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

Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.

That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.

I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington

Video Credits include:

Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

I start by mixing a palette, and as I mix, I get an idea of what the painting will be. I’ll have a general sense of the palette within a few minutes: they usually involve interactions between earth tones and bright, saturated colors. But I spend a lot of time figuring out the light and contrasts, and a palette can take a sharp turn quickly if it’s just not feeling right.

Lately I’ve been starting with the background, then working my way to the surface of my paintings. I like making the background look like it was the last thing that happened, even though it was first. I’m often building up thick paint, then wiping it away, and the wipes leave marks. But I change the process up from painting to painting—I always want to stay surprised and spontaneous.

I mostly draw imagery from everyday experiences: memories, places I’ve lived, things I see on walks. Sometimes, I’ll see something I liked in one painting, and then I’ll try it again in the next one.

For Convergence (2023), I started off building up layers of dark acrylic dye washes. But I couldn’t figure out the space at all: it was too abstract and looked almost underwater. Eventually, I flipped the canvas over and started painting on the back. You see the stains from the reverse side at the top, and at the bottom, I painted over them in oil. The harsh horizon line helps both parts feel like they’re in the same space, even though, material-wise, they’re very different.

I keep paint skins in my studio, made from paint I took off old paintings. I’m often holding them up to canvases to see what needs them. Sometimes I’ll throw in paint from another palette. I almost want it to feel like you could just peel it off.

Usually, I’m working on four or five paintings at a time. It’s helpful to bounce between works. I can finish a painting in one day, and usually I find those to be the most successful—it means I got the full idea out and I don’t have to go back in and fix it, which sometimes makes me feel on the verge of “designing.” For me, it’s always about spontaneity. —As told to Emily Watlington

Over the past decade, Simpson has produced a veritable pantheon of clay beings that honor Pueblo traditions while anticipating an upcoming apocalypse. Bearing such hallmark signifiers as slit eyes, absent limbs, and desert tones, these figures serve as characters in a quiet but profound epic that begins in the Southwest—in northern New Mexico, to be exact—but whose relevance extends into the beyond.

Check out a recent Art in America feature about Simpson by Lou Cornum from our November 2022 issue.

Watch the full video above or on the official Art in America YouTube channel.

Video Transcript

My name is Rose B. Simpson. The exhibition is called “Road Less Traveled,” and it’s at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. “Road Less Traveled” is me challenging the very things that I took for granted or the processes that seemed easy and often are unhealthy. And if I take some time and witness what’s possible, I can transform my own reality and hopefully, by default, help other people, too.

The work represents my own journey, whether it’s psychological investigation, a new spiritual awareness, or it’s a very practical emotional or psychological space that I need to inhabit in order to transform my reality. The work offers me a reflection of what’s possible and I make it and I visualize it, and then it becomes… a thing. And then I get to witness this thing, and from it, I get to grow. Every single mark on the surface of these pieces means something. Either they’re stars, they’re X’s, which represent protection, or they represent tracks or days or the marking of time or the process around journey. When I use things like beads in a line or I put a line of markings in a row, it’s a specific number, like seven generations, or it’s seven directions, or it represents the months of the year. To me, it represents the process of going somewhere. So, the journey that we’re on.

Video Credits

Featuring: Rose B. Simpson
Producer and Editor: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Music: Jakariwing
Copy Edits: Emily Watlington
Additional Edits: Jacob Amorelli

“Hot Mess Formalism” can be seen as more a sampling than a survey per se—not least because of the aforementioned ephemeral quality of some of her work. The five large-scale installations in the exhibition are not of that sort, but have been loaned from various collections. The earliest piece on view dates to 1983, and the latest, 91 BCE ⌛ Not So Good for Emperors, was commissioned by the Phoenix Museum of Art for the show’s debut in fall 2017. Displayed on big tables are dozens of Pepe’s “Votive Moderns” (1994–): engaging little assemblages, each with a distinct personality, that combine art materials and industrial castoffs. Throughout the show, in works large and small, Pepe combines architectural nerve, material dexterity, and an appealing, awkward choreography.

