Scott’s fluid and free-spirited work—which also includes forays into comedy, music, theater, and performance of other kinds—is on full view in “Walk a Mile in My Dreams,” a retrospective currently at the Baltimore Museum of Art through July 14. The 75-year-old artist, who has called Charm City her home since childhood, is showing some 140 works spanning more than 50 years. Below, Scott discusses her hometown history, her capacity for craft, and how she’s navigated an evolving art world over the decades.

How has Baltimore informed and guided who you are as an artist?

My parents were sharecroppers from North and South Carolina who came to the “Up South” during the Great Migration. They got to Baltimore, and it allowed them to have a bit more agency and power in their lives. This city offered them the possibility of giving me the life that I have—the ability to become a MacArthur fellow and have a 50-year retrospective.

When I was growing up, Baltimore was much more prosperous than it is now. Unfortunately, stories these days are always showing boarded houses and Black men standing on the corner, but that’s only a pittance of what the city is really about. Baltimore, for me, is a city of largesse. When you are loved in Baltimore, it’s the best. You’re in a city filled with joy, filthy with artists, and packed with angst.

Your exhibition coincides with a Baltimore Museum show devoted to your mother, the late artist Elizabeth Talford Scott, who is also being celebrated with shows at eight other museums and colleges across the city. What does it mean to you to be showing your art along with hers?

It really speaks to a Baltimore ethos, where I, as a fabulous African American woman at three-quarters of a century old, get to do this. I was like, “What the fuck?!” (I cuss a lot, and I’m trying not to.) These young curators have given such deference to my mother and know things they probably shouldn’t. When you walk through my mother’s exhibition at the Baltimore Museum, it is mounted beautifully, and you are made aware of the consummate dignity and stank—that’s not stink but stank—and regality and oomph that my mother’s work has.

What’s something your mother taught you that has stuck with you?

The voice that I hear from my mother—she talks to me all the time, that rascal—says, “You’re worthy. And if you want it, go get it. Never stop.” We used to talk about having just one life. I, who have had some infractions in this life, probably will be reborn as a bee or as a bodily fluid—as something terrible. But as long as I’m a human being, I’m running it down. She packed me full of self-awareness, self-assuredness, and the ability to know that if this is it, I’m running for it. I’m not going to stop. And that is ever present in my artwork.

Your show opens with a newly commissioned installation titled The Threads That Unite My Seat to Knowledge (2024). Why did you want to begin with that?

This is one of my cockamamie ideas. I decided to make a dwelling that represents not only me and my brain but also the cozy, comfortable environment in which I grew up and became this person. On the outside are quilts made by my mother, grandmother, grandfather, and godmother because they swaddled me in my youth and gave me a lot of love. When I dreamed, I was on a magic carpet under those things.

Inside that installation, I’m showing large beaded pieces that talk about translucency and color—and just ass-kicking. There is a chair where I might sit if I’m in the museum, and tell stories and sing and talk. My mom brought me to the Baltimore Museum when I was a kid, when [Auguste Rodin’s] Thinker was still outside. You could jump all over him and try to find his genitalia and then walk up all those steps through the front door. The museum was one of my seats of knowledge. It was a place where I could perambulate and touch things I’m not supposed to. So it’s proper and apropos—and all those words—that I should be able to sit in this joint and disperse some common knowledge.

The title of the show alludes to a performance piece of yours called Walk a Mile in My Drawers (2006). What is the significance of that work to you?

The first retrospective I did here [at the BMA in 2000] was called “Kickin’ It with the Old Masters.” It was funny because when we were talking about it, people would say, “Do you really want to say masters?” This [new title] is a way to talk about the many facets of what I do as a performer, singer, and theater person, as well as a visual artist and an educator. Walk a Mile in My Drawers was a funny bon mot about fatness, about big girls, sexuality, all that stuff. “Walk a Mile in My Dreams” is about how I shall not be denied.

I’ve been loved. I’ve been given the fodder I need, and the nourishment. Some of that was money and food, but a lot of it was that little extra kick you need to take the next step—someone imparting knowledge to me and not making me feel either stupid or wrong to ask questions. To receive that is a big deal. And I would be remiss if I didn’t include race in this, because that can make it a really arduous task to exhibit work about social and cultural stuff and also use materials that people don’t necessarily understand as art. I’m a craftsperson and an artist all rolled into one. But people bemoan me saying I’m a craftsperson. “What?! Are you going to sing a Negro spiritual?” Well, I just might! I’m overwhelmed by this retrospective because it allows me to look at how I’ve walked so many miles in my dreams—and how I continue to do that.

You’ve made so many different kinds of art over 50 years. Are you surprised by any of your work? Are there things you can barely believe you made?

