University Place

Artist Talk: Nathaniel Mary Quinn

– I’m Sheri Castelnuovo, the curator of education and on behalf of the MMoCA staff and board of trustees, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the MMoCA opening for Nathaniel Mary Quinn: This Is Life. We’re honored to have organized Quinn’s first solo museum exhibition and published its accompanying exhibition catalog, which is available in the museum store. It’s a really beautiful publication if you haven’t seen it; please take a look at it. And if you purchase it this evening you might even be able to get the artist to sign it for you while he’s here tonight. Needless to say we are thrilled to have Nathaniel Mary Quinn and his partner Donna Augustin Quinn here at MMoCA this evening and we thank them for traveling to Madison to join the celebration. Originally from Chicago and now residing in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City, Nathaniel Mary Quinn has garnered international attention for portraits that merge masterful technique with complex imagery to express psychological aspects of identity. Quinn earned a Bachelor of Arts from Wabash College in Indiana, and a Master of Fine Arts from New York University. Following his graduate studies he taught in the public schools and worked with at-risk youth for ten years, all while pursuing a demanding studio regimen and actively exhibiting his paintings, before turning his attention solely to making art.

Since that time his work has become increasingly sought after and acquired by individual collectors and museums alike, including the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus Ohio, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln Nebraska, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as three museums in Los Angeles: the LA County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art. We appreciate Quinn’s generosity in speaking with us tonight about his work, and Donna will assist with advancing the slides, so please offer them both a warm welcome to the stage.
(audience claps)

– [Nathaniel] Okay.
– [Donna] We’re here. Bye
(audience laughs)

– [Nathaniel] Well. Thank you all for coming this evening for the talk. My wife has just put up the first image of a work called Super-Fly. Now this work is not in the exhibition here, but I thought it would be nice to show a different piece that perhaps many of you all have not seen, but it still works very much in alignment with the kind of work that I make and what I try to do in my practice. When I was young, my father introduced me to those old black TV shows and films where the black protagonists, typically a man, went out into the street and was like an urban vigilante, and he was kicking ass and taking names. (audience laughs)

And he did pseudo-karate and martial arts and that sort of thing and you know normally that character was like a Super-Fly, and therefore I thought to make a work that was reminiscent of that and this was the first time when I began to make works that broke through the barrier of the frame where as you can you see the arm’s hanging in that sort of blank space. And I found that quite interesting because in a minimalistic sort of way it highlighted how watching shows like that as a child broke through a barrier in my own life. As we all know often times watching films and TV shows gives us the opportunity to escape our reality for a moment and to be somewhere else. We like watching these characters and movies who can do the things that we don’t possess the courage to do ourselves, because I never possessed the courage to be a vigilante (audience laughs).

Although I wish I had the courage to do something like that, but I’m from the South Side of Chicago where you’d get shot doing something like that, so. But not Super-Fly, he didn’t get shot. He was dodging bullets and stopping bullets, and said, “Too bad sucker,” you know. (audience laughs) So there’s a lot of humor in the work and that’s important. But like the works here tonight at the museum, I use the same kind of materials, of gouache, soft pastels, oil pastels. Perhaps in this case I used paint stick and oil paint to render the nose and all the works are made by hand so every aspect of the work is rendered through painting and drawing. So there is no quasi-mechanical, mechanical methods used for making the works, there isn’t any collage systems at play here, therefore there aren’t photographs being taken from an extraneous source and then placed on the surface of the paper itself. Everything is made directly on the surface of the paper. The paper I tend to use is Coventry Vellum paper, because it’s heavy and you can be pretty aggressive with that paper and it can hold up.

Okay, my wife is my studio manager as well, and she does a great job. (audience cheers and claps) Now this is a work that’s actually in the exhibition here. It’s called June Bug. When I was young, maybe around ten years old, my mother took me with her to visit her sister. And when we arrived for the first time I met her brother, June Bug. And that’s stayed with me that experience because he was wearing this really flashy clothing and he was a loud dresser you know, one of those people who wanted to show off their money, but of course he was a drug dealer, (audience laughs) and this is how drug dealers dress, which seems counter productive for a drug dealer, because you probably want to stay under the radar, if you’re selling drugs. But why sell drugs if you don’t also believe yourself to be invincible, I mean that’s the whole point. You want to feel like you’re El Chapo or something, you can’t be touched.

