life that way, it really gets me to be excited for each day, because it’s what you make it. We have these opportunities to learn, grow, and change. And I feel like listening to you talk at KSMoCA, you might be able to connect to that?
Xavier Pierce: You know, I’ve always been excited to get up and go teach, but now I got this project to do with y’all and now I see the excitement in the students, and they wanna make sure the academics are taken care of so that we can get to the art. And it’s just fun to watch the kids be really excited about something. And, I’m really excited. The whole community is excited about this thing.
Dom: Yeah I can definitely sense the excitement. I think part of it comes from not many people knowing you as an artist.
Xavier: I don’t know if you were in the room when Laura asked me if I tell my students that I’m an artist, but I really don’t ever tell anybody that I’m an artist because I feel like art is just kind of ingrained in being human. Because humans have been doing art forever and ever. It’s natural. I’m always wanting to be creative in life. Do something new with my day, learn something new with my day, wake up and figure out how am I gonna experience this day to the fullest. Sometimes it’s through putting some paint onto a canvas. Sometimes it’s making a good meal with my loved ones. And I feel those are the same thing.
Dom: Yeah, they are the same. Do you feel like this project at KSMoCA brought some of that out of you?
Xavier: I do. Now I have this new resurgence of creative energy. And it’s because KSMoCA invited me to do this, but it’s also helping me understand now that this source of creativity is nostalgia, and this source of creativity comes from being a role model at school. I see a little me in my students, and I want the kids to see they can be all of these things. You can be an athlete, an artist, a lover of music, a scholar, all of these things together. You don’t have to pick just one. That drives my creativity now.
Dom: No, you don’t have to pick one. The kids definitely need to know that.
Being at King School helps reinforce this process of focused creation. The object really doesn’t matter there as much as the process. It makes me think of how you mentioned how naturally humans want to create. Like in cave drawings, it wasn’t about the drawing on the rock, it was the process, the hunt, and how to express that to others.
Xavier: Yeah and they were using berries, charcoal from the fire of the night before, or whatever they could find. That’s something I always think about when I’m painting. Maybe I’ll run out of colors. So I think of how I can find a substitute or how to morph this idea so that it still has the essence of what I’m trying to say. LIke how we used cardboard as a paint brush for this last workshop. That’s what I feel art is all about, the process, adapting, learning, way more than the product itself. Even when I don’t like the product I appreciate the process. That raw art is real dope to me.
Dom: Yeah. I think it’s really about being more present. I feel that with photography. Especially when traveling. I’d have my camera and sometimes I would forget to take a photo. And that’s what I fell in love with. Being a photographer that takes no photos. Building relationships and listening to people. I’m currently doing a workshop with older adults and I feel like the conversations, the honesty and vulnerability is what it’s really about.
Xavier: Exactly. Man, and that is such an important thing too. Intergenerational communication. I grew up with two sets of grandparents and a set of great, great grandparents. My dad’s great grandparents raised him. And so they’re my great-great grandparents. And they were alive. They died when they were 99 and like 89. So I got a chance to kick it with my grandparents so much. I think that really taught me how to listen. It taught me how to have a good conversation and how to just take people where they’re at.
Dom: I was close to my grandma. Most of the conversations I remember or moments as a kid that have really sat with me or, you know, had some type of impact. They all come back to something she did or said to me or told someone else.
Xavier: I really think kids listen to their grandparents more, they watch them. I mean they’re so cool, they have so much wisdom, and they’re chill. There’s something about that communication, right?
Dom: I think it has something to do with the two both not being listened to.
Xavier: Yeah, no, that might be it. Both aren’t being listened to. So that communication with each other is, I don’t know, like one has a lot of patience. Because your parents want the best for you, but they also see you as that extension of them so they don’t exactly listen. They tell. Whereas grandparents are usually more patient. Makes me think of my parents. I grew up playing football and running track and I knew that I didn’t want to go to school for it. I was always pretty grounded in my academics. I wanted to go to college and focus on school. My dad ran track for Oregon and he was a track coach most of my life. While he never actually told me the plan was for me to run or be an athlete I felt it. So when I chose to go another route the energy was kind of, “so… what ARE you going to do?”. My sister ended up throwing at Hawaii U and Biola down in Orange County so they (my parents) still had a star athlete.
Dom: Man same. My dad was my coach my whole life, I ended up playing at Idaho State, going the avenue paved for me. About halfway through college though I lost the passion for it. I had other things I wanted to try.
Xavier: Yeah exactly, and so they say, “so what are you gonna do?”
Dom: Man, yup!
Xavier: And so I had to really figure that out, what am I gonna do? Because our guidelines for us were to go to school, get a scholarship so you can go to college and then you figure it out from there.