Beginning as a thin trickle of blue cord in a stairwell, 91 BCE rises into a corridor and two rooms on the second floor, morphing into stretches of metal chain mail and tan-colored crocheted patches. Some portions rest against walls; others proliferate into a room-blocking chaos of stuttering lines and shapes. Such works feel like drawings in space, as much sketched as constructed—an intentional effect; and a large group of gouaches (wonky geometric abstractions alluding to urban infrastructure) offers a pictorial counterpart to these three-dimensional acrobatics. In a documentary video playing at the show, Pepe discusses some of the ideas behind 91 BCE. In the title year, as alluded to by the chain mail in the work, violent uprisings against ruling powers occurred in both Italy and China. The work demonstrates Pepe’s typical tough attitude, itself a form of resistance: deeply feminist and queer in sensibility, she challenges the dominance of monumental form with patient, accretive labor.

A veneration of women’s work has undergirded Pepe’s structures from the start. In Women Are Bricks: Mobile Bricks (1983), triangular bricks mounted on ceramic rollers are arranged in a grid on a stretch of found carpet. They could almost be toys, but for the rough, industrial quality of the brick and the rigor of seriality and gridding. Here we see Pepe’s origins as a ceramist and a devotee of the Post-Minimalists, particularly Eva Hesse. Pepe speaks often of her post–Vatican II Catholic childhood, and of being raised by industrious Italian American parents, who owned a restaurant in New Jersey; we see homages to these milieux in the imposing Second Vatican Council Wrap (2013), a quasi-figurative installation incorporating metallic thread and a fragile baldachin, and in a video showing her hands rolling meatballs and placing them in a grid. The ubiquitous shoelaces refer to her cobbler grandfather, the crocheting to her mother’s craft. Still, Pepe pushes her tributes to an extreme, her obsessive energy transforming the most ordinary materials into the great “hot mess” that is their strength and appeal.

The video, María Elena, combines various filming techniques: panning sequences and fixed camera shots; aerial views (of putty-white terrain, of geometrically arranged mounds of powdery minerals or drying beds, the latter acid yellow and lime green) and closely framed details (an ear, a llama’s matted back, old shoes). We see mining processes, with tracts of land laced with charges exploding and heaps of white material being generated. We see machines, but rarely their operators. Flies move on the surface of water, stars hang in the sky, all accompanied by a soundtrack of ambient noises such as walkie-talkie conversations, plane-engine humming, and instrument beeping. An enigmatic figure draped from head to foot in a reflective metallic cloth appears three times, unsettling the viewer.

It is interesting to compare this work with Turkish artist Ali Kazma’s video Mine (2017), which focuses on the abandoned remains of another Atacama mine, one that, after it had ceased operations, was used as a concentration camp under Pinochet’s regime. Smith’s video likewise shows ruined buildings—an earthquake hit the town in 2007—but otherwise is very different. While Kazma’s work depicts its site soberly and quietly, allowing viewers time to form judgments, María Elena is often restless, occasionally frantic, and filled with frustrating images: blurry footage of a polo game, for instance, and cropped shots of people with their heads outside the frame.

The paintings on view were rendered with various materials (oil, acrylic, masking fluid, encaustic, pencil) on MDF or paper. Two diptychs and a triptych, each titled Bocetos para María Elena (Sketches for María Elena), were shown as one frieze. Subjects focused on in the video dotted its surface, as did lists of statistics (of what was not made clear) and train station names. Lines tracing from panel to panel suggested those on transportation maps. The work read as a spare sketch of how a barren region is prospected: the exploration, the building of its infrastructure, the movement of people. Another work, Diagrama 82, was a map of Chile with the country’s outlines carved into the panel support and the mining areas highlighted in orange. 

