School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21 School of the Art Insititute of Chicago emerge Journal 20-21
By Elise Butterfield
When immersed in making something, my brain and hands and heart are braided tightly. It feels like I can access the divinity of everythingness. – Juniper Moneypenny
In “What Makes an Artist?” Matt Manalo and Juniper Moneypenny explore their own practices of artmaking and community building. They directly push against the relentless infiltration of capitalism into art through a commitment to community-building, activism and resource sharing. These artists find meaning not in the silo of the solo studio, but in exchange—of story, of material, even of confession and pain.
“What Makes an Artist?” is a generous peek into the journal of two thoughtful artist-hybrids as they navigate institutions, identity, and community. Manalo and Moneypenny in their own ways begin to articulate the dream of an art world not held captive by the interests and the taste of the wealthy. Lofty in their belief of the power of art, and grounded in the reality of its current inaccessibility, their artistic practice is one of self-inquiry, service, witness, abundance, facilitation, witchcraft, and more. For them, it is not the single-authored masterpiece that makes an artist, but the devotion to creating in myriad forms.
By Elise Butterfield
When immersed in making something, my brain and hands and heart are braided tightly. It feels like I can access the divinity of everythingness. – Juniper Moneypenny
In “What Makes an Artist?” Matt Manalo and Juniper Moneypenny explore their own practices of artmaking and community building. They directly push against the relentless infiltration of capitalism into art through a commitment to community-building, activism and resource sharing. These artists find meaning not in the silo of the solo studio, but in exchange—of story, of material, even of confession and pain.
“What Makes an Artist?” is a generous peek into the journal of two thoughtful artist-hybrids as they navigate institutions, identity, and community. Manalo and Moneypenny in their own ways begin to articulate the dream of an art world not held captive by the interests and the taste of the wealthy. Lofty in their belief of the power of art, and grounded in the reality of its current inaccessibility, their artistic practice is one of self-inquiry, service, witness, abundance, facilitation, witchcraft, and more. For them, it is not the single-authored masterpiece that makes an artist, but the devotion to creating in myriad forms.
Matt
Manalo /
Manalo /
Repurposed: How found material
made my work possible
I graduated from the University of Houston in 2011 with my BFA in painting, and as soon as I left, I lost my main source of materials. While I was a student, I commuted daily from my parents’ house to school, during which I would take a shortcut through a small area that served as a garbage room for graduate students. There I would find materials students tossed: discarded or ripped canvas, cut wood to build stretchers, old sketchbooks, piles of used paper. It wasn’t until one day when a student decided to get rid of many stretchers that I finally understood this room as a source for material as opposed to garbage collection. That day, I picked up the discarded stretchers and brought them to my studio with so much excitement because I didn’t need to purchase new materials to make my own work.
During this time, I had approximately a 10-by-10 foot studio at the university. Even though studios were communal spaces, there was just enough room for a single person to move around if they had their belongings piled up. The works I was making at the time were small in size because of space constraints. They were also mostly made from discarded raw canvas I found in the graduate students’ dumpster, some of which had already been used and had marks on them. I eventually incorporated those existing marks into my work’s aesthetic and they simply became part of my practice. Other materials I was using at the time included charcoal, graphite, wood glue, and gesso because those were the art supplies that were most accessible to me.
My material choices in college, while they came about serendipitously, were also born out of necessity. When I began using found material in my work, it was 2009, and I was part of the junior block painting program. I was working two jobs at the time but was still terribly broke. I was making $15 per article while writing for The Daily Cougar, the university newspaper. I was also working part-time as an art installer and security guard at The Blaffer Art Museum, and yet, I couldn’t afford to buy the materials I needed to complete my projects.
Our professors in the painting block assigned everyone a word that our work was intended to explore for the semester. The word I got was “map,” and for this reason, a lot of my work followed a grid format that resembled this word. Through this assignment, I was able to unpack and explore issues regarding immigration and displacement. In addition to my work with grids, I also incorporated sculptural elements into my paintings. I was doing extensive reading about Robert Rauschenberg’s practice where he would go around his studio in New York City and picked up things to use in his works. I used to go to the Menil Collection to see his shipping boxes on display. They were gigantic boxes laid flat against the white walls of the museum. I could tell that these boxes had a history by the wear and tear on their surface. Their aesthetic was interesting to me, but I was more curious about what they carried and the means of transportation used to deliver their contents.
While my studio-mates in the painting block were experimenting with moving paint on smooth canvases, I was trying to figure out how to attach a piece of wood to my canvas. My professors Rachel Hecker and Al Souza pushed me to keep making this type of work even though my classmates didn’t know how to engage with it during critiques. Despite it being a painting class, I used very little paint. The only color that existed in my paintings was from the existing marks on the canvas I reused. It wasn’t until the latter portion of the semester when my classmates began to interrogate the flatness of their canvases that they tried to figure out ways to approach my work differently. Eventually, two of the pieces I made during the painting block were collected by the playwright Edward Albee.