At the same time it was quite sad because I also recognized right away as a kid how much my mother detested that part of her family. She was just doing her sort of duty as a sibling to go and see these people, but she didn’t like these people very much precisely due to the kind of activities that they were engaged in. But yeah, June Bug was an interesting character. He rubbed off on me a bit. I kind of liked him in a weird kind of way. But I did not like what he did. I mean I was very aware, acutely, of the downfalls of living a life in that way. I was ten years old by the way and years later of course I have my first exhibition with Rhona Hoffman Gallery.
(audience cheers)

Yes. And of course, my art practice, I make work based on visions that come to me. I’m not trying to be religious here, but basically I make work based on visual images that appear to me and those images function as the preliminary sketches for my work. So I never do a pre-sketch on paper. The vision is a pre-sketch, or better yet the guide for the practice of my work comes from here from the center. And I’m not afraid to say that. I mean that’s a really honest part of my practice. And then I begin to make the work and then I’ll allow the work to tell me what I’m dealing with, to tell me or to remind me of the memories that continue to reside within me. And it turns out that June Bug continues to reside in me. That experience of meeting June Bug, as you can see the gold ring in his nostril. I mean what’s a more garish place to put a piece of jewelry than in your nostril?

To make that point about how this guy was very out there about exposing the sort of money that he made and sitting in a nice leather chair, that was part of the furniture in the house. And yet there’s a sadness there in the countenance of the subject as he sits there with that sort of lackluster posture. There’s not that real sense of authentic confidence that you would normally see within someone who has true authentic success, something that they could be proud of. That’s definitely not there and I wanted to be sure to somehow visually record that in this particular work. So this work is called Motorcycle Pig, (audience laughs) It was– I know it’s a funny, funny title.

This work was part of my first exhibition at Pace Gallery in London, and during this time I hadn’t even began to incorporate soft pastels or oil pastels in my work at all. This was just pure gouache and black charcoal on paper, although the arm there of the Incredible Hulk is used by means of oil paint. But this is a very important work. This work pretty much– It highlights everything in a way. It’s a large work; it’s 60 inches tall, 44 inches wide, as I said before, it’s gouache and black charcoal and oil paint on Coventry Vellum paper. And it’s called a Motorcycle Pig, because growing up in Chicago we had a pantry in the apartment. And the pantry was always filled with junk, and a lot of that junk was old motorcycle parts and bicycle parts. And I will never forget this. And of course around this time, I may have been six years old you know, and my father a man who could not read or write, but who indeed had a talent for drawing, he recognized that talent in me. And he went downstairs and he found an old, like an old desk of some sort. He brought it upstairs, we stayed on the sixth floor, apartment 604. He cleaned out the pantry for me, and he put that desk in the pantry. He propped it up with books, so it became like a drafting table. I was an avid collector of comic books. My dad knew this obviously, so he was hanging the comic books in the pantry so I can have some inspiration. And he would take shopping bags and he would rip them in half, so the shopping bags became my drawing paper. And this was all from a man who could not read or write. He was illiterate, but yet had enough wherewithal to understand the sort of format of motivation and inspiration that would be required for his young son to pursue this affinity for making pictures and drawing. And he set me in there, he says to me, “Every day after school after you finish your homework, you will spend time here; this will be your studio, and you will work every day.”

And that became hours upon hours of work and rendering. My father ripped off the erasers on all of my pencils and he says, “You will never erase, ’cause you will learn how to be very intentional with the marks that you make.” He taught me every mark will be made with great intention. And every mistake will not be a mistake, but will be an opportunity for you to find a creative solution. And so this is how my father trained me. And this training started for me five, six years old. I mean this is what we did every weekend. The comic books, I love comic books, so this explains the Incredible Hulk arm in this particular piece. Remember those motorcycle parts in the pantry? So you got the motorcycle there, my father was to me a big man. Big stature, he was like a warrior, a Trojan almost, which explains this sort of Roman armor that one is wearing, but also it highlights the sort of psychic armor that was indeed required to actually survive in a community like that of the Robert Taylor homes of Chicago. You had to be very, very diligent in how you protected yourself and how you guarded your dreams and your aspirations, because a community like that was fervently and efficiently designed to rape you of your dreams and your hopes of ever having an optimistic future. And of course then you have the pig snout, and my father loved pig feet.
(audience laughs)

I mean, he could not read or write, but he always found a job at a restaurant being a cook. And during that day you didn’t have to go to culinary art school to be a cook for someone’s restaurant, you all remember that right? Today you got to go to school and learn how to cook this dish and that dish and get these fancy names and stuff like that, pay all this tuition money. But years ago you didn’t have to do that. If you knew how to cook in a kitchen like I do, you cooked the food. And so my father, that’s what he did, and sometimes on those lucky days, he was allowed to bring food back home. And he would bring– I don’t know how he found pig feet, and pig ears and he would boil it, and we ate it together; it was a real delicacy. You know that my father liked. So this work encompasses all of those experiences in this piece, so now you can understand how deeply personal this practice is for me.