So I went to North Carolina AT right after high school. Greensboro, North Carolina for a semester. I didn’t really like it ’cause the town was just too small. It was fun though, HBCU, real cool. But I had walked that small town a few times in that short span. I decided I was just going to go home. So I went to PCC, got my pre-reqs. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I started going to art shows just with the homies. That was real tight. The community was tight. Everybody’s having fun, everybody’s doing something. I started thinking to myself, “man, I’m not doing anything but just coming and drinking a little wine and, you know, head banging at a house show from time to time. But what am I contributing to this? I was living with my homie from high school at the time, and he was like, “man, what if we became artists.” I was like, “What are you talking about? How are we just gonna become artists?”
Lo and behold, I was sitting around one day, I was playing Super Mario Sunshine on the Game Cube, on this big TV that I dragged into the house. I was tired of it. So I went over to Scrap, and just started looking for things that I could maybe make something with. That’s really how I started painting. Was just out of boredom and I like trying to figure out how I could be a contributor to the communities that I operate in.
Dom: Dang. That’s crazy, just a big what if question led you down a new path. What if I became an artist, what if I use something other than a paintbrush? That’s dope. I had a real similar experience with my roommate, he wanted to act. At the time, we were all like okay man, go act then. But over time, that childlike mindset got contagious, I was asking myself what if I wrote scripts, what if I acted too. We fed off that energy, that childlike imagination. It led us down this creative path, trying new things and really just pretending to be what we wanted to be. Soon enough you start to be it.
Xavier: I figured out like you really can’t take yourself that seriously, man. If you take yourself too seriously, you’re missing out. You have to stay open to change, growth, and trying new things.
Dom: I agree. I think you have to be curious and vulnerable so you’re not stuck in doing one thing your whole life.
Xavier: Do you think traveling influenced you to be more open-minded?
Dom: Yeah most definitely. I think traveling introduced me to that openness. Seeing all types of perspectives, different lifestyles, honestly different ways of coping with life. It definitely changed me.
Xavier: Travel puts you in situations that influence you for sure. This one time Hannah and I, we were on a road trip down to California and we ended up having to get gas in Trump territory. This dude, I’m just sitting there chopping it up with him.
He got his little Make America great again hat on and we’re just sitting there having a conversation and as a black dude I have to play a cool, you know, or I’m gonna mess around and get shot. I have to play it cool, gotta be the mediator.
I’m laughing with him and talking with him. We get on the subject of teaching and he says “You some kind of communist?” I’m like we just started talking about teaching bro. Like how did you get that? But after talking to him again, I still don’t agree with everything he was saying, but through talking to him, I was like this dude is just another dude. That just made me realize that I do need to talk with the opposition more often. Especially right now, everybody is so divided, so polarized and like the only way to get over that is not to move to one side of the spectrum more. It’s honestly to move closer to the middle.
And it’s not that my beliefs have to change, it’s just that I need to be more comfortable talking to those people who make me uncomfortable. And also in that process, making them more comfortable talking to people who they might not agree with. Through that you can start to kind of heal. cause man, it’s getting weird. It’s getting really sticky right now. I feel like people need those conversations with outsiders to start to change their minds a little bit.
Yeah. And I’m not, I’m not saying like I’m gonna go out to every single place. I, you know, I walk in and I’m gonna change somebody’s mind, but at least I can have a conversation with them and I can better understand. If they listen to me, they can better understand my stance. Maybe over time, like we were saying before, like they might not change their mind right then and there. They might sit on it for a little bit and then later on when they’re met with the same question or. Met with somebody who has the same conversation. They can bring that different idea and then through that, just like those little, those little trickle effects, you know?
Dom: That’s true. While travelling I’ve met so many people with conflicting ideas and beliefs but I think just being honest, you’ll find those common things that’ll make you both reconsider why you differ with each other in the first place.
So where do you go from here, what are some ambitions you have?
Xavier: I think I really wanna try being a professor. But not in a traditional sense. So I think it’ll take a lot of building blocks to get there, I feel like it’s gonna be a long process. ’cause there’s not necessarily a department or a class for what I’m thinking. I gotta kind of wiggle my way into an institution and then you know make that class. I’ve always had this idea of taking a class where it’s more focused on questions. A conversation class, but focused on asking questions. Cause I like questions more than I like answers. It gets people’s minds moving. You just learn so much about another person through asking questions. I guess I’m just overall more of a listener.
Dom: Lisa Jarret always says, “Live in the question.” Right now that’s my favorite quote. Crazy part is I could totally be wrong but I guess the way I interpret that is like living in the response really. Not the answer to the question, but the response to the question. So like if your question is “what does it mean to be a, a black man in America?” What does that really mean? There’s no answer. Because everyone’s experience is different, you know. But there’s a response to that question that we live in and it changes overtime too though.