Following graduation, I began buying materials because I no longer had access to the grad students’ garbage room, and subsequently, I started making what you could consider being more painterly work. But it didn’t feel the same. I eventually decided to go back to my old way of working. I didn’t only feel more comfortable doing so, but also, it was a way of making that kept me occupied, continually curious. Throughout the years, I made friends with other artists who understood what my practice was about, and we found ourselves exchanging art materials we had in our studios instead of throwing them away, some of whom I highlight below:
Cecila Norman is a mixed-media artist involved in the food industry. Her previous work experience at Finca Tres Robles Farms has made her realize and stay engrossed in recent conversations regarding waste and sourcing of materials. From dyeing fabrics with turmeric and avocado skin to making ink out of black beans, she views these experiments as a way of producing more sustainable and Earth-friendly materials. Her practice leans more into the experience of making the product, rather than the product itself while starting a conversation that would not have been discussed otherwise. She mentions that her practice also allows her to explore the materials presented to her, and it is evident through her choices of both color and imagery. She is currently working with artist and educator Ann Houang of Work With Women, an organization working to empower a community of Congolese women through art and storytelling.
Julia Barbosa Landois is a visual and performance artist. I specifically asked her about her work titled Suburban Labyrinth, a labyrinth constructed from salvaged wood intended for walking meditation. The installation has a painted path inspired by the street maps of the Houston suburbs. She shared with me that when she moved to Houston from San Antonio in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, her neighborhood flooded and was one of the places most badly hit. Due to the damages caused by the flood, her neighbors were forced to take everything out of their homes that had been submerged in water. She visited her neighbors one by one to learn more about their situations and asked if she could take and reuse their flood-damaged wood. Landois made sure to remain conscious of the endless sprawl of Texans from their cities, the waste produced by the construction, and the irony of slowly traversing on a map built on the culture of cars. From there, she built the walking meditation labyrinth with the idea of being “trapped in the suburbs,” which became a terrifying sight of boats floating down their street and neighbors losing their homes. After the work was displayed, she decided to donate the damaged wood to students, friends, and its original owners. Later on, she told me how the same neighbors reached out to help each other during the winter storm that hit Texas this past March.
Lastly, Claire Drennan Jarvis is a fiber artist and a fashion designer. Her background in fashion evolved into art-making and informed the attention she pays to the sources of her materials. Her materials are usually recycled, handed down, or generally humanely made. In 2019, she was invited to propose a collaborative art project for the Periwinkle Arts In Medicine program at Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Centers. Her proposed project was a colorful garden created with thrifted fabric, in which children and their families, as well as volunteers, helped create unique flowers. The flowers made were later installed on a flower bed that Claire made in collaboration with the creators. Throughout the process of creating the necessary materials for this project, she relied on the help of her friends with cutting, organizing, and building the “garden.”
Like my colleagues, I value reusing material not only because I need material to make work, but also because I understand that the waste I produce in making artwork is directly implicated in climate change. When I realized this, I became increasingly conscious of the waste I left in my studio. This was a dimension of my practice I hadn’t registered previously, and when I finally did, I figured that my artwork was more socially conscious than I had initially thought. I wasn’t just making work for myself, but for reasons far past myself and with people outside of myself. And it’s partly because of the material-sharing network I had built that my work had become a form of social practice.
In the book Education for Socially Engaged Art, Pablo Helguera defines socially engaged art as: “All art, inasmuch as it is created to be communicated to or experienced by others, is social. Yet to claim that all art is social does not take us very far in understanding the difference between a static work such as a painting and a social interaction that proclaims itself as art—that is, socially engaged art.” Helguera also mentions that “All art invites social interaction, yet in the case of socially engaged art it is the process itself—the fabrication of the work—that is social. Furthermore, socially engaged art is often characterized by the activation of members of the public in roles beyond passive receptor.” In simpler terms, social practice focuses on the relationships among the viewer, the artist, and the social systems we operate in. Often it is defined as collaborative and community-driven art that is made to directly engage social issues,
I had the opportunity to work with Rick Lowe, one of the pioneers of social practice, who I met during my residency at the Project Row Houses in Houston. With the help of other local artists, he transformed shotgun houses into art studios and living spaces. His practice also inspired my work with Alief Art House, which operates out of a used shipping container located in the middle of a community garden. Alief Art House is a community-focused art space I founded with a mission to highlight artists who live, grew up, work, or have deep connections to Alief, Texas. The shipping container is a humble 10-by-20 feet, and the sight of it is something very normal in the neighborhood. The use of a pre-owned shipping container made so much sense to me because I wanted a space that was sustainable and a look that was approachable versus having a building that had a threatening vibe of gentrifying the neighborhood.
In Tagalog, the word “dreams” can be translated into two different ways: The first is panaginip, which means “the state of dreaming,” and ambisyon, which translates to “ambition.” When I moved to the US from the Philippines in 2004, I was nineteen, and it wasn’t a dream—it was a nightmare. I wanted to be an artist, but the whole idea of creating as a career seemed far off especially living in a society that makes it feel like that goal is impossible to achieve. There are still so many things that need to be fixed to make this dream accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it. But after a few years since my move, I realized that you could have ambition while being in a dreaming state. And that’s why I went head first and made the decision I did to switch my major from nursing to studio art. Looking back, the nineteen-year-old version of myself would have been surprised to see me in the present.