But yet, it’s also highly democratic, because I would like to believe that the work can be accessible by everybody. We all have had our experiences of loss and abandonment, or family relations that we remember and things that may pop up for us from time to time as we go on through life. That was a very memorable work for me, Motorcycle Pig. The other arm, the boxing glove. There was a kid who had moved into– I lived at 4500 South State Street. I lived in apartment 604. My mother’s say we lived at 4500 South State Street, apartment six-oh-foh, that’s how my mother, you know, ’cause she was from Mississippi, six-oh-foh.

She didn’t say, “mop the floor,” she said, “mop the floh.” She didn’t say, “close the door,” she said “close the doh.” You know– But DJ, this kid, he was like this kind of heavyset kid rough around the edges and he had these boxing gloves, and he always wanted to play boxing and things like that. But once again, you had to fight in that community. Not physically fight, I’m not talking about violence. I’m talking about fighting to grab hold of something. A belief, a desire to want to make it someday and possibly even get out of that community, because it was very dangerous and some of the strictest form of poverty you can imagine. I mean people had cookouts and people got together and there was some good times too no doubt about that, but generally speaking, this was a very difficult community. I would like to say this, too. I think it is important for me to also highlight, tonight, that this is my first solo museum exhibition.
(audience cheers)

And I am very honored to be here tonight in Madison. I’m thrilled, I’m fortunate, serendipity and luck plays a big part in life. I believe that. I believe that hard work is conclusion and exponential result. So when you work hard, of course, we tend to think about the outcome in a literal way, but there are exponential things that happen, and working hard and believing in something. And I just have to say that I am really happy to have gotten to this point in my life. I mean– I get– I don’t know, I could talk about my practice and give you some deep theoretical honest opinions of my work, but I’m a human being, and this is emotional for me. This is– I can’t believe it! (audience cheers) I can’t believe it, you know? (audience cheers) And I’m very happy that Rhona Hoffman is here with me tonight. (audience claps)

You know I’ve never, Donna and I went to visit Chicago some years ago and we walked past Rhona Hoffman Gallery. And I said to them, “I would love to work with Rhona Hoffman, man that’s–”
– [Donna] And what did I say? Remember I said, “Send a portfolio in.” You said, “You can’t do that!”
– You can’t send–
– [Donna] Don’t do that!

– And Donna and I went to a local coffee shop, and we had a couple coffees and I was like, “Whoa, Rhona Hoffman Gallery man that’s like one of the best programs in the world… and blah, blah, blah… And she helped a lot of artist’s careers.” You know, I was like, “Wow, that’s Rhona Hoffman, you know?” (Donna laughs) “She’s basically god,” you know.
(audience laughs)
– [Audience Member] Yes, baby!

– And then fast forward… Rhona Hoffman came to my studio. And right then and there she let it be very clear that she wanted to represent me. We booked the first solo exhibition and we’ve been together ever since. And she is the absolute best dealer I’ve ever worked with and I’m convinced, (audience applauds) that I, we’ll go the rest of my life, saying that exact same statement. Rhona Hoffman is– She cares about the artists. She cares about the artist’s career and how the artist works on being developed. I mean she really gives a damn about artists, and that’s why I love her so much, so I’m very– (Nathaniel laughs).

So, um, just to circle back a bit, I just told you about that experience. So prior to that even happening, I made this work and when I made this work I was still a teacher. I was a teacher for ten years, and I love teaching I love education. I say it all the time that education saved my life. But around this time I had a visit by a very powerful collector named Beth DeWoody. And she came to my studio and she presented to me this opportunity to submit a work to the Whitney Museum of American Art Auction Night. And this is the work that I created. I made the work. I rolled it up. I took it with me to my job, ’cause so often the Whitney Museum come to my teaching job and pick the work up to deliver it to the museum. But this piece is called Richard. Now Richard happens to be one of my brothers, whom I have not seen since I was 15 years old. And my brother Richard loved fashion. I mean, he had a closet full of nice clothes and fur coats and things like that and nice shirts and I wanted to make a work about him. He wore jewelry and stuff. And I thought that’d be so cool to put a work like that in the Whitney Museum. Now, sometimes I jokingly say I put a pimp in the Whitney Museum,(audience laughs) but Richard wasn’t a pimp, you know. And that night turned out to be a really phenomenal night for me. It was rather life changing in many respects. And now that’s in the collection of Beth DeWoody. She bid on the piece and she won the bid, and now she owns it and that’s it.