It’s the amount of work. If I make 10 necklaces a year and 10 sculptures, that’s 20 pieces of art. Multiply that by 50. And that’s a low number! And while I was doing that for a long time I traveled as a performer with Kay Lawal-Muhammad as the [variety act] Thunder Thigh Revue. I look back at that and think, Who the hell is that person?! Isn’t it wonderful that I wasn’t dissuaded and didn’t succumb to my fears—that I just kept walking?

How do you remember the Thunder Thigh Revue?

This was in the mid-’80s into the ’90s, at a time when Whoopi Goldberg was golden, and people like Mort Sahl—monologuists—talked about really heavy subjects in a comedic manner. It was a real adventure. We would do bits. We realized there were things that we needed to say, and we wanted to say them in a way that the audience would actually listen. A lot of our work was about being accepted for who you are. It was about larger women, about large Black women, about immigration; anything we heard, we went after. A lot of it was about who the messenger is and listening to what that messenger has to say. Because incumbent in that was our ethnicity, our weight, our gender, our class: you name it. That was very important for us.

It was also a kind of feminism for us. But we kept our clothes on. It was different than what I see young women doing now, shaking their butts and whatever. We were very aware of who was looking at us, because the majority of the time our audience was not 50 percent Black. We were very aware of the message we were sending out and what we looked like. We were aware that some of the “demons” we were talking about were sitting in the audience and lasciviously wondering what’s under that lace bustier. One of the things we always were tackling was how not to pander to that—to be real and true and honest. That’s very relevant in my artwork as well.

In the past few years there’s been a shift in terms of attention paid to African American art. How different or the same does it feel to you now?

I talk with friends sometimes and we say, “Didn’t this happen in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, when African Americans were everything, and everybody had on kente cloth and big afros? And everybody was an Indigenous person wearing bead work and whatever was the flavor of the month?” For me the real difference is that the folks who are doing it now are not 20th-century people. They’re 21st-century people who are part of a more global society. These kids aren’t who I was. They are very different people. The abundance of knowledge and accessibility that we really had to work for in the past is at their fingertips. And there are many, many more well-educated people of color. There’s still not enough, ever. But we have great examples.

You’ve done beaded works, blown glass, and worked with all kinds of different materials. Is there one way of working with which you have a special kinship?

Beadwork. I insinuate beads into anything. If I could make an edible bead and we could sprinkle it on top of ice cream, I would bead in a beautiful design, and then we’d eat it. It is a mesmerizing technique. My mother’s side of the family were craftspeople: basket workers, clay people, weavers, all kinds of things. One of the reasons I chose beads is because I could afford them. I could carry them with me, and they weren’t toxic—unless I ate them. The more I learned about them, the more I realized I had the facility to bend them to my will. And they are my lingua franca as a teacher. They’re one of those things you can teach, and while you’re working with your hands, you can talk to people about history, about power—you can apply it to just about everything.

What made you inclined to work across so many different art forms?

I took advantage of every opportunity. I was so hungry for knowledge. If knowledge is truly cumulative, then being able to relay and pile on from the past and also unite that with what’s happening now … If I live, what the hell will I be doing in 2030? I’ll be in a wheelchair, but I’ll be rocking, baby. 

Before the Biennale opened in April, Art in America visited the artist in his studio, a spacious workshop teeming at the time with some 20 studio assistants in a former schoolhouse near Hudson, New York. While he primed a canvas and examined other works in various stages of preparation, Gibson talked about the allure of painting, his interest in the history and intricacy of beadwork, and advice he offers to aspiring artists looking to make their mark. Watch Gibson in his studio in the video above, and read more about him in Art in America’s latest “Icons” issue.

Video Credits include: Director/Producer/Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle Director of Photography: Daniele Sarti Second Camera Op: Alan Lee Jensen Sound Engineer: Nil Tiberi Interviewer: Andy Battaglia

You have a rigorous research-based art practice. How did that begin?

The earliest works in the show begin in 2014 when I was a student, with explorations into employing research-based methodology. I’ve always been asking questions and trying to visualize language and relationships. At the time, I was experimenting with researching histories of American school desegregation. In particular, I was focused on the cases that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision of 1954. As a student at Yale, I had access to the law library. I spent a lot of time trying to understand the many cases of this landmark legislation. Anyone who uses interstate travel, public education, or public broadcasting is a direct beneficiary of this legislative package.

I found myself with lots of questions about public-school transportation and a long legacy of devaluing the lives of children of color and public space, as well as defunding and depriving public schools of resources after the Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. I had faith that if I focus on an area of research or a particular question that something is going to come of it. I didn’t know what the work was going to look like. I didn’t know what the solution was going to be. But I just started reading the cases.

How did you become interested in public spaces and resources?

I’m from Southern California. Growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, I was very impacted by the prominence of murals and narratives painted in public spaces. There’s this part of me that I can’t really shake: a desire to inquire about issues of public concern and embed them into a process by which new material is produced. The first works start there.