It took years and years of being afraid to finally have the courage to be able to create art for a living, but using found materials has enabled me to accomplish my dream. Even more, it feels familiar and comfortable to me, almost like home. I am constantly thinking about being uprooted or losing purpose, then being found again. To me, these ideas are near-biographical. While it’s less expensive and more sustainable to use found material in my work, the material of my work itself and the process I use to make it embodies these same ideas of rooting/uprooting, making a home/displacement, and migration.
I believe that mixed media and social practice go hand in hand and lead to a more sustainable art practice, while continuously being conscious about the role of art in society. The social climate in the US today proves how easy it is to dispose of things that still hold value. When a country is built upon capitalism, the ideas of excess and scarcity will always be relevant. The accessibility of my materials has made mine and other’s dreams a reality. I have realized early that sustainability in an individual’s practice is very important. It will help with the longevity of their career, along with their storytelling. I believe that by also collaborating with our communities, individuals will be able to foster healthier relationships. In doing so, your work exists beyond the self and actively negates this perception of the artist as a solitary figure, removed from the world. The future of social practice in the arts is the foundation of discovering how we can engage, interact, and support ourselves and each other better.
made my work possible
I graduated from the University of Houston in 2011 with my BFA in painting, and as soon as I left, I lost my main source of materials. While I was a student, I commuted daily from my parents’ house to school, during which I would take a shortcut through a small area that served as a garbage room for graduate students. There I would find materials students tossed: discarded or ripped canvas, cut wood to build stretchers, old sketchbooks, piles of used paper. It wasn’t until one day when a student decided to get rid of many stretchers that I finally understood this room as a source for material as opposed to garbage collection. That day, I picked up the discarded stretchers and brought them to my studio with so much excitement because I didn’t need to purchase new materials to make my own work.
During this time, I had approximately a 10-by-10 foot studio at the university. Even though studios were communal spaces, there was just enough room for a single person to move around if they had their belongings piled up. The works I was making at the time were small in size because of space constraints. They were also mostly made from discarded raw canvas I found in the graduate students’ dumpster, some of which had already been used and had marks on them. I eventually incorporated those existing marks into my work’s aesthetic and they simply became part of my practice. Other materials I was using at the time included charcoal, graphite, wood glue, and gesso because those were the art supplies that were most accessible to me.
My material choices in college, while they came about serendipitously, were also born out of necessity. When I began using found material in my work, it was 2009, and I was part of the junior block painting program. I was working two jobs at the time but was still terribly broke. I was making $15 per article while writing for The Daily Cougar, the university newspaper. I was also working part-time as an art installer and security guard at The Blaffer Art Museum, and yet, I couldn’t afford to buy the materials I needed to complete my projects.
Our professors in the painting block assigned everyone a word that our work was intended to explore for the semester. The word I got was “map,” and for this reason, a lot of my work followed a grid format that resembled this word. Through this assignment, I was able to unpack and explore issues regarding immigration and displacement. In addition to my work with grids, I also incorporated sculptural elements into my paintings. I was doing extensive reading about Robert Rauschenberg’s practice where he would go around his studio in New York City and picked up things to use in his works. I used to go to the Menil Collection to see his shipping boxes on display. They were gigantic boxes laid flat against the white walls of the museum. I could tell that these boxes had a history by the wear and tear on their surface. Their aesthetic was interesting to me, but I was more curious about what they carried and the means of transportation used to deliver their contents.
While my studio-mates in the painting block were experimenting with moving paint on smooth canvases, I was trying to figure out how to attach a piece of wood to my canvas. My professors Rachel Hecker and Al Souza pushed me to keep making this type of work even though my classmates didn’t know how to engage with it during critiques. Despite it being a painting class, I used very little paint. The only color that existed in my paintings was from the existing marks on the canvas I reused. It wasn’t until the latter portion of the semester when my classmates began to interrogate the flatness of their canvases that they tried to figure out ways to approach my work differently. Eventually, two of the pieces I made during the painting block were collected by the playwright Edward Albee.
Following graduation, I began buying materials because I no longer had access to the grad students’ garbage room, and subsequently, I started making what you could consider being more painterly work. But it didn’t feel the same. I eventually decided to go back to my old way of working. I didn’t only feel more comfortable doing so, but also, it was a way of making that kept me occupied, continually curious. Throughout the years, I made friends with other artists who understood what my practice was about, and we found ourselves exchanging art materials we had in our studios instead of throwing them away, some of whom I highlight below:
Cecila Norman is a mixed-media artist involved in the food industry. Her previous work experience at Finca Tres Robles Farms has made her realize and stay engrossed in recent conversations regarding waste and sourcing of materials. From dyeing fabrics with turmeric and avocado skin to making ink out of black beans, she views these experiments as a way of producing more sustainable and Earth-friendly materials. Her practice leans more into the experience of making the product, rather than the product itself while starting a conversation that would not have been discussed otherwise. She mentions that her practice also allows her to explore the materials presented to her, and it is evident through her choices of both color and imagery. She is currently working with artist and educator Ann Houang of Work With Women, an organization working to empower a community of Congolese women through art and storytelling.