This is First and Fifteenth. My mom was a recipient of the state. She was a welfare recipient. And of course they get a check every 1st and 15th of the month. And I wanted to make a work that represented those, you know, people in Chicago, who were poor, essentially. And to try to find a way to visually show their attempts at presenting to the world a different reality of themselves. There’s a deep amount of shame that comes with being poor no doubt, and yet they would find ways to dress up in a certain way because they didn’t want to be seen with that kind of shame, you know, as they waited in long lines for the mailwoman or mailman to come to deliver the mail, because the welfare checks would come, so they would wait downstairs to get that check. And then they would use that money for whatever purposes they had to use it for. But this is something that was very just part of the fabric of life growing up in those tenement housing developments on the South Side of Chicago. And so memories like that stick with me, and I try to find ways to recreate them, and recreate them in a way with a sense of dignity about it. But at the same time try to tell a certain truth through the work.

When I came out of grad school I was making a lot of work about various issues, particularly issues related to racial politics in America or critiquing hip-hop culture. And then I sort of made this transition to making work about masculinity and femininity, and just exploring these different ideas in my practice. And I did that for about ten years. But throughout that timeframe, I was never particularly fully happy with my practice, because I was looking for something more honest, and I was trying to figure out what that could be. And it wasn’t until around 2013 when I discovered what was very real for me and very impactful for me, which was a practice where I can dive into the exploration of the spectrum of humanity. So now this allows for the…the illumination of the internalized world of people to show the multiplicity of one’s identity. How identity is constructed, and what it looks like.

And is not seamless; it’s not blemish-free, but is very crudely put together, because life experiences are built that way. And we learn to live with those experiences. There’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t run away from them, because they’re actually actively happening to you. So you learn to find a harmony with those very experiences. And this then gave rise to the actual technique in my practice where there’s this sort of jarring, sort of movement of parts and geometry, and is partly abstract and partly figurative. But all of these sort of modes of working are working and operating on the same plane to try and show the multiplicity of the internalized world, of a human being, which is in effect a technique that continues to carry the torch of Cubism, but the difference is that in Cubism the multiplicity of many different perspectives is based on the external surface of an object. But in my practice, it’s the multiplicity of perspectives based on the inner world of an object or subject. And it is a technique that I would like to coin. And it’s the technique of light, that is you’re taking a light through the corridors of the internalized world of a particular human being. That light lights up their corridor so you can see and feel the sort of dynamic rainbow-like spectrum of one’s identity and find ways to visually present that through a work of art. I call that Luminism. And this way, this technique, I like to believe that many perhaps years to come other artists will have to reckon with this. And there’s no better time than now to explore such a technique of Luminism, because it’s a rebellious technique. It’s a technique that goes against the grain of the cultural temperature that we are actually experiencing today in our own country, where it goes against a presumption of hate and prejudice and instead allows for the realization of how we can relate to each other, even if that means that we don’t understand that which we are relating to. That should not have to be a requirement. One ought to love another person simply on the basis of who you are. And one’s love should not be defined or predicated of one’s knowledge of one. Therefore, I can meet you sir, and I’m just meeting you tonight, I love you anyway. I don’t know you, I may not ever get to know you, but it’s just a human relation, just a common man and woman respect that we ought to have for one another.
(audience claps)

Yeah. So Luminism is a technique that allows for the exploration of the multiplicity of the internal world of a given subject or a human being so to speak. It to me I feel a great deal of conviction about it being the torch that can carry on another step further from Cubism. And that’s my technique and there was no more effective of exploration that took place than the one when I began to explore myself and my work which is quite difficult to do, because it’s very difficult to face the truth, and oftentimes the truth hurts and makes you feel uncomfortable. And so we find peace and a sense of tranquility and calm with avoiding the truth, but you cannot run away from the truth.So in the previous work,
(audience laughs)