Xavier: If I think about how many times I’ve been asked that question and how many different responses I’ve given based on the time in my life, or the person who I’m talking to. I’ve been thinking about representation in art, in making these new pieces, I was like, okay, it’s gonna be in King. Kids are gonna be walking past this every day. They do need to see themselves in the work. Reflected in some way. So I just tried my hand at it and I got out my anatomy books and tried to figure out how I’m going to do this, so that they are reflected in some way. They’d see full lips, a wide nose, an afro. Then I got some gold leaf. I put gold in his mouth instead of teeth. It came out pretty good. It took a lot for me to bring that out. One of the hardest things, it’s just not in me to do portraits and portray us like that. It became a study of the body as well.
Dom: I get that. I think I struggled with that too. When I was in France, I used to send my pops a few photos I would take. One time he was like, man, there ain’t no black people out there.
He made me really look at all my photos. There were black people everywhere, all around where I was staying. But in the photos, no black people. It made me think for sure, maybe there’s some resistance in not wanting to mess up. I got to get the lighting right, I can’t portray us the wrong way. There’s a lot to think about. And then also, to me, there’s also a fear of doing it wrong. And misrepresenting your own culture, you know what I mean? Who am I to be representing all of one people?
Xavier: That was a huge fear with this portrait that I did. Because I knew I wanted full lips.
I wanted a wide nose, but I don’t want this to be a caricature. I have to do this right. I’ll probably still keep tweaking it until I have to give y’all, cause it needs to be right.
Dom: I feel that. And I think that’s always going to be evolving. You’ll always ask yourself if you’re doing it right. You might try to do something new every time. For me there’s a lack of knowledge there too, as far as in film and photography. They don’t really teach how to light for darker shades of skin so you have to learn by just doing it, by trying. Then I think once you mess up a few times or you feel you might have misrepresented, that might lead to a version of avoidance too. I know a lot of filmmakers and painters that are black that resist black topics or subjects, and I think it’s because you don’t want to be wrong. Or you don’t want to be put into a box.
Xavier: Yeah, I’ve always tried to figure out like, why, why do I resist it so much? Yeah. And it is, it’s because I don’t wanna misrepresent it.
Dom: Yeah. And maybe there’s a privilege to it. Like, dang, I have the privilege to be speaking for all my people. I don’t want it. That’s too much responsibility, so you resist it. And I think once you stop resisting it, the intentions in our art might be clearer. But within that, we also get put in a creative box, being categorized as a black artist who only makes black art, rather than an artist making work, who is black.
Xavier: We have to have the audacity to do something different. That’s kind of what I’m trying to show. I am a black man making art. Making abstract art. I do also want to start representing more of my culture though. So breaking that wall with this painting I’m working on. I’m excited honestly to see how the kids receive it and how my community receives it because that feedback will also inform how I continue. Art is a conversation like that.
Dom: I think it’s gonna be important for them. Like in terms of how the art is presented. It’s been up to an amazing level. Last term, Napoleon’s work was up and he had the blind boys of Alabama. You got these three dudes with glasses, singing, with the gold behind them,
That hit me, because it was the culture. Represented for the culture, in collaboration with the culture. Man, so I think your work is gonna speak on that level. Displayed in a professional way for the culture. I’ve noticed a lot of the little black boys at that school and they don’t look at the walls as much. Especially at that age, I feel like they’re learning a lot about their masculinity and masculinity is different for us. Being a painter or a dancer isn’t a common option. That’s a different level of masculinity. But having that representation and knowing the possibilities, knowing they can go hoop but they can pick up a paint brush too. That’s different.
Xavier: Exactly. That gets me so excited to read the commentary from the kids. Once they start looking at their own work on the wall. How they see mine. That’s gonna be crazy, that’s what I’m most looking forward to!
Xavier Pierce is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, emotion, and the act of being present. Raised in Northeast Portland just off Alberta Street, he received both his undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies and a master’s in Education from Portland State University.
Pierce draws inspiration from his lived experience, using art as a metacognitive tool to navigate the emotional currents of life. What began as a personal process to make sense of change and growth has become a lifelong practice rooted in the belief that creativity is essential to the human experience.
As a teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary and now visiting artist at the King School Museum of Contemporary Art, Pierce continues to develop a body of work that invites reflection, groundedness, and emotional clarity.
Domenic Toliver is a storyteller. Working across film, photography, performance, and socially engaged art, he explores how personal and collective narratives shape memory, identity, and community. Whether through photography or collaborative projects, Domenic invites others into the storytelling process, creating space for layered voices and shared meaning. Currently pursuing an MFA in Art and Social Practice, he sees storytelling as both an artistic method and a tool for imagining new ways of being together.