Julia Barbosa Landois is a visual and performance artist. I specifically asked her about her work titled Suburban Labyrinth, a labyrinth constructed from salvaged wood intended for walking meditation. The installation has a painted path inspired by the street maps of the Houston suburbs. She shared with me that when she moved to Houston from San Antonio in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, her neighborhood flooded and was one of the places most badly hit. Due to the damages caused by the flood, her neighbors were forced to take everything out of their homes that had been submerged in water. She visited her neighbors one by one to learn more about their situations and asked if she could take and reuse their flood-damaged wood. Landois made sure to remain conscious of the endless sprawl of Texans from their cities, the waste produced by the construction, and the irony of slowly traversing on a map built on the culture of cars. From there, she built the walking meditation labyrinth with the idea of being “trapped in the suburbs,” which became a terrifying sight of boats floating down their street and neighbors losing their homes. After the work was displayed, she decided to donate the damaged wood to students, friends, and its original owners. Later on, she told me how the same neighbors reached out to help each other during the winter storm that hit Texas this past March.
Lastly, Claire Drennan Jarvis is a fiber artist and a fashion designer. Her background in fashion evolved into art-making and informed the attention she pays to the sources of her materials. Her materials are usually recycled, handed down, or generally humanely made. In 2019, she was invited to propose a collaborative art project for the Periwinkle Arts In Medicine program at Texas Children's Cancer and Hematology Centers. Her proposed project was a colorful garden created with thrifted fabric, in which children and their families, as well as volunteers, helped create unique flowers. The flowers made were later installed on a flower bed that Claire made in collaboration with the creators. Throughout the process of creating the necessary materials for this project, she relied on the help of her friends with cutting, organizing, and building the “garden.”
Like my colleagues, I value reusing material not only because I need material to make work, but also because I understand that the waste I produce in making artwork is directly implicated in climate change. When I realized this, I became increasingly conscious of the waste I left in my studio. This was a dimension of my practice I hadn’t registered previously, and when I finally did, I figured that my artwork was more socially conscious than I had initially thought. I wasn’t just making work for myself, but for reasons far past myself and with people outside of myself. And it’s partly because of the material-sharing network I had built that my work had become a form of social practice.
In the book Education for Socially Engaged Art, Pablo Helguera defines socially engaged art as: “All art, inasmuch as it is created to be communicated to or experienced by others, is social. Yet to claim that all art is social does not take us very far in understanding the difference between a static work such as a painting and a social interaction that proclaims itself as art—that is, socially engaged art.” Helguera also mentions that “All art invites social interaction, yet in the case of socially engaged art it is the process itself—the fabrication of the work—that is social. Furthermore, socially engaged art is often characterized by the activation of members of the public in roles beyond passive receptor.” In simpler terms, social practice focuses on the relationships among the viewer, the artist, and the social systems we operate in. Often it is defined as collaborative and community-driven art that is made to directly engage social issues,
I had the opportunity to work with Rick Lowe, one of the pioneers of social practice, who I met during my residency at the Project Row Houses in Houston. With the help of other local artists, he transformed shotgun houses into art studios and living spaces. His practice also inspired my work with Alief Art House, which operates out of a used shipping container located in the middle of a community garden. Alief Art House is a community-focused art space I founded with a mission to highlight artists who live, grew up, work, or have deep connections to Alief, Texas. The shipping container is a humble 10-by-20 feet, and the sight of it is something very normal in the neighborhood. The use of a pre-owned shipping container made so much sense to me because I wanted a space that was sustainable and a look that was approachable versus having a building that had a threatening vibe of gentrifying the neighborhood.
In Tagalog, the word “dreams” can be translated into two different ways: The first is panaginip, which means “the state of dreaming,” and ambisyon, which translates to “ambition.” When I moved to the US from the Philippines in 2004, I was nineteen, and it wasn’t a dream—it was a nightmare. I wanted to be an artist, but the whole idea of creating as a career seemed far off especially living in a society that makes it feel like that goal is impossible to achieve. There are still so many things that need to be fixed to make this dream accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it. But after a few years since my move, I realized that you could have ambition while being in a dreaming state. And that’s why I went head first and made the decision I did to switch my major from nursing to studio art. Looking back, the nineteen-year-old version of myself would have been surprised to see me in the present.
It took years and years of being afraid to finally have the courage to be able to create art for a living, but using found materials has enabled me to accomplish my dream. Even more, it feels familiar and comfortable to me, almost like home. I am constantly thinking about being uprooted or losing purpose, then being found again. To me, these ideas are near-biographical. While it’s less expensive and more sustainable to use found material in my work, the material of my work itself and the process I use to make it embodies these same ideas of rooting/uprooting, making a home/displacement, and migration.
I believe that mixed media and social practice go hand in hand and lead to a more sustainable art practice, while continuously being conscious about the role of art in society. The social climate in the US today proves how easy it is to dispose of things that still hold value. When a country is built upon capitalism, the ideas of excess and scarcity will always be relevant. The accessibility of my materials has made mine and other’s dreams a reality. I have realized early that sustainability in an individual’s practice is very important. It will help with the longevity of their career, along with their storytelling. I believe that by also collaborating with our communities, individuals will be able to foster healthier relationships. In doing so, your work exists beyond the self and actively negates this perception of the artist as a solitary figure, removed from the world. The future of social practice in the arts is the foundation of discovering how we can engage, interact, and support ourselves and each other better.