Smith’s video certainly casts a dubious eye toward the historical exploitation of the “new world” for natural resources. Yet it also, more urgently, asks the viewer to consider what role industrialized mining should play in current and future conceptions of property and in relation to our environmental responsibilities. Smith observes how the earth’s crust in María Elena is still being blown apart to release valuable saltpeter, and she looks, too, to the stars, as if to ask where our hunger for resources will take us. Her study offers the viewer no easy, omniscient perspective, but instead a disjointed collection of insights to decipher. But one thing is certain: it is as much a warning of things that might come as it is a portrayal of anachronistic industrial operations.

Born in Palestine, Habib Allah studied at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and received an MFA from Columbia University in 2010. He is based in Miami. His earlier work explored such disparate subjects as Bedouin smugglers in the Sinai Peninsula, ghost stories in Jerusalem, and the trade in stolen electronics and auto parts in Miami. Habib Allah spoke to me via Skype while putting the finishing touches on his Chicago show and then again by phone while installing the project in Los Angeles.

MICHAEL MCCANNE  Tell me about your new work: 70 Days Behind Inventory and “Dropping the Tenth Digit.”

SHADI HABIB ALLAH  70 Days Behind Inventory is a 750-square-foot vinyl floor taken in its entirety from a corner store in Liberty City, Miami, and placed in the gallery at the Renaissance Society. It’s part of my research into how these stores’ relationship with their neighborhood changed from selling groceries to providing alternative financial services, including gambling, loans, and food stamp scams. “Dropping the Tenth Digit” is a series of photos that documents the manual records storeowners use to track each food-stamp-for-cash transaction and make the charges to the food stamp cards look plausible for the city or the food stamp agency.

MCCANNE  What was the genesis of these projects? How did you get access to the stores?

HABIB ALLAH  I got to know some of the storeowners when I was first living in Miami, many years ago. Whenever I would go back to visit those stores, the owners would ask me to stand behind the cash register for five minutes while they went to the bathroom. Then customers would come and give me their food stamp card and say: “I want twenty.” “Give me some cigarettes and fifty.” But I didn’t know what they were talking about. With food stamps you can only buy groceries: no alcohol, no cigarettes. But some stores will exchange food stamps for cash, charging fifty percent for each transaction. You lose fifty percent of the value but at the same time you get cash, and a lot of the beneficiaries need cash: to take a bus to go look for a job, to pay a phone bill, and so on. The storeowners keep the card for seven or ten days and they keep charging the card in sums that correspond to merchandise in order to empty the card.

The title of “Dropping the Tenth Digit” comes from the method the Florida welfare agency uses to inform beneficiaries when they are going to get their money deposited on their card each month. Benefits are made available from the first to the twenty-eighth day of every month, based on the eighth and ninth digit of the ten-digit case number. The recipients know how to interpret the numbers to determine when the month’s deposit will be made available.

MCCANNE  Are these kind of scams happening just in Florida?

HABIB ALLAH  I’m sure they’re happening all over, not just Florida. And the project is not about a specific locale. I’m not trying to make a portrait of a specific community. The work addresses bigger questions and how certain policies impact communities.

MCCANNE  What draws you to work with alternative economies as subjects?

HABIB ALLAH  I’m mainly interested in how systems and laws seem to affect certain people more than others and how this creates alternative economies that are continually changing and calibrated to appear legitimate to the government. I’m interested in how they exist visually. For example, right now I’m making a film about a pimp and the girls living with him—seventeen girls in a super fancy house. I’m trying to capture how they mimic acceptable norms. It reminds me of the soap operas from the 1980s and ’90s. Everyone’s together. They have family values, which are important. Everyone is wealthy but you’re never shown what the business is.

MCCANNE  So less than the systems themselves you’re more focused on their appearances?

HABIB ALLAH  Yes. I am still interested in the systems but the legal facades they produce is a very important part of my work.

MCCANNE  Your work also seems to focus on how commodities circulate outside legal channels. I wanted to ask you about your video Daga’a (2015), which really explores this theme.

HABIB ALLAH  Daga’a was shot over a period of a year and a half in the Sinai Peninsula, which is under Egyptian governance and mostly inhabited by Bedouin. The desert part of the Sinai has become very politically significant, especially as the main source of smuggled goods for the Gaza Strip. The film traces routes that the Bedouin use in the desert to smuggle goods and avoid the Egyptian army.