– [Donna] Sorry.
– [Nathaniel] This piece is– It’s okay! (Nathaniel and audience laughs) So this piece is called Golf Mound, and it was part of my first solo show in New York at Half Gallery. It’s a small work: 16 by 30 inches of paper. You know, gouache, soft pastel, black charcoal, paint stick, oil pastel, gold leaf, on Coventry Vellum paper. But it’s called Golf Mound because I had to come to the realization I continue to deal with the grief of the loss of my mother. I had the fortune of attending a private boarding high school in Indiana, called Culver Academies. And every– Oh, is there a Culverite out there? Hey, all right, wow!
(audience laughs)

So every Sunday there was a parade, because Culver is like a military school, but it’s not a school for like bad kids, you know, the military aspect of the school was designed to maintain discipline amongst adolescent students. And as a co-ed school, so you have the Culver military academy for the boys and the Culver girls academy for the girls. And every Sunday there was a parade. And I was in the band unit, so many of the artists stayed in the band unit and I played the drums, and marched to the parade field. And people from around the country would come and see the band and clap at the end that sort of thing. And then at the end of the parade everyone would break away and go to the mess hall to eat lunch. I stayed back and I stayed back because I wanted to sit on the golf mound and I would listen to my Walkman and I’d listen to Al Green. I’d listen to “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart.” And every Sunday for four years that’s what I did. After every parade, I would sit on that golf mound and just mourn the loss of my mom, and listen to Al Green, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” and at the time I set aside for that. And then after that was done, I went to eat lunch, and I got on with the work of my academics, and I would study until the next Sunday, and I would use that time again. So, this was the disposition and what may very well continue to be the disposition of what I was and what I continue to be as that broken-hearted child on that golf mound. This is what it’s like to mourn the loss of your mother, to want your mother back in your life. That’s Luminism.

And it’s both painful and it’s beautiful. It’s both up and down, it’s everything and it’s nothing all at the same time. It’s just a state of being. So that means that the technique of Luminism requires a high level of empathy, and vulnerability in order to make such a work, to do that type of investigation through that particular art practice. And this show was exhibition of my first self-portraits. I’d never done self-portraits of myself, but of course not portraits in the traditional sense, ’cause I don’t have an interest in painting the physical form of who you are; there’s nothing real there. What’s real is the essence of who are you. So I’m trying to find ways to visually articulate the essence of a person. How can you paint that? I want to find ways to actually articulate that to render it. And that takes an incredible amount of work and just determination.

And speaking of work, I think it’s also important for you all to know, and I’m sure many of you already know, But um… make no mistake, making these pieces really do require many, many hours of work and labor. I love to make art. There isn’t anything else on earth that I can see myself doing. I mean for ten years I just made art for free. And never complained about it. I love creating. It’s the thing that I just love to do. And yet it’s also the most difficult sort of practice I’ve ever done. It’s very challenging. So, you wake up and you start working in the studio at 10:30, eleven o’clock a.m., and really you’re just working, let’s say from 10:30 a.m. until 2:00 a.m., every day. Now of course there are times you can take a break, take a week off, maybe two weeks, that sort of thing, but for the most part, I’m working in the studio every day, to make the work, because I have a deep insecurity about my practice. I’m deeply insecure about my work, as well.

And I’m so afraid. (chuckles) Like, I’m just so afraid of– I try to avoid making a bad work. Now, I have not achieved that goal. (laughter) I’m far from it, and I believe that some day I will finally make a good piece. I do believe that, but I haven’t achieved that yet. But, I think I’m making progress. I feel good about the progress I’m making. This is Sunday School; I explained this tonight to someone else– Oh, thank you baby, Choir Rehearsal. This is my studio manager. See, my wife is much more intelligent than I am. (laughter)

This piece is– There’s two aspects to this work. On one hand my mom– I was raised in a Baptist church, and my mom was a member of the choir. And she went to choir rehearsals throughout the week and she sang on Sundays, that’s one part. But the other part is when I got a little older I started attending a church in Chicago called St. Paul’s CME Baptist and I joined the choir. And no, I cannot sing and I didn’t need to know how to sing because the really good singers in the choir just drowned me out, but it was a beautiful time. But there was girl in the choir named Leticia Owens. She was the daughter of the pastor and she was the prettiest human being, the prettiest…

– [Audience Member] Watch yourself, now.