Juniper Moneypenny /
Living through this:
On art and artlessness
during a pandemic
content disclosure: this piece
contains themes related to
medical trauma, illness, and death
Is it enough to work out for myself what this was and what could be possible?
I have made a career inside of hospital rooms, making art at bedsides and over tray tables, alongside young people who, as one child’s mother lithely put it, “are in need of encouragement.” When I meet a new client for the first time, it is oftentimes at a moment when the scaffolding holding them up is being tested, with varying specificities of cruelty or chaos. Colliding at this intersection between an old reality and a new one, I envision myself an engineer-witch hybrid. I am invited inside someone’s figurative and literal space, touching surfaces and their insides, pressing my ear to a structure under strain, asking with readied gentleness: tell me where the tender places are, I can hold whatever you can stand to show me. These first moments with someone loom enormous in my memories yet with enough of them lined up on a sunny windowsill, they are heartbreakingly ordinary treasures. There is a poetry to learning to read these beginnings of people’s stories, I joke that I am a trained human divination machine, analyzing and absorbing signs and symbols. Instead of studying stars or bones, I work off the sound of an inhale or the timing of a hard swallow, the direction of a loose gaze, and the weight of the negative shapes we are talking carefully around. I have practiced recognizing the preciousness and precariousness of other people’s stories’ beginning. In the moments we gather ourselves enough to overcome the threshold of unsaying, we are put squarely in view. This work will embroider a respect for such courage into your being.
The most salient part of a pandemic is that we are experiencing it together, yet in ways that are frighteningly particular to us. In conversations with friends, I find myself using phrases like, my pandemic, as if this were a way to acknowledge the distinctness of our experiences, and the inherent unknowable amplitude to each of them. I balk at slicing the story of my pandemic, how to delineate it into something that is intelligible. Like you, I am living through a knotted convalescence of collective trauma and personal crisis, and for the longest time, it defied my attempts to describe it. Images undulate for me in ways that feel safe, and so I choose to begin there. Please:
Why can’t I talk about dreaming about new systems without talking about heartbreak?
Before there was my pandemic, there was a life before, a life I had left behind. My last night living in a salt-encrusted valley, I struggled to dig a shallow hole in a field of wintered dirt. I was determined to successfully bury a jar containing a failed love spell before leaving the place forever. An onlooking friend had just scratched a sprig of juniperus utahensis into the side of my neck with black ink as a goodbye. We’d packed up my books and my art supplies and put them on an outbound train together. Under a weary moon, three years’ worth of dry-boiled hope came pouring out of my eyes as I entombed my fragile offerings in an unceremonious patch off the I-80 freeway. I had come to the mysterious West for my first full-time art therapy job after having floundered to find consistent work in the six years following the completion of my clinical training as an art therapist. I had taken a leap of faith in moving to Utah, never having seen the place, never having even said the noun aloud before accepting the job. My destiny manifested in the experiment: eight thousand dollars of credit card debt incurred in clinical supervision fees and an ATR-BC and a mental health license to put in a manilla folder. These were parting gifts I had anticipated, but I hadn’t predicted my quiet stipend of self-doubt and deeply enculturated loneliness, nor the nettled sting of a failed partnership that continued to haunt me elaborately. As a fresh Utahn, I had found someone when I was the most thirsty for a soft and endless place to fall, and I had tumbled miraculously. I broke marvelously when our paths diverged once again. The whole doomed choreography made me feel as a xenograft shunned by its host. The rejection swept me inside myself, into the caverns of my own resolve, and that resolve moved me to change. The change brought my mittened hands to this moment, clutching a jar of remnants of a love affair buried in sugar and sealed in wax. Imagine the flickering scene:
The dressing of the stage and placement of the props are too woven into my pandemic story to omit. It was the first month of a new year; the first year of a new decade; I had been hurt, and I was on the cusp of running away. The logical response to shutting the door on such a startling brush with my dreams’ fulfillment-gone-awry was to fling myself toward the place where I last felt I’d belonged, which was New York, a city I loved. I had artist friends and activist friends with whom I knew I could sink into familiar patterns. Despite the hard knocks, I had solid experience as a medical art therapist and I used my newly padded CV to land a carbon copy job at another hospital. It felt like a trick I was getting away with, to have kept a place bookmarked in a profession so gatekept and mired in scarcity.
You thought you’d never come back to yourself.
When immersed in making something, my brain and hands and heart are braided tightly. It feels like I can access the divinity of everythingness. Sometimes this communion takes the form of a person, an idea, a place, a feeling. Institutionalized art pedagogy nurtured a fear of time into me, namely, that all possibilities were chained to a very quantifiable, finite end. The longer I have lived, the more I’ve come to understand it for myself as a fear of death. Yet when I am at my best, this fear melts whitehot and condenses like electric nectar to become something akin to fertility. Art becomes devotion, magic in a form alive.