MCCANNE  How did you get started on this project?

HABIB ALLAH  There’s an area in the south of Sinai on the Red Sea called Sharm El Sheikh. Following Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1967, Sharm El Sheikh, which had been a small Bedouin fishing town, started developing as a tourist destination. Since the 1980s and after Israel evacuated Sinai in 1982, Egypt continued to develop Sharm El Sheikh as a major resort town. A lot of Europeans go there, as well as a lot people from Israel and Palestine. I went for the first time ten years ago, at thirty, which was quite late. Usually if you are from Palestine you go there when you’re eighteen. You cross the border at Eilat and have to hire a cab to get from the Israeli border to Dahab or Sharm El Sheikh. One time I was riding with a Bedouin cab driver and we started talking politics. Bedouin in that area work mainly as taxi drivers. They don’t consider themselves Egyptians, although they used to. They fought alongside the Egyptians under Nasser and Sadat but still the Bedouin are not treated as equal citizens.

Two years after Hamas won the 2006 parliamentary elections, Israel and Egypt blockaded the Gaza Strip. Since then, most of the supplies going into Gaza have been smuggled through tunnels from the Sinai. I was interested in how the Bedouin move things through the Sinai into Gaza. I brought a camera and slowly I started filming them. It took a long time. On one trip I would get deep into the desert and then meet someone else who would become my contact. Sometimes they would take me by boat to another part of the desert and tell me that my contact would be there. But I didn’t know who the contact was. There were no phones, no nothing. I’d meet the person and just stare at them as they looked back at me. I was scared of them because I was alone there, cut off from everything. At the same time, they were probably a little bit hesitant because they didn’t know if I was working for the government or something.

When I wanted to start filming in 2013, the Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi was overthrown and General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took power. The Egyptian army invaded Sinai and the Bedouin launched their own resistance. It was very scary because even journalists were not allowed in. I had to smuggle the cameras with someone else through Jordan.

MCCANNE  Do you think the Bedouin you were traveling with understood what you were doing? Did you explain it to them?

HABIB ALLAH  I said that I was doing a film about Bedouin culture and traditions. But I think after a while, without me telling them, they understood my intentions. They realized that I was on their side, that I was against the government.

MCCANNE  As I was watching Daga’a and some of your other films, I wondered how much you collaborate with your subjects.

HABIB ALLAH  Some of the scenes are scripted but not fully. If I wanted to shoot a scene with a few specific lines, I would work with one person and give them the lines beforehand. When we were shooting they would repeat the lines but in their own words and the people around them would react to the lines in different ways. I did this with my film The King and the Jester in 2010. Parts of it were scripted, others not. Another film showing at the Renaissance Society, S/N: 8F1GNA0021 [2012], was more scripted because I worked with an actor. For me, the scripted dialogue feels too artificial, because the actor was, you know, an actor.

MCCANNE  You work a lot with marginalized communities and I wonder how you navigate the risk of exploitation.

HABIB ALLAH  You have to have a sympathetic approach. But at the same time there is always the question of how much to tell your subjects. I tend to reveal more towards the end. I think it becomes natural because you spend time with them. And I also tend to develop relationships with the subjects. I don’t just work on a project and then pull back and look for something else. For example, I still have relationships with the Bedouin. Whenever I go to the Sinai, I hang out with them.

Camp is kitsch glamour and Hollywood B movies; an emphasis on style over substance; exaggeration and absurdity; gender-bending characters; gay and drag; and porn that’s so bad it’s good. While Sontag defined camp as “depoliticized,” it was anything but for Smith. Rather, it was an effective tool against the increasingly dominant real estate and art markets. He railed tirelessly against both, and proved something of a soothsayer for contemporary times in New York.