– Oh, she knows, she knows this story, Donna knows this story. I told you about this! (audience laughs) (Donna laughs) But anyway Letitia, you know, was a very pretty girl. The only time I got to see her was during choir rehearsal, because you know, she was the pastor’s, what you call it, P.K., preacher’s kid, so she was like the elite in the church. I didn’t have the courage to speak to her say anything. I didn’t think she would have interest in someone like me, ’cause remember I was this poor kid from the projects. She was from this upper-middle class family, her parents were professionals and stuff, leaders in the community.

In any case, that experience stayed with me as well, because it forced me to confront the dynamics of class in a way that I’ve never had to deal with before. And I felt it quite fervently during that time. ‘Cause there’s no reason why I should have felt insufficient enough to at least speak to her. But I did feel that way, because I was in fact poor, and I did not feel worthy enough to speak with Letitia Owens. (Donna laughs) I don’t know where she is today by the way. I don’t know.
(audience laughs) She’s somewhere out there. (Donna laughs)

– [Donna] Questions.
– [Nathaniel] Okay, so now my wife is detailing to me that it’s time for questions. (audience laughs)
– [Audience Member] So two questions. One, do you dream a lot? Do you have an active, you know, sleeping dream life? And two, do you think that dreams are maybe like Luminism self-portraits? I ask this because there’s such a dream-like quality to your intuition.

– [Nathaniel] Well, I imagine– They say people dream every night. We might not– I don’t remember my dreams. I remember one dream and– (audience laughs) I’ll tell you, I remember one dream. (Nathaniel laughs)

– [Donna] Okay, baby. Baby, that’s not what she means.
– [Nathaniel] Is that what you mean? Like a dream?
– [Donna] When people dream a lot, that means they remember it the next day. If you’re’ quite a dreamy person who dreams normally, you know, like every kind of so often I’ll say I remember, “Oh, God, I had this dream!” You never do that to me. You’re not a dream person.

– [Nathaniel] No, I know! (audience laughs) I don’t remember my dreams! I don’t remember my dreams! Does that answer the question? (audience laughs)

– [Donna] He never remembers his dreams; he’s not a dreamy person. Remember one dream, in 41 years?
– [Nathaniel] Yeah only one, yes ma’am.

– [Woman] So, it seems like a lot of your work is a representation of growing up and your childhood and adolescence, is there any aspects of your work that represents having made it or the journey?

– [Nathaniel] No. That’s a good question. My recent first solo show was my New York Gallery Salon 94 is a show called The Land, and that entire exhibition is about various members of my community of Crown Heights Brooklyn.So to answer your question, it wasn’t even about me at all. It was just about– My wife and I recently bought a house, three years ago now. We moved into this community, and it was on the verge of gentrification. We all know Brooklyn’s going through this big change, becoming one of the most robust real estate markets in the world. And, so you still have the old remnants of Crown Heights there. And the first night we move in. We go to sleep and there’s like six, seven guys standing in front of the house. ‘Cause the house had been abandoned, right, so they were accustomed to standing there. Now my wife is from London. And in Brooklyn, she thinks she’s on the set of BET, you know. (audience laughs) She thinks it’s a movie.

And she said, “I’m going out there and I’m going to do this.” And I said, “No, you’re not.” (audience laughs) “You’re not going– Let me handle this. You better not do that. They don’t care about your little cute British accent, trust me.” So I went out there and I spoke with the guy, “Hey, how you all doing.” I introduced myself to them. And they said “Hey what’s up.” I said, “Hey look man, we’re new homeowner’s man. I just notice you guys are standing, What’s going on what’s happening?” And we just started talking and relating. And then I learned that one of the guys had prison time, the other guy was a drug dealer, another guy was in and out of jail. They were a little older, like 35 to 40, you know. And I was just kind of relating with them, and I thought cool, you know what I mean? And so then at the end, like 45 minutes of talking, just connecting with them, because you have to first realize some things, first that when you move into a new community you have to understand that you’re moving into somebody’s home. They grew up there; we’re new. Secondly, we’re gentrifiers, right? So we’re homeowners ourselves. They recognize that, so they’re also reading us. So I wanted to lighten up the mood with them. And it worked, and I said, “Hey man, look, we’re about to go to bed. I know you’re out chilling, but if you don’t mind moving down the block a little bit so my wife can get some sleep.” You know the guy said– One of the guy’s names was Tu. Brawny big guy, you know, he just got out.
(audience laughs)