My art practice grew out of desperation and desire: I wanted to stare straight into myself without looking away, unapologetic and unashamed. Likewise, I pursued art therapy because I wanted to share this shapeshifting with others, to watch my clients build their own moments of limitlessness. When I think about being an artist and a therapist, I cannot separate these identities, nor from being ecstatically of service. To be of service is to run in cycles of hunger and sustenance. At best, art therapy is an ecosystem of potent choices. The landscape of this work enriches me. It is a terrain I can always return to, and upon crossing its borders, feel the core of me set alight. When I am thriving, my emotional capacity for service is the shining hammer that attunes me into a more fine tool for the task. Yet if the balance of my work is somehow thrown, I struggle to survive. A layer of dusty exhaustion falls over me, over the land, and I can’t recognize where I am.
I had once convinced myself that my art therapy education would always remain a soured dream to shake a skinny fist at, seasoning it with my most colorful curses. I was just old enough and disillusioned enough to know when landing my first dreamy job that it had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t that a system could recognize my merit or my skills, it had everything to do with the terror built into the circuitry. The flipside of most everyone being shut out is that someone makes it in. Life had spoon-fed me this proof, like when a physician caught my arm after starting my position in Salt Lake City: you’re the new art therapist; I was on your hiring committee. I noticed you had an impressive resume. RISD is a great school. I went to Brown. I laughed so much about that on the phone with my friends from undergrad, the ones in retail and food service jobs, and the ones still bemoaning living at home, and the ones who didn’t make art any longer. We shared the kind of laughter that you can notice as dainty foam atop pooling sadness. We knew, without having to say so, the encounter with the doctor begged the question, how much longer might I have spent upselling watercolors in the suburbs if it had not been for a string of five words under an eye primed to recognize the signal? It was a signal as easy to overlook as it was to celebrate. It was a signal anchored to the reality of one hundred thousand dollars of debt. Put yourself here:
When I emerged from general anesthesia, I was sobbing for the whole world.
didn’t know or even think much about my father as a child, but somewhere in between the bookends of college semesters, I took a week to meet my father in rural Florida. For the first time my hazy abstraction of what a father might be was superimposed with, finally, a verified person. These memories of us meeting as strangers are encoded with a delicate, almost otherworldly quality. One feature of him turned smooth in my mind from handling, the thing striking me even now, is the ease and force with which he could weep. I had come to know that in the order of things, personhood must be fenced by stoicism. Emotionality had been yoked to distaste in my growing-up, however so subtle, however so well-intentioned my instructors. The legacy of this idea haunted me as an emerging adult. At the moment my father breezily chose to enter my life, I was still unlearning the resentment I harbored for my own stormy and tear-soaked nature. As such, I was fascinated by his tears and even more drawn to his comfort with them. He hiccuped over our morning coffee as he described concepts like Beauty or Patriotism. He positively dissolved describing the life of his favorite poet whilst weaving through heavy traffic. He wailed wetly in a Denny’s parking lot after singing along to a cassette containing original songs his much younger voice embalmed there. I hadn’t yet witnessed such virtuosity of surrender, and I didn’t immediately know how to categorize a phenomenon I found compelling, yet one which could easily enough be dismissed as some shade of unwell.
I have a photograph capturing the moment of my birth in which both my parents are gazing at me during my first minutes spent earthside on my mother’s chest. She once told me that I did not cry out when I was born, I simply stared at the world, sullenly clear-eyed as the midwife handed me over. When I peer at this photograph, I wonder what it must have been like for these freshly-made parents to hear a few weeks later that the neurological machinery of their baby’s vision was not properly made. My pleasantly blue eyes were connected to something broken behind the curtain of their prettiness, and there was no reason why, and no way to fix it. My mother did not consent to a pediatric surgery that involved the manipulation of my extraocular muscles. She was not impressed by this medical option to improve my developing vision. She did, however, have people lay crystals on me and shine blue lights into my eyes through something that looked like a megaphone. It was her way of helping, effects still unknown. Similarly, sometimes I try to watch myself grow up through pictures. At every age, from babyhood to adulthood, to the untrained eye I appear frozen at some humiliated angle, tilted and askew inside every image. This was the effect of adjusting my head to the null point where my vision is best, so as to regard the camera regarding me; knowing this, I still find it unsettling.
Decades later, I chose to have the surgery my mother had not chosen on my behalf. It was eerie to be the patient after extended time spent on the other side of the consumer/ provider power dynamic. I felt irrational shame to undergo a procedure most people have completed by toddlerhood. It excavated an attachment grief inside me that I had avoided for years by only licking at the edges. The nurse I met readying me for surgery was unnervingly cold, but eventually animated into some human form when she learned during the pre-op interview that no family would be coming to stay with me in the recovery suite. Rather, I was expecting an acquaintance whom I had sheepishly asked to come collect me. I studied her as she visibly processed the information, incorrectly assuming through some arduous mental calculus that this must be due to my gender and sexuality markers documented in my medical record, a recent addendum to the hospital’s protocols. She whispered, “you’ll build your own family now,” knowingly, but hoarse with her hesitation. When I did not respond, she repeated it more decisively and even patted my lower forearm for greater effect, as if she had aimed for my hand, but couldn’t ultimately commit. I swallowed the strangeness like a nasty drink and let her enjoy the thrill of her own noble kindness.