Split into sections and spread out over two floors, “Art Crust of Spiritual Oasis” comprised mostly handmade performance flyers, posters, collages, archival photographs, and audio and video snippets that conveyed the silly, DIY style of Smith’s post–Flaming Creatures output. Opening the exhibition was an audio recording of a monologue he performed in 1981, “What’s Underground about Marshmallows?” in which he discusses landlordism and the “fear ritual” of paying rent every month. Nearby, headshots of the artist in stereotypical Hollywood poses contrasted with projections of 35mm slides showing him dressed like a lobster—he frequently employed oceanic plotlines—delivering rent checks in an envelope.

The subsequent section was titled “Plaster Foundation of Atlantis,” after the loft Smith lived in on Greene Street from 1969 until he was evicted in 1971. Smith turned the space into a performance venue and “trash heap.” The nine performances he staged there were notable for their freewheeling structure, insufferably long running times (often they stretched into the wee hours of the morning), and overall disorganization. Smith’s sketches, storyboards, and handwritten flyers for these performances were displayed in vitrines. They abound with humorous phrases, such as “Live Crab Ogress on Display! Clamercials! Clapitalism!” In the back corner of the gallery space, the film No President (1969), which was shot at the loft, played on a monitor. It’s classic Smith; camera close-ups and abrupt cutaways make it hard to follow the characters, many of whom are in drag and mostly just pose. Their faces are occasionally framed by two men stroking hard-ons above them, their dicks bouncing in the most unflattering ways. The whole thing is hilariously incoherent.

The exhibition troubled what exactly we should consider to be Smith’s work. Walking through, you got the nagging sense that you had missed out on something. But at the same time, it was obvious that Smith placed a lot of value on the ancillary photographs and flyers, and that he intended them to live long afterlives since the performances couldn’t. In that sense, one wonders if he thought of them as the work more than he did the performances. Indeed, the materials constitute not just an archive gathering dust, but something almost as performatively alive as Smith was.

The exhibition’s opening work was also its most resonant. “Invocation for a Wandering Lake” (2015–16) consists of a pair of videos projected onto two sets of large, freestanding folded panels. Stretched across the first polyptych is footage of a rusty ship in the dried-up Aral seabed; across the second, a sequence focusing on a dead whale stranded on the shore of Fogo Island. Slowly, attentively, Chang washes the ship and the whale by hand, her lone figure dwarfed by the imposing forms. During the ablution of the whale, the artist wades through gray-black water as she moves her sponge back and forth across its body. This simple act is an exercise in endurance—emotional as well as physical. “I had never been in the water with such a large dead being before,” Chang writes in the travelogue-style artist’s book. “My sense of mortality was overwhelming.” The videos are wordless and mournful, full of the sound of air and sea, and composed of long, static shots that convey a sense of passing time.

In the installation “Configurations” (2017), still photographs and a three-channel video document Chang’s trip along China’s South-to-North Water Diversion Project, which includes the longest aqueduct in the world. After visiting a village whose inhabitants have been displaced by the expansion of a reservoir, Chang encounters a woman perched on a bridge, ready to commit suicide. When rescuers arrive, “she refuses to be taken anywhere,” Chang recounts in the book, “saying she has no home.”

Chang monitored her own bodily flows as she wandered from site to site and transitioned from one phase of her life to another (over the course of the project, her father died and her son was born). The video shows her peeing into funnels fashioned out of plastic water bottles at various points along the aqueduct. Glass replicas of these urinary devices feature in the installation. The photo series “Letdown (Milk),” 2017, depicts plastic cups, bowls, and aluminum pans holding Chang’s breast milk, which she pumped during a return trip to the disappearing Aral Sea (70 percent of which was drained by Soviet irrigation projects), the work drawing associations between the body and the landscape.

Toward the end of her journey along the Water Diversion Project, Chang went to a place where the aqueduct carries water from a tributary of the Yangtze River under the Yellow River, thus crossing the historic dual arteries of Chinese civilization. Hours of driving led her to an unremarkable spot, a gray bridge overlooking the waterway. As Chang surveyed the scene through fog and rain, she writes, “The surrounding landscape folded in on itself as if a map were collapsing.” In “The Wandering Lake,” it was precisely in these amorphous, unstable spaces, where the map “collapses,” that Chang invited us to dwell.