Just Imagine!
Artist Jared McGriff speaks of paintings as tools to help people organize their world, reflect on memories, and consider how they assign meaning and value to construct their reality.
Have you ever met a person or entered a room that felt instantly familiar? That feeling that you have been there before or the memory of having seen that face or heard the sound of that voice somewhere before? I had such an encounter, but with a painting. I was on the second floor of a warehouse-like building to see an exhibition of paintings. At the end of a dark hallway flanked by doors, some open, most closed, a group of people stood by the entrance of a brightly lit room talking, laughing, drinking. I had reached my destination. As I entered a painting on the far right wall of two women in bathing suits caught my eye. They are standing slightly to the right of the canvas, on the shore of a body of water. The woman on the left is wearing a pale pink one-piece and the one to her right a red and white polka dot two-piece. The latter seems to be talking. Their arms touch at the elbows. The background, horizontally divided in three, is warm yellow at bottom, the remaining two thirds in shades of blue. Despite the two figures, the painting felt abstract.
That was in 2019. Much has happened in these mere four years in the world and in my personal life. Once I started this series of interviews, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to pay a visit to my friends and speak to the artist?” Well, the painting now has a permanent home at the Rubell Museum (Miami). The artist, Jared McGriff, was available for a conversation.
Jared McGriff is tall, has observant eyes and is an attentive listener whose pauses during our conversation were rhythmic, as in a musical score. His studio is in that same hallway, one door before the one I had visited then. Brushes and paints occupy several surfaces. Blank canvases are stretched on the floor, waiting for their turn. Bigger painted canvases are leaning against the wall and some smaller ones are hung. Generous horizontal lines hold many of the compositions together. The studio seems to be an archive of his memory, with suggestions of people, circumstances, moods, and self-reflection. Memory here is the landscape: figures are indeterminate, life is quotidian and joy is injected in this daily existence.
Recently I heard someone saying: “We are like walking museums: wearing our memories and people we have encountered in our stride”. Possibly. Below, our conversation on memory, experiences and the importance of imagination.
CARMEN: In your work, the thinking behind it and the several layers it takes, you explore the idea of “how we are our environment and how our environment creates us, as people. And how there are ways to shape our environment deliberately” as you are doing so in painting. This statement I read while preparing for this conversation got me thinking of how vision is informed by more than what we see.
Do you agree with this association? Could we say your paintings invite us to experience the world through them, maybe even creating one of our own?
JARED: Yes, definitely. When I'm painting, I am thinking about this idea of constructing an environment that can be used as a conduit for people to think about their own perceptions. I want the painting to act as a tool to help people order their world in a way and think about their own memories and experiences, and how they might assign meaning and value to those things in terms of how they construct the world. A lot of it is about the questions that the paintings bring up because sometimes there are small anachronisms in the work that make people infer something. And in that inference, they have to pull on their own experience or it might make them question what something is or why something is happening or what is happening or the relationship between individuals and the works. And all those questions and the answers that will come about are related to this idea that you're bringing up.
The act of painting has been a way for me to construct my environment but it has also been the result of questioning the constructs in the environment that I experienced. So it's a way of saying: “This is how things are in my reality.” There's often no bridge between the two, but it's still a way to spend time somewhere else, essentially.
CT: It is believed that art can be a tool for self-discovery, one that broadens our perspective, fosters empathy and stimulates critical thinking. A better self-understanding is also said to play an important role in contributing to a sense of belonging. You have mentioned that your practice has been a constant in the vicissitudes of life and that it has allowed you to spend time with your memory. Would you say it has also helped you know yourself better? If so, were there aspects about yourself that were revealed?
JM: It definitely has. In the world that I'm in now where I have to articulate what I'm working on externally, it has made me think about what I'm thinking and why I'm doing something. In that sense, yes, it's a strong affirmative to the question.
In terms of what has been revealed, I think there are certain threads that I'm seeing in the work. Painting has served as a mirror to what I'm considering as signals that reflect what I'm tracking and everything I'm consuming: my travels, the news, personal conversations, books, etc. I'm a filter and the painting is the reflection of all these inputs.
So in that sense there are definitely some threads there but I can't say painting has taught me “x” or “y”. The practice of painting has given me what a lot of people get from any kind of practice. If you practice yoga or run or play golf there are certain things you could get out of it like patience, diligence, self-discipline, forgiveness of self. And that's what painting has given me: it's made me learn about myself, but those things can be learned through other means as well.
CT: Could we say that because of the need to put your practice into words those threads were revealed?
JM: For sure. In writing about my practice in this iteration where I'm painting and there's an external viewer, it has made me think about what I'm painting, why I’m painting, and what I'm thinking. Before I had to articulate the “whys” of my work, I had an Instagram project where I posted drawings or paintings regularly, as in a journal, but it was never about those paintings or drawings, it was about a release really. I did not have to elaborate on them or connect them to other ideas.