When I surfaced from the surgical sedation, I was flooded with pain so terrible it had a pitch, like a voice. I had never experienced sensory dimensionality to pain before, pain that held memories and could whisper secrets. As I struggled to open my eyes, I instinctively reached to touch them, howling. I remember someone restraining my hands. There was a woman there, patiently asking me why I was crying. I was frustrated that I’d even need to explain, that they wouldn’t just know it alongside me: I could feel our world’s suffering etched on my eyes. Layers of sorrows and injustices were being channeled through my body and I struggled to express my powerlessness to mend it, generations of turmoil rippling through me like waves. The acquaintance who had come to take me home told me, days later, that when they had entered the recovery area, the exasperated nurse’s greeting was: oh, thank god you’re here, she’s going to tear out her sutures like that, crying for everyone in the whole world. When I tell the story, there’s ghosts of my father rattling in there, and it’s the only thing I can see. It takes up the whole sky.
I imagine tenuous threads, perhaps soft and seeping spaces between the physical body, the emotional body, the lived-in, lived-inside, lived-in-spite-of body. These spaces are where the work finds us:
What am I willing to let die?
At my worst moments, I revile this hospital. For weeks, there is no sign of preparation,1 no coordinated effort we can observe to plan for the storm we have watched play out in other places across the country and across the world. Hospital leadership dismisses the mounting unease amongst patient-facing workers by staying silent on the matter, yet I notice blurry harbingers of dysfunction: We are reprimanded for wearing surgical masks in the hallways and in elevators and when facing patients. The nurse managers and administrators tell us we are seeding panic. A terse email goes out to inform us that any employee who is discovered stealing PPE will be immediately terminated. New York’s first coronavirus case was confirmed on March 2nd, thirty-five days after my first day to show up to my new job in my practical shoes and my just-trimmed bangs. This is where I mark the start of my pandemic, though yours likely begins before or after. I request to pivot the scope of my services away from group art therapy and inquire about telehealth infrastructure. An administrator flicks away my ethical concerns with five beautifully coffin-shaped nails the color of oxblood: it’s just like the flu, wash your hands and you’ll be fine. Ominously, she will be the first person I know to fall very ill, and I will replay the footage of this moment in my mind like a looping .gif image, an infinite boomerang.
By mid-March I am terrified to go to work. We don’t have enough surgical masks, N95 respirators, or gloves, or gowns. My hospital puts donated Yankees rain ponchos into the brown paper bags of PPE we get once a week. We are instructed to hoard and reuse these supplies until the next offering. A resident physician tweets a photo of her bag and our PR department puts out the fire swiftly, since this was, of course, just a misunderstanding. As cases continue to rise, my morning subway ride will become less and less populated until I am the only person on the noisy N train. I will spend an increasing proportion of the daily commute crying myself into hyperventilation, until I develop the strategy of shutting my eyes for the whole ride as taught to me by the other essential workers whom I study from the other side of the subway car. My coworkers rent vehicles during the whole of April, to avoid the exposure of the subway. They scold me for taking the risk, but I can’t drive. I finally become so numb to the routine of the three hour commute that after a certain point, I am not afraid of this particular part of the day anymore.
At the height of the first surge of patients, there is nowhere to keep all the very sick and dying people. The hospital administrators will do all they can to discharge the children, so they can fill the empty beds with adults. The pediatric operating rooms become ICU space. Even the outpatient waiting rooms are converted into patient care areas. Out of a whole hospital with ten floors built for children, there is only one unit where you can still find a child. We don’t even have enough room to keep patients’ bodies after they have passed away. The first time I see the refrigerator trucks rumbling outside the hospital, I am horrified to notice people snapping pictures of them, as if someday we’d need the documentation to verify we hadn’t dreamed up the detail.
Other creative arts therapists in the city are providing virtual support while sheltering in place, or they have been furloughed, or they have quit their jobs entirely. Why not quit if you’re so afraid? why not take an unpaid leave if this is too much for you? isn’t this what you signed up for? why would you want hazard pay, isn’t being able to help enough? I am blindly angry. I am brightly angry. I feel like a pawn as my job becomes something I do not recognize, one I even resent at times. I keep coming in, not because I believe I am effectively helping, but because I am without resources which means being without choices. I am convinced that with one contaminated exhalation, I may be the reason someone I am there to help will die, but I keep coming in. My working life becomes a dissonant wound and I keep coming in.
What did I do in this year when no art would exist outside my body?
While my pandemic raged at its zenith, nothing artful would come out of my body at all. I watched my friends rollercoastering through their own pandemics via digital timeline. Through an intravenous drip of images and updates, I watched the people I know turn into all manner of things: tiny students of virology and sociology, homesteaders and survivalists, watercolorists and vigilantes, radicals and amateur economists. Laid-off friends became chefs and tailors, woodworkers, authors. From the outside looking in, I imagined my working-from-home friends carving out new realities for themselves in between refreshing their inboxes and tiptaptiptapping in shared Excel sheets, finally the horticulturists, conflict mediators, playwrights, and historians they had wanted to be. I tell myself now that this image was an amorphous fiction, tinted with the unrealistic envy of a person questioning everything. The bitterness became a form of perfunctory self-flagellation.