He was fresh out, and he said, “You know what Quinn, we’re going to move because you came to us with respect.” That’s what he said to me. He says, “Otherwise, we’ll be whupping your ass up and down the street right now.” (audience laughs) And I said, “Yeah, you would.” (audience laughs) I’m not trying to act tough, I’m not a tough guy. I’m an artist, but then I said to him, but I said to him, “But you understand Tu that I’m willing to give up my life for my wife now, you understand that.” And he says, “If you weren’t, I’d still be whupping your ass up and down the street.” (audience laughs)

And then ever since we’ve developed this relationship. This is over about two years. And then all of a sudden I began to get these visions of these pieces that I want to do, about them and other people in the community. I called the exhibition The Land. And so there were 50 works in the show. Each work is predicated on an actual person in the community. And those guys, a lot of them are in the show. They don’t know what I do. They don’t know that I make art actually, but one piece in the show is called JB and Bobby, which was exhibited at my current show at The Drawing Center museum in New York. Now, it’s in a collection of the Art Institute of Chicago through Rhona Hoffman Gallery. (audience applauds) And it’s actually about, you know, JB and Bobby. So as it turns out, my technique allowed for the exploration of other lives and things like that, so it went beyond just my family and my history, but it began to open the doors to explore the histories of other peoples, and certain communities as well.
Yes?

– [Audience Member] Every time I look at your pieces, I think about Francis Bacon.
– [Nathaniel] You said Francis Bacon?
– [Audience Member] Yeah.

– [Nathaniel] Yeah, I get that a lot. Although, I will say I haven’t really spent a lot of time looking at Francis Bacon’s work for any kind of inspiration for the kind of practices that I do, but I see what you’re saying.

– [Audience Member] So for me my question then would be does it matter the race of the person is who you’re looking at, like I saw in your video outside that you have like some– You were putting up pieces of– There was like a white woman who were you using. And even though you’re describing a black person, do you need to use a black face or can you use a white face or Asian face? Or people like that, too?

– [Nathaniel] Okay. No, that’s what I was saying earlier, it’s about the exploration of humanity. You know what I’m saying. Humanity and race don’t correlate. There’s no such thing. Race is just some construct we decided to participate in. Like democracy’s not “real.” These things aren’t real. What’s your name?

– [Erin] Erin Ocracy.
– [Nathaniel] Erin Ocracy, imagine that you could create that in your home. Erin Ocracy, like democracy. You have your own constitution, and people got to live by it.

– [Erin] It’s my husband; he lives by it.
– [Nathaniel] Yeah see, (audience laughs) Erin Ocracy.
– [Erin] So my question too then is when people like Dana Schutz did the Wheel Show. To me that was so hurtful that people didn’t see that she was tying into a narrative that would beyond on her race.

– [Nathaniel] Yeah, I mean, you know what, I…
– [Audience Member] That’s his name, Emmett Till.
– [Erin] Emmett Till.

– [Nathaniel]Yeah, Emmett Till. I understand that perspective wholeheartedly, ’cause of course she’s an artist, and she was exploring a particular historical moment in American history and every artist ought to–Artists reserve the right to do that, much in the same way, you know, Lucian Freud…he had a model, who would model for him, he would paint the model’s back, and that was a beautiful thing. It’s great. But there’s been a history of black artists, if we were to just paint someone’s back, it would be politicized and just given a different kind of meaning, when in fact we just want to paint the person’s back. That’s all it is, you know. But in my work, I do, it’s not about race. You know, it’s about really trying to find ways to explore the multiplicity of one’s humanity. You see what I’m saying? Like this piece is Ethan. Now Ethan, and you, are one and the same. You’re just like him. And we all are, because it’s the delusion of race that disallows for the embrace of the humanity of the other. So when I see… (audience claps) as human beings, we’re seen as people without feelings without emotions, who don’t deal with despair, you know. But I’m trying to indicate through my work that we’re all the same, that’s why Luminism is so important, so it can help to highlight the reality of our relation of who we are as a people so that way you can look at the work, and you will all know, it’s not about race. It’s not even about if the person’s white or black, or whatever the case is, it’s just about using those photographs that you saw in that catalog as a means to give form and shape to the subject.

I look at the flesh of the subject the way I look at a chair or a tablecloth. It’s just form; it’s just making the work. You know, ’cause I– That’s what it is for me. But if you limit your view of the work to being about race then you miss out on the beauty and the lesson and understanding the multiplicity in your own identity, how complex you are, how beautiful that is. And that beauty not only exists in you, but it exists in everybody and it exists in the subjects. But you have to have a personal reckoning with humanity through a real connection with somebody. And it just turns out that the connection I’ve been having are with people who are black. But it allows for the exploration of that the complexity in their humanity.