Now, with concentration and more practice, I'm able to see some of the things that I'm working with. I've always been influenced by postmodernism; by people who are questioning systems and maybe even changing systems; by people who are really into coming up with a different way to do things. Now I am able to further the ideas of those threads, and others that I’ve been exposed to, and reflect them in my work and in how I talk about it.
CT: We are going through a much needed historical reset and I believe art has been playing a prominent role. I am thinking of exhibitions such as When we see Us: A century of Black Figuration in Painting” at the Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town, South Africa and “Judy Chicago: Herstory, a six-decade survey of her work in New York’s New Museum, to name a few.Several of your paintings depict scenes of mundane, ordinary life. Why do you think it’s important to tell stories of the common man? Can they contribute to expanding the vocabulary of art?
JM: For sure. Institutions are paying attention to demographics outside of what they did in the past and there's a potential for them to include other perspectives that don’t belong to the upper echelons in terms of the hierarchies that Western capitalism has set up. I think irrespective of those hierarchies, people like me have always been creating influential work. I'm in the tradition of focusing on the surroundings, the actual peer group, the environment that one sees on a day-to-day basis which is the environment that shapes a person—versus scenes or views that are more constructed. The mundane, day-to-day life are the moments that make up our experience and our existence.
CT: It takes us back to the thought of how our interaction with our environment has a profound impact on our emotions. How our lived experiences shape our understanding of the world.
JM: Exactly. I want to highlight that because in the town where I grew up there were no museums or universities; there were no places to view art or see live performances. So what these scenes are providing are these highlights and punctuations to life. It's day-to-day life: people cracking jokes in the garage; people talking on the phone; people getting into a fight. There's tremendous value in that. And I think that as I've been exposed to different demographics and experiences, I find that there's a lack of joy and a lack of peace about life in a way. I think it's sad that people don't experience the richness of life without any barriers to experiencing joy.
But I think paintings can only do so much. I think they can cause someone to pause and reflect. That's all it can do. And that's what we want. For me, in making the painting, that's where some of this is.
CT: I agree. I do not think art could or should solve any problems, but could it be a seed that might be sowed?
JM: Not that you intend it to be that way, but it definitely could. I think that you can plant a seed in any soil you want, but it's only gonna grow with the soil that has the right conditions. And it only matters if the soil has the right conditions. So I wish for all the best of all seeds planted.
CT: I guess there's a bit of chance there as we seed. I’m being optimistic.
JM: For sure. And 3 cheers for the optimist. I think we need optimism more than ever. I need painting more than ever because painting has been, as you mentioned, the constant in my life. I lean on it for everything. That's the only way I can make sense of anything. When I see what's going on in the world, whether it's Gaza or Yemen or Sudan or the Congo, these are things that unfortunately can consume me. And they've always consumed me since early on coming out of South Central and seeing the things around me. All these things have weighed very heavily on me on a daily basis.
So the only way that I can maintain any kind of position where I'm not only being consumed by those things is through painting. That's where my optimism is because I just see that there's so many ways that we've been failed by these systems and structures. Despite all that failure and all those very poor, anti-humane decisions, we still have to swim within it.
CT: Despite saying you're not optimistic about the ways in which the world might change, slowly or ever, I do think that your paintings convey joy. There's activism, there are elements of politics in your work, and there’s also joy. Actually, I think you are much more optimistic than I am.
JM: That's great. That's fantastic. I think we all need it, however we can get it, because things are tough sometimes.
CT: When I first saw one of your paintings I had a feeling you were not introducing us to your friends, but proposing possible ones. They looked directly at me, as if inviting me to create a story. Have people come to you with stories from any of your paintings?
JM: People have these little story lines and narratives about almost all the paintings they see. Everybody tells me something and I think it's pretty funny. People have commented on this painting of a couple dancing—I think you saw it at The Hampton House. They will say: “This is a breakup”; “This is an apology”; “Oh, we’ve been through so much together”. They are casting their own experience on the work. To me that's what success is in a way: where the people who see the work are putting themselves in it. Even if only as an observer, this narrative building shows that they're using their own imagination.
I think that one of the goals of my painting is to get people to use their imagination, because I think we live in an ad driven world. Through the study of advertising, psychology, and mass communications we know that ads are essentially getting people to shut off how they're thinking. Advertising is intentionally designed to put people along a specific thinking path. And by doing so, they're shutting off their own thinking path. That's the world we live in right now, especially in the United States. In Suriname, where I traveled to recently, the advertising is minimal and that’s why I loved it so much. But here in the U.S., especially online, we are bombarded 24/7 by advertising. So even subconsciously we're put along these thinking paths that shut off our imagination.
I think one of our key strengths as humans is our imagination. Imagination is one of the main traits that makes us human, and we hardly use it. We're in these mazes of someone else's choosing around how we think. So when I hear someone express their own imagination about something, I'm curious, because they're actually not reciting some stupid conspiracy theory that they think is their own because they've been on their social media 24/7. It's actually an original thought. It's actually their own imagination.