I was exploring the perception of color and its impact on the value of life in public space. As an adult, I was able to again study Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, which I had first learned in elementary school. This work gave me an opportunity to start exploring color relationships chromatically and societally. I realized that the impact of color perception and optical illusions initiated by interactions of particular colors which make us see things that aren’t really there. I saw an echo in the case law that I was reading.

Subsequent bodies of work follow this methodology, with site-specific research on such topics as the relationship between public transportation and voting referenda in Atlanta, for example, as well as a comparison between the contemporary use of third-party transfer programs seizing paid properties and the historic property dispossession of people of color in New York. Let’s talk about some of your latest works, which were produced during an artist residency in Boulder, Colorado.

There are three new pieces in the show that use marble dust from the nearby Yule Mountain Quarry, which produced the marble for the Lincoln Memorial and most—if not all—of the great monuments in Washington D.C.

Not unlike your earlier works, you employ a rigorous material process that alludes to the history of abolition and democracy in America. How do you create these multi-layered surfaces?

Before I know what the image is going to be, I’m building a surface with material that is symbolic to me of a place in some way. The material used for Here at the Western World…, for instance, is made of a quilting liner. I spent a lot of time in southern Colorado, outside Denver in the San Luis Valley, and I made friends with people who gave me such textiles. I attached the quilt liner to a piece of raw canvas. I used paper bags, which I separate from the handles. Over many days, I soaked the paper and unfolded it carefully, before laminating it into the surfaces of the work. The pieces become kind of like animal hides that are stretched onto the wall and cured in anticipation of stretching them onto awning style frames. The surface of the piece was then encrusted with sand from southern Colorado and marble dust from the Yule quarry.

There are additional layers and images constructed on top of that surface as well.

The halftone line image that’s projected on the surface in yellow hues is an image of a particular classroom from This Is Not Who We Are (2002), a documentary film about Black communal experiences in Boulder from the 1800s to more recent years. The catalyst of the film, which questions Boulder’s standing as what some have called the happiest place to live in the U.S., is a controversy over excessive police force used against a Black student at Naropa University in 2019. I included an image from the film of Professor Wyndham’s classroom.

Printed on the pink vinyl is a still that I created of a very quick moment from 1972 home video footage of the choir from the Second Baptist church—the only black congregation in Boulder for many years—singing, which resonated with my own experiences going to church growing up in Los Angeles. These places historically in the United States and other colonized countries are where people of color gather for respite and liberation. There are these moments that happen where people are trying to get closer to freedom by gathering together for release and for mutual exaltation.

In her work—including the painting Loves Me, Loves Me Not (2023), pictured above—Kahraman draws on a personal interest in binomial nomenclature, a naming system for living species started by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century, and its relation to refugees and migrants.

How did you first incorporate binomial nomenclature into your work?

I grew up learning about Linneaus in Sweden, where he is seen as a heroic national figure. He was on the 100 kroner bill when I was growing up, and has multiple statues across the country. What a lot of people don’t realize about Linneaus, however, is that the sexual system of plants that he created is hierarchically divided. The male stamens came first, with female pistols listed at the end. In his writing, he equates a lot of his thinking on the natural world through a religious lens. The petals of a flower, for example, were described in relation to the bedchamber of a married couple. He also described this sexual system as a marriage between plants.

Another aspect that people might not be aware of is that Linnaeus divided the human species into four categories that he called varieties. The heteronormative European man is first, and as one goes down the list, it describes different races, with African listed on the bottom. Linnaeus created an incredibly problematic system rampant with biological racism and sexism, which has informed modern society and culture.

When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, it spurred discussions and protests about what has been culturally promoted and upheld. A lot of people think Sweden is this incredibly egalitarian place, but marginal voices often get stomped on very quickly. These were the thoughts that were on my mind when I took a trip to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which carries many of Linnaeus’s rare books.

How did your experience of those books inform your artwork?

The library had a copy of one of Linneaus’s most notable volumes: Hortus Cliffortianus [1737]. When I opened it, I discovered that the end paper is marbled. Marbling was very prevalent during that time. It prompted me to delve into the history of marbling, which is believed to have started in Japan in the 12th century and then moved to the Ottoman Empire, where it took off. It was not decorative but was also used in legal documents to prevent forgeries, because there is no way to duplicate the marbling due to all the variables that come into play when it’s being made. This is a monoprint that cannot be forged. It asserts itself on whatever surface it’s on. It refuses erasure. That spoke to me so much that I started trying to figure out how to marble.

What was recreating that process like?

I’m very deliberate and systematic in my work—I do sketches, color schemes, and research before even touching paint. I grew up under the European Swedish educational system, and this necessity to classify, to understand everything, to render everything knowledgeable is ingrained in me. Marbling was the complete opposite in that it demanded me to relinquish control and became a way of pushing back against these systems in asserting that, no, you cannot render me knowable.

How does the process of marbling play out in relation to migrants and refugees in your work?