I mean look, if I moved into a predominantly white community, I still would’ve made a work called The Land, and the figures would’ve been that. And it wouldn’t change anything, cause they’re humans, too. There’s still the multiplicity of perceptions and the person’s identity. It still exists, you know. If you happen to be walking down the street, and you see someone walking down the street, and they take off flying, that’s a different race. That’s something different than you. That’s different. But as far as I know, we all have the common cold, right? And appears that for the most part none of us is immune to cancer or other kind of illnesses. We all know what pain is. We all know what loss is.

Like, the things that you can’t see with the naked eye would perhaps become the most dangerous things to your life. Like viruses, viruses don’t know what color you are. They don’t care about your race. Your own heart doesn’t know what color you are. Your heart don’t even know that you exist. Your heart is just beating, that’s it. That’s it, so I think it’s important to get, to dive into the reality of things and just relate. Yes? Wait, wait. One more question?

– [Audience Member] The eyes are very powerful in your work. It’s like a commonality between all the work. Have you met the characters from your childhood or memories in your adult life?

– Have I met them in my adult life?

– [Audience Member] Yeah, these characters that your memories are of, have you met them in your adult life?

– No, no, no, no, just in my childhood. But you know, I’ve met these characters, this piece is called Terry. I know them today ’cause they live in my neighborhood, you know, but from my childhood, did I meet them again? No sir, I have not.

– [Audience Member] Can you give any example or any story about literally what you do about making the painting, about your, like the visions, or your brothers.

– They just, they just, they just, they just come. I’m not trying to make them happen. I’m just, I’m just being. You know, I mean like, it’s about being present. It’s about being like still and being present, and you just let it flow through you. I like to think of myself as a medium, through which the universe flows. You understand, and it just flows through you. You know, there’s a difference between…like creating art versus being art. And then there’s a difference between creating art and just being. And don’t even call it art. You just, you just be. And, I trust the visions that are flowing through me, I just trust them. Because they come from a real genuine place for me, and then I begin to create the work, and then the work tells me what they are. And often times I don’t know what it is, until I get towards the end of the process of creating a work. And every time it is spot on. It’s like that’s Charles, that’s Charles! Because Charles had that exact same smirk, when he smiled. That’s my brother.

You know, or that’s Richard, or that’s Claire Mae or that’s Miss Chairs. It just–And that’s Charles. Yeah, that’s Charles! And he had the same smirk; that’s my brother Charles. That’s– Oh, there he is, that’s my brother. But I don’t have a picture of him, or photograph of him. I haven’t seen him since I was 15 years old. But of course it’s in my memory, and most of our memories are not at the forefront of our minds. But yet those experiences being lodged in the deep recesses of your mind, continue to dictate your behavior patterns, the decisions you make, the way you view the world, the way you receive information, the way you dissect information. So this stuff is in you, it’s in you. And if you could just be still and present enough, and just be present and still, and let, for me, just let the talent do the work, let the work do the work, let the work be. Don’t force it, don’t be contrived, just be honest and let it be. And just trust that, and then you start working with the materials I work with a lot of different materials, and so you got to have a relationship with the materials you work with as well, cause the answers are in the paint and pastels. And you got to understand what the pastels can do for you. You have to have respect for your materials, you see. So you form a relationship to the point where you understand that you and the materials are one, you come from the same origin. What exists in the materials also exists in you.

So you have to understand that the pastels can do this for me, can do that for me, and how you can deal with the materials to get a certain result and then you render through hours of labor and patience, and you just keep working on it, and working on it. And the vision is like broadcast on the paper. I’m working within that. And you’re working in the moment, you see. So you’re not overthinking your process, because the vision did not– It came to me by means of the absence of overthinking. And then secondly, you are removing yourself. You’re not interpreting it, you’re just letting it be. You know, great artists– This is the key. Many great artists have used in their works. It’s how to make those great, masterful works. They were in that kind of space. That’s the space that they were in, Lucian Freud was in that space. He wasn’t painting with paint, he was painting with flesh. There’s a difference. He was being the work he was being it. And that’s how you work and from that practice, the answers come out, through the work, because it must be about the work. Once you make it about you, that’s when God leaves the room. But when you keep it about the work God stays there with you. You see what I’m saying to you?
(audience claps)
(audience cheers)