So it's really cool when people are engaged in this process because that's basically how I make these paintings. I'm doing one line after another. I start in this very abstract manner for the most part and I think: “this could be a nose”; “this could be a tree”; “this could be this”, “this could be that”.
CT: Yes, because in your abstract paintings the body occupies space and the space has certain divisions. That opens a whole world for the viewer to follow their own process, starting from wherever they want, opening and nurturing their imagination. I consider that an immense contribution. That's a part of the seed I was talking about earlier.
JM: Thanks. I'm glad you see it in that way.
CT: Can you describe one of your paintings?
JM: Okay. I'll choose this watercolor piece. There’s a figure in the foreground standing on a boat which is displayed diagonally in the image and the figure is stepping on the edge of the boat balancing between what looks like a basic rowboat and the water that the boat is on with the arms in a diagonal fashion almost like the person is spreading their arms as people do when mimicking flight. In the background there is what could be considered a blank sky, maybe a bright sky with nature behind it. So it almost looks like the person is standing on a boat in an area that is close to the shore; of a body of water that could be a lake or ocean and the land is maybe an island or some other land mass that's maybe surrounded by water or very close to the water; influenced by water. The figure is wearing a green short sleeve t-shirt and red shorts with no shoes. The figure could be young, potentially male. The boat is blue and brown or maybe those are the shadows. The water is blue and the background land is greenish brown, the color of trees in light.
CT: The quote below is an excerpt from the essay Seeing ourselves, by Tandazani Dhlakama, co-curator of the exhibition When we see us, part of the exhibition’s catalog.(1) Could you comment on it?
What underpins ‘When We See Us’ is the perpetuation, essence and phenomenon of Black Joy. Joy can be radical and political. Even without reactively resisting, it can be a profound tool used to dislodge harmful tropes and refute the centrality of colonialism, as emphasized by Achille Mbembé in ‘African Modes of Self-Writing’. Furthermore, the exhibition goes far beyond the lament of scholar Kevin Quashie when he says, ’nearly all of what has been written about Blackness assumes that Black culture is, or should be, identified by resistant expressiveness - a response to racial oppression, a speaking back to the dominant ideology. Rather, ‘When We See Us’ challenges this by focusing on how Black artists see themselves and each other apart from imposed or reductive narratives associated with the spectacle of Black pain. The theme of Joy thus manifests in the exhibition in the form of euphoric revelry, repose, the quotidian, sensuality, triumph and the metaphysical.
JM: I see the point of this quote and in a lot of ways I agree with this idea of making work that is not part of a response to these narratives around the spectacle of hate. So, yes, that resonates, for sure. I don't know that there is always an intention around joy in particular.
I see the point of curators who are going back and looking at work, articulating it (Black Joy) in this way, whereas in the moment, I find that I am creating work as a Black artist for the audience of other Black folks, vs coming from a point of view where I am responding to narratives cast from an external audience, to see blackness from the inside out.
CT: The joy I see in your paintings I associate with humanity, the human joy, more than with skin color or blackness. I don’t see politics being addressed in them.
JM: In terms of my personal experience, I don't think the political nature of it can be removed from my work. As a human, I can say: “I don't see myself as a Black person. I see myself as a person.” Well, I don't see myself as a Black artist. I see myself as an artist. That's true. I don't primarily look at myself as a Black artist, but at the same time I am very much a Black artist in that my work can only be generated through the Black American experience. I can't remove that aspect of my work because frankly I don't think I would even make work if I wasn't living in my body.
CT: This makes me think of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who stated: “I wasn’t Black till I came to America. I became Black in America. Growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t think about race because I didn’t need to think about race.”(2) The previous quote is from an essay written for an exhibition that took place in Africa. There is a difference between being a Black person in Africa and a Black person in the United States.
JM: Yes. Totally. The interesting thing about Chimamanda's work is that in a reverse way she gets at this inextricable relationship of the political Blackness of the American Black person and humanity in and of itself. That's where it's hard for me to parse it. When I think about my work, I'm not always depicting certain things that elicit an association with a specific political state of Black people within America. But what's interesting is that a Black American would see things in the work that are idiosyncratic to our experience. That's what I mean, I’m a Black artist reflecting an experience that belongs to me, but is a part of a collective Black American experience. And there is this inherent political nature of being Black in the United States which is my experience and has shaped my whole life, on a daily basis.
CT: What you are saying is that there is a code that a certain group of people know and are able to use to read your paintings?
JM: Yes. An example could be from my show at the Rubell Museum. One of the paintings, the smallest one, was of a woman sitting down, holding a purse. A lot of Black folks who see this painting see something that reflects a very specific Black experience related to church and their grandmothers, because we've all been through this experience. [In particular this is referring the complexities of matriarchal family structures and the Black Church as the only Black-led institution in America – central to financial, civic and educational life of Black Americans organizing themselves post-enslavement.]
What's interesting about art, and painting in particular, is that we can discuss issues that we don't always have the language for.
CT: That has been my ambition, and practice: to read into the language of art and try to bring it to words.