In a year of my own artlessness, I quietly watched the ebb and flow of my friends’ endeavors. I joined Zoom-based poetry readings inspired by their anti-oppressive reading groups. I tuned into their experimental livestreams based on the lifecycle of fungi. I read their essays about the merits of a slow life, even an unremarkable one. I subscribed to their anticapitalist podcasts. I watched their embroidery timelapse YouTube videos. In the most harsh light, at my most depleted, to be an art therapist living through a pandemic seemed to me to be trapped by one’s work. Art as a force for interpersonal, intrapersonal, and societal change was unfolding around me daily: in our personal rituals, in our rage and our defiance, in our grief, in our altruism, in our will to survive, in our eagerness to understand each other. As a mental health worker, I looked at the pandemic and its waves of reckonings with an augmented sheen of awe: this is art, this is artful, this is healing work. And I just wanted to put it all down, this precious burden. It felt too important to look away, yet too difficult to honor it in the way it deserved. And yet, in its best light, the honeyed light of golden hour, my identity as an art therapist brought me an eerie gratitude. I was grateful to experience the impact and the cultural urgency of making art, to witness the hopes and fears of the friends and strangers making it, and to feel the faint vital signs of my movable, emotional heart reverberating within myself. At a moment when my creative animus felt so far away, like some elemental lie I had convinced myself to believe in, I needed to steep myself in art conjured by others to remember: yes, still alive.
Full text
On art and artlessness
during a pandemic
content disclosure: this piece
contains themes related to
medical trauma, illness, and death
Is it enough to work out for myself what this was and what could be possible?
I have made a career inside of hospital rooms, making art at bedsides and over tray tables, alongside young people who, as one child’s mother lithely put it, “are in need of encouragement.” When I meet a new client for the first time, it is oftentimes at a moment when the scaffolding holding them up is being tested, with varying specificities of cruelty or chaos. Colliding at this intersection between an old reality and a new one, I envision myself an engineer-witch hybrid. I am invited inside someone’s figurative and literal space, touching surfaces and their insides, pressing my ear to a structure under strain, asking with readied gentleness: tell me where the tender places are, I can hold whatever you can stand to show me. These first moments with someone loom enormous in my memories yet with enough of them lined up on a sunny windowsill, they are heartbreakingly ordinary treasures. There is a poetry to learning to read these beginnings of people’s stories, I joke that I am a trained human divination machine, analyzing and absorbing signs and symbols. Instead of studying stars or bones, I work off the sound of an inhale or the timing of a hard swallow, the direction of a loose gaze, and the weight of the negative shapes we are talking carefully around. I have practiced recognizing the preciousness and precariousness of other people’s stories’ beginning. In the moments we gather ourselves enough to overcome the threshold of unsaying, we are put squarely in view. This work will embroider a respect for such courage into your being.
The most salient part of a pandemic is that we are experiencing it together, yet in ways that are frighteningly particular to us. In conversations with friends, I find myself using phrases like, my pandemic, as if this were a way to acknowledge the distinctness of our experiences, and the inherent unknowable amplitude to each of them. I balk at slicing the story of my pandemic, how to delineate it into something that is intelligible. Like you, I am living through a knotted convalescence of collective trauma and personal crisis, and for the longest time, it defied my attempts to describe it. Images undulate for me in ways that feel safe, and so I choose to begin there. Please:
Imagine carrying yourself through a tunnel of fire, wriggling on
your belly under a cloud of the poisonous unknowns, and you are
not quite sure where and when the tunnel began, if you are still
inside it, or if it is still a tunnel at all.
Why can’t I talk about dreaming about new systems without talking about heartbreak?
Before there was my pandemic, there was a life before, a life I had left behind. My last night living in a salt-encrusted valley, I struggled to dig a shallow hole in a field of wintered dirt. I was determined to successfully bury a jar containing a failed love spell before leaving the place forever. An onlooking friend had just scratched a sprig of juniperus utahensis into the side of my neck with black ink as a goodbye. We’d packed up my books and my art supplies and put them on an outbound train together. Under a weary moon, three years’ worth of dry-boiled hope came pouring out of my eyes as I entombed my fragile offerings in an unceremonious patch off the I-80 freeway. I had come to the mysterious West for my first full-time art therapy job after having floundered to find consistent work in the six years following the completion of my clinical training as an art therapist. I had taken a leap of faith in moving to Utah, never having seen the place, never having even said the noun aloud before accepting the job. My destiny manifested in the experiment: eight thousand dollars of credit card debt incurred in clinical supervision fees and an ATR-BC and a mental health license to put in a manilla folder. These were parting gifts I had anticipated, but I hadn’t predicted my quiet stipend of self-doubt and deeply enculturated loneliness, nor the nettled sting of a failed partnership that continued to haunt me elaborately. As a fresh Utahn, I had found someone when I was the most thirsty for a soft and endless place to fall, and I had tumbled miraculously. I broke marvelously when our paths diverged once again. The whole doomed choreography