I was a refugee from Iraq to Europe in the early 1990s. My family hired a smuggler and became undocumented asylum seekers in Sweden. I was a refugee who became an immigrant, and now I have Swedish citizenship. As part of this process, my mom made a cassette tape in 1997 and sent it to the immigration office in Sweden because we has been denied residency. The Swedish government denied us on the basis that my mother could not prove who who she said she was. On this tape, which is included in the show, my mother had recorded her pleas to the immigration office. It’s 20 minutes of her saying things like, “If you don’t believe me, take a sample of my DNA and cut my skin.” It’s full of visceral metaphors linked to the idea of dehumanization. Marble surfaces not only have this quality that mirrors tissue under a microscope or a unique fingerprint—it also resists the endured systemization to which refugees are subjected.

Eyes and the act of looking are also a big part of the show.

My mother’s tape prompted me to start thinking, what does it mean to be believable enough to an immigration officer? You’re being scrutinized—the slightest movement you make, the tiniest alteration in your voice pattern, any deviations in your story. It’s so subjective. And then there’s a decision made that will completely alter your entire life.

It seems to speak to efforts to fit people into preexisting systems.

Many refugees end up violently removing their fingerprints by pouring acid, using sandpaper, and cutting—all in an effort to circumvent biometric scanning into what is called Eurodac, a centralized database that tracks asylum seekers and migrants. If one is denied entry into a European country, one is prevented from applying to another. It’s detrimental. So a lot of people end up trying to mutilate the pattern on their fingers, essentially erasing a part of their body in order not to be erased [by the system].

The border police have moved beyond fingerprinting. They are scanning not only your fingerprints but also your iris, your voice, your vocal patterns. They put it in their algorithms. It’s so incredibly invasive. But this is why my figures lack irises. This is a way for me to implement tactics of subversion being used by refugees. It also connects to the concept of classification and surveillance by refusing to be scanned. There is this demand for opacity so as not to be rendered knowable. It’s basically saying, “I get to be what I want to be.”

In Loves Me, Loves Me Not (2023), we see three female figures eating eyes off of a plant. Where did that idea come from?

The figures seem to be not only persistent—there is a kind of anger to them. I was always taught to be an obedient little girl who performed well. Even as an immigrant in school, I had to prove myself worthy and never show anger, never protest. These figures are the complete opposite. They’re channeling resistance.

Related Articles

New-York Historical Society Promotes Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto to Chief Curator

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Brings Indigenous History to the Whitney Museum in a Landmark Retrospective

A member of the Cherokee Nation who is also of European descent, WalkingStick has been exploring relationships between people and the earth for five decades. Diptychs are her signature format: often, she pairs landscapes with abstractions. Since the 1960s, her output has been marked by impressive range. During the ’70s, at the height of the feminist art movement, she painted brightly hued images of her nude form. In the decades following, she took up various triumphs of Native American culture alongside tragedies of Native history. Among her few sculptures is Tears (1990), representing a traditional Plains Indian funerary scaffold, but this version is embossed with a poem identifying the structure as a memorial to those lost, and to those never born. It’s a piece about Native grief that WalkingStick made in anticipation of the quincentennial of Columbus’s 1492 voyage.

WalkingStick has long been revered in the Native American community. Several key surveys of Indigenous art organized by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith have included her paintings. Feminist critics such as Lucy Lippard have also lauded her, writing that WalkingStick’s recent landscapes “brilliantly achieve the unity that is her aesthetic goal.” The National Museum of the American Indian put on her 2015 touring retrospective, helping secure her spot on the institutional map. Today, her work is on view in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York, and her solo show at the New-York Historical Society runs through April 14. For the latter show, WalkingStick hung her signature two-panel landscapes, superimposed with traditional Native patterning, among works by Hudson River School painters. She borrowed these historic compositions, but overlaid them with recognizably Indigenous imagery—like Native patterning, or silhouettes walking the Trail of Tears—refuting those painters’ false depictions of land that lay vacant before colonizers arrived.

Below, WalkingStick discusses her approach to painting—and probing— landscapes, all the while looking past the land’s surface to unearth its wounds.

In your diptychs, you seem to establish binaries—between figuration and abstraction, for example, or land and people. But there is often a lot of continuity beyond the harsh juxtaposition a diptych might imply. How do you approach flipping between either/or and both/and?

Whenever I talk about my paintings, I start by saying I’m a biracial Cherokee woman. Of course, that impacts the work, and I suppose this impact is most evident in the diptychs. The [nonfigurative half of a diptych] is never an abstraction of the other—it’s an extension. It tells more of the story. I’ve often thought of each panel as the inside or the outside of the painting’s subject. The inside is the spiritual side, the one that has to do with the soul. So one side involves seeing the present—it often looks like a snapshot—and the other might involve the deeper meaning of the present, or the future.

When people see the diptychs, they’re going to see whatever they want to see. Some people just see geological history, and that’s a valid way to look at them. There are just so many ways to see a piece of art that are valid; that’s what keeps our historians working.

Your work has drawn on so many different eras of art history, from 14th-century Italian icons to 19th-century Hudson River School landscapes. How has your relationship to art history changed over the years?

Well, I think I got a better education in art history than young people get today, judging from what I hear and see. I had good art history classes in my undergraduate and graduate schools, and my vacations are usually to visit museums. I’ve been heavily influenced by European art and American art, whether it was Native or Indigenous art, or art by Euro- Americans. The New-York Historical Society sensed this when they reached out to me.

Many of your paintings are very sensual. Your landscapes often feel corporeal— landforms have warm, fleshy undertones, landscapes are shown next to breasts. What is the importance of sensuality to your work?

The act of painting is sensual. For me, if it’s not sensual, it’s not painting! Night/ƠRT (Usvi) [1991], a painting owned by the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, shows a riverbed at night. I made the abstract panel of that painting using my hands [instead of a brush]. I was physically playing with the paint. For me, all my abstractions, all my diptychs—making them was a sensual act.

Sometimes, you mix your paint with natural materials, like rocks and sand, which causes it to appear rough. At other points, you’ve used encaustic, resulting in paintings that feel chunky. What made you want to do that?

I love the way it looks, I love the way it feels, I love the way it smells. With the works made with acrylic and wax, I liked what [the paint] did when it was piled up. And of course, when it’s made out of beeswax and acrylic and an emulsifier, the smell of it is heavenly—it’s like honey. So, I liked the look of the paint when it was very dense, but then, oddly, I stopped liking it for about 12 years.

What changed?

I just didn’t like the way it looked. But part of it, I think, was moving around the country, seeing different landscapes. And eventually, I went to Rome [during the ’90s, while teaching at the Cornell University campus there], and there were so many wonderful paintings there. I was doing paintings on paper in my little apartment, and I started using figures. Change doesn’t happen quickly for me. But over a few years, the paintings just sort of evolved.

How do you get to know a landscape before you paint it?

I do a lot of drawing, but I don’t necessarily use those drawings in the painting. I draw a place from a number of different viewpoints, so that the scene really gets in my head. It’s useful for me to have a solid idea of what a place looks like and feels like. After that, I usually take photographs. But photographs are always a problem because they’re not what the eye sees. You lose a lot of depth perception, and the blacks drop out; information in the dark areas gets lost. Photography is just useless unless you have a lot of equipment and knowledge about how to take photographs. It’s not totally dependable, you have to fill them in with memory. So after I make photographs, I often come home and make color drawings or oil sketches on paper.

And how much do you research the history of these landscapes?

It depends on the place. For instance, if I’m in Navajo country, it’s so easy to find great patterns [to superimpose on the landscape paintings], since they do all that wonderful rugs. I use these maps showing where different tribes lived, so if you’re looking at Wyoming, for instance, you can look up where the Shoshone lived. They’re related to the Crow and the Nez Perce, and they make marvelous parfleche bags, so they have perfect patterns to use in a painting. They’re not too curvilinear, so I can cut them with a stencil.

But I can’t always find what I’m looking for. I went to see the glaciers in Banff, and I looked for the people who lived in that area, the Nakoda. But they’re not allowed to live there—the Canadian government took over that land, so they’ve all been removed from their ancestral home. Only about 12 years ago were they allowed back into the park to have their ceremonials. It’s a disgusting history. So, I couldn’t find anything about the Nakoda—I looked everywhere. I finally called a friend, David Penney at the National Museum of the American Indian, who gave me some patterns. So, it goes from an easy find, like the Navajos, to a very difficult one, like the Nakodas.

Your “Chief Joseph” series, a group of paintings from between 1974 and 1976, is about a Nez Perce leader from the 19th century, but the imagery is mainly meandering lines against dark backgrounds. Does it bother you if not everyone gets his story from the paintings?

The subjects of all abstractions are identified by the artist. If an artist says, “This is about bloodlust or mother-and-child love,” you can attach that meaning to the painting. For me, the “Chief Joseph” pieces are about honoring the journey of Chief Joseph across Idaho and over the Bitterroot Mountains into Montana, and the battles that he fought in Montana with the American forces. It was a dark and difficult time for him. And it was a long journey. When you put them on the wall in the way I prefer them to be shown, which is a group of all of them together, it implies movement—rather slow movement. Sure, I’m assigning an idea to them, but that’s what artists do.

You’ve continued to paint during periods when some critics claimed the medium was dead. Did you ever feel pressure to change your work to meet the dominant modes of a specific moment?

No, not really. I was fortunate in that. When my kids were little, my first husband would basically take care of us. I got some part-time jobs, doing substitute teaching, and then taught adults painting at an art center for a while. But I didn’t have to get a full-time job. I didn’t have to sell art. I’ve always made paintings for myself and my family—and my own interior growth. I’ve never made paintings for clients. I didn’t feel like I had to make paintings for other people, ever. What a blessing.

A rejoinder to this series, titled Meta/Physical Therapy, is now on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and loosely relates Moulton’s recent experience undergoing physical therapy, hoping to alleviate hip and shoulder issues. It’s a funny, colorful, engaging work sure to be relatable to anyone who has ever googled a mysterious symptom and then felt overwhelmed. Below, Moulton talks about the work, and how Cynthia has grown over the years.

There’s a lot of continuity in Whispering Pines, but how do you see the project as having evolved over time?

In the beginning, I thought of Cynthia as a character separate from me. She grew out of these dresses I made in graduate school, with medical devices and crutches embedded in the fabric. I started wondering what kind of person would wear those types of garments. Then I started to blend this person with anecdotes from my own life, or my mother’s or grandmother’s or aunt’s life. Soon I realized Cynthia was just a great vehicle for me to delve into anything I was interested in, like the love-hate relationship I have with beauty and wellness products, and especially to the advertising around them.

Growing up, commercials were one of my favorite things. I used to think I’d grow up to work in marketing, because I love that language. For a while I was trying to get rid of Cynthia, because I didn’t want to get stuck in one idea. But then I gave into her. At a certain point, I realized how interesting it would be to see her age. Now I think, “this sucks!” I don’t like seeing her age—it’s not fun. But even though aging isn’t fun, it’s useful for me to take a step back from what I’m going through and consider it through this character.

You’ve also made works express skepticism toward the ways healing has become a kind of industry—long before there were things like Goop or Instagram ads for doctors with cute interior design. What has it been like to witness that industry grow, and how has that impacted your work? 

When I was a child, the healing industry looked more like Suzanne Somers and her ThighMaster. In my personal life, that’s always where I would spend any extra money I had—yoga classes that I couldn’t afford, or massage therapy, or even past-lives regression therapy. I’m constantly looking for healing or comfort. At the same time I know that journey or search is usually bound to fail. I’ve never been able to achieve peak fitness or comfort, though I’m sure yoga helped some. Often, it’s basic things that are most helpful, things don’t cost that much money. But still, here I am, sitting at my desk, surrounded by all these tinctures, like an adaptogenic brain tonic. I haven’t found the product that does quite the ultimate thing for me yet, but I’m still searching. I’m always going to be searching.

I really appreciate how relatable Cynthia is and how you don’t moralize or demonize her, or make her the butt of the joke. You’re critical of the wellness industry and the way it preys on certain anxieties, and you capture the ways that online information and so many options can be overwhelming. But the work is funny too. Tell me about your approach to humor.

I hope I’m making fun of myself, but with a knowing wink. I know that I’m falling prey to all these industries, and that these industries are on a spectrum. I do think some of them are great, and people deserve to make money from teaching yoga or whatever. But some are snake oil. Cynthia and I fall for a range of them, and will never stop. I’m probably going to cycle through desire, hope, and failure forever. Feelings of curiosity and optimism are met with that overwhelming feeling of there being so many options and so much information. It’s like shopping for products that you want to be the answer to all your problems. Reading the label can be so exciting, like a little high. 

How about the seating you designed for the show? So much video art gets shown without any seating, but it makes sense to include with your work, which often seems to ask, “how do I get comfortable in my own body?”

When the curator suggested thinking about seating, the first thing I thought of was the seating at the Whole Foods in the Lower East Side. That sort of stadium-like seating is this great place to rest and get a snack when you’re walking around Manhattan in the cold. I wanted to provide something like that, a place for people to hang out in the museum.

In the new work, we see Cynthia confronting inaccessibility in the form of a staircase she can’t climb because she’s wheeled, and a gate that she can’t open because, when she’s outside, she wears this kind of quilted bubble. Has accessibility always been a theme in your work? 

Not really, or at least not in an obvious way—though Cynthia is often trapped in her domestic environment. Early on, a lot of my work came out of hypochondria, or from being around a lot of relatives going through things in the hospital. Now I feel like all that work was kind of predictive. 

I’ve become unable to use my body in the way I used to. I filmed this piece on the campus where I teach, at UC Santa Barbara. Recently I got a mobility scooter, because it’s such a large campus. I have arthritis and was about to get a hip replacement, but then I cancelled it because it got better. Still, I can’t walk very far. Using my mobility scooter, I’ve become so much more aware of how inaccessible so many things are. I found myself mapping out an intricate route around campus—and trying not to be late! It’s really challenging. So I put Cynthia in this personal steam sauna tent that fits on top of the mobility scooter—something I’ve been imagining for a while.

It also seems essential that Cynthia is a woman.

The bulk of the advertising and marketing I’m talking about is geared toward women. Keeping up appearances is 90 percent of the job! More recently, confronting perimenopause, women’s health has been on my mind. I’m actually participating in a study on campus researching the ways hormones affect the brain in midlife. I went and had an MRI, which I used in the piece. I’m happy to participate because there’s so little research on menopause—a stage that can be really disturbing and difficult or, in some cases, empowering. This study, and this lack of understanding, are both big parts of this narrative. You can see it in the menstrual cups and the lava lamp.

I was also curious about the garment Cynthia wears, a pastel pink gown that looks like something between a hospital gown and a nightgown.

I found this brand for really stylish hospital gowns; they are comfortable and pretty. It definitely felt like the ideal brand for Cynthia! I also wanted her room to feel like it could be something between her home office or a workout room, or maybe even a hospital room. 

What else should we know about the piece?

It’s the first time I included Tarot imagery. I’ve always been into astrology, but I hadn’t really been directly referencing either of those things, though I feel like they get hinted at. I don’t get my cards read often, because I find it kind of frightening. The same goes with astrology. I don’t like the daily horoscope. I don’t really want to know my future. My uncle was an astrologer, and he made my birth chart when I was born. He left all these cryptic notes on the birth chart, like an airplane falling, and he passed away before I got to ask him what that meant! But I really relate to thinking about potentials, and about all the ways things can go wrong. So it was fun to incorporate some of that imagery in this piece.

He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2022 and was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2023. His current exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, touted as his first major institutional solo show, features 11 works dating back to 1999 and is accompanied by companion show sharing the same title—“A Worm’s Eye View from a Bird’s Beak”—at Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway. (The New York exhibition is on view through April 14; the Norwegian show continues through September 1.)

Related Articles

Nicholas Galanin’s Pointed Public Sculpture Inspires Glorious Noise in New York

Four Artists Win $800,000 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships

Below, Chacon talks about four works that counted as highlights during a walkthrough of his Swiss Institute show.

American Ledger No. 1 (Army Blanket), 2020

This is part of a series of scores that take on the form of a flag. You read it like a score—from left to right, top to bottom—and inside of it is a chronology of what I call the creation story of the land that the United States is on. At the top is a blank area: there weren’t even humans yet. As you go on, you come to a landscape, with stars and mountains—part of a world view that’s emerging as people live on the land for the first time. Anytime you see a cross in one of my scores, it’s a kind of notation for percussion.

Then you move down a line and this wavy tone gets played, as a continuation of this world view that’s maybe oscillating and changing. These waves can be interpreted as sounds going up and down. Every time you see an X, it’s a chopping of wood, like with an axe. Then it moves to building ships and coming over the ocean to the Americas, and to building a new colonies. And on the next line, you have a police whistle that gets blown and starts a rhythm—with three notes and two rests—that is the Three-Fifths Compromise, which [in 1787] introduced slavery to the economy.

Then there’s a point in the score when coins are thrown, with cities being built in the Industrial Revolution. That gets interpreted through a line that is not necessarily for pitch; it could be a change in tone, a change of volume, a change of tempo. Then you have an acceleration, a kind of crashing that is also becoming unified. I like to call it a corralling of the sound, where you have all this activity that becomes motor-rhythmic.

Then it stops with the lighting of a match and a symbol, a “D.C. al coda” with crosshairs. In musical terms that means go back and play the whole thing again, but it is also a reference to Washington, D.C. Then you come to the end and see a star again, a Christian cross, one more chopping of wood—and whatever happens next, in which every sound that has existed in the composition gets played together all at once.

Report (2001/2015)

This is an infamous piece I wrote 23 years ago when I was thinking through some compositional frustrations. I was wanting to find an instrument I couldn’t control, [for which] I didn’t have the agency to control the volume, the pitch, the timbre, or any of the musical parameters I had been working with. I was trying to think: what can I use that would be just the most blunt, limiting instrument? I thought about drums, but you can play those very quietly, and you can change the pitch.

Around that time I was doing a lot of hunting and practicing shooting with friends out in the desert, and I thought, I can just write it for guns. I didn’t think of it as some kind of pro-gun or anti-gun statement. But because the people I could find who could read music and shoot guns to perform it were a bunch of drummers and percussionist guys, it looked like I was trying to form a militia. So it kind of just sat around as a conceptual piece.

About 10 years later I started finding different people who wanted to do it. I found more women who had guns in New Mexico, and I started to wonder what it would mean if we made a video of it being performed. The video was filmed in 2015 with women, people of color, some Indigenous folks. A lot of my work is about histories of places and certain landscapes, and this piece raises lots of questions: Where is this place? What are they shooting at? Are they training for something? That music could raise those kinds of questions was interesting to me.

Field Recordings (1999)

This is the first piece I ever made. The idea was to go to different places I’m very familiar with, two of them on Navajo Nation land, to find locations that would be very quiet. I took a recorder and put it there for an hour on a very quiet day: no cars, no people, no airplanes. I ended up with three very quiet recordings of these places and went back to the studio and turned them all the way up to the maximum, as a way to magnify and amplify them. I didn’t treat the sounds at all.

I didn’t know what sound art was when I made this. I was like, What do I do with this—put it out on CD? It wasn’t until later that I realized it was the kind of thing that could be exhibited. Then I started making these postcards that are also flexi-discs you can play on a turntable. The idea was to make something like tourist mementos. I have a few pieces like this that critique people’s thinking of ”deep listening,” or going to places in the Southwest and meditating and having profound experiences in silence—the tourist nature of going to places like Monument Valley or places in the Navajo Nation and sending postcards to friends.

For Four (Caldera), 2024

This piece can be performed in any valley that was created by some kind of disruption. This valley is a volcanic crater, from an eruption millions of years ago. Over one of the hills is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they developed the atomic bomb. Within the piece there are four singers who sing the contour of the landscape as a melody. They start in different cardinal directions offset by 90 degrees. As one of the singers pivots, the next one begins, so it becomes a kind of musical round, with all of them singing the same landscape with a delay. After we shot this, I asked the singers and some of them were interpreting things like densities of trees with a little trill or some vibrato. They have the freedom to interpret the landscape as they will. The only thing we set up was to have a starting pitch for the first one, so there would be some kind of locking in, harmonically.

These are mostly classical singers I collaborated with in New Mexico. In fact, one of them is one of the shooters in Report. But another version of this piece in Norway has a much different sound. That one has joikers, who practice a tradition of Sámi singing that already is influenced by the landscape, whether literally by the contours of the horizon or something more about stories within a place. There are songs about mountains or rivers that joiks come from. Putting four joikers together is a kind contradiction, because they’re so personal, but it creates very dynamic contours as well. Putting them somewhere with a prompt to sing the landscape in addition to joiks that already exist was quite different than the original idea. It was nice for me to learn about joiking. It’s very, very old tradition.

On January 3, 2020, I was in Marfa, Texas, sitting at a bar drinking a Negroni. There was a TV in the bar, and I saw my last name flash across the screen. I thought, Oh god, this can’t be good. After 9/11 my family went through a lot of racism, so anytime that I see any Western media covering Iran, I get worried. The news was that Trump [had] assassinated [Iranian military officer] Qassemi Soleimani. We were in Texas, about to fly home, and, meanwhile, there was my last name all over the news. Suddenly, everyone that saw it—even friends of mine who I think are fairly enlightened or educated individuals—start texting me: “Are you okay?” “We’re so sorry for your family.”

Meanwhile, no one knew that Qassemi Soleimani was a ruthless government’s dictator and chief of the armed forces in Iran. There was no recognition of who he was. When people are ignorant, I have to find humor in it—there’s no other coping mechanism. When I was in elementary school, people would ask me if my dad knew Saddam Hussein. My dad would say, “Tell them that we played backgammon.” I said that in school and people believed me. So, in the same way, I texted back, “thank you so much for your condolences.”

It became a thought experiment for me. Where do we get our news from? Who do we deem to be good or bad, especially when it comes to politics? At any given point, we’re taking in information in sound bites from our phones, we’re seeing a headline. But because of my baba, I’ve been trained to never trust a single news source. They’re all fragments and figments of the truth.

That led me to the series “Levers of Power,” in which I’m looking at the body language of politicians or activists—different people that are part of this game—and thinking about how we are socially conditioned to read gestures. Like, if someone’s pointing their finger: they’re bad. I wanted to learn people’s media literacy and literacy with history. So I began severing hands and asking people to focus on the images surrounding the gestures.

Armita is a response to the murder of Armita Geravand, who was pronounced dead this past October after being in a coma for over two weeks. The hand is from footage of her in a subway station in Tehran, where she was taken and beaten by the morality police just like Mahsa Amini for not wearing her hijab correctly. The Ayatollah’s regime has tried to co-opt the tulip to make it a symbol of the right wing. People who are Marxist, anti-Islamic-government, anti-totalitarian-dictatorship want to take the tulip back to its roots, starting in the 1950s. That was when Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected, and we had the first kind of guerilla activist groups fighting in the jungle. There is a revolutionary protest song that I grew up with my dad singing to me as a lullaby—it’s about the coming of the spring. Tulips are these ever-returning bulbs: they have delicate flowers that a frost could kill, but the bulbs stay underground and always return. In Persian culture, they’re a symbol of revolution.

I’ll be 34 soon, and my generation, we want change to happen quickly. But my father’s generation—and those before him—were like, You know, revolution requires persistence and time. Hands—or “Levers”—are miniature monuments, not in the oppressive bronze-sculpture sense but like how bookmarks exist to say, “Hey, this is here, but this is ongoing …”
—as told to Tessa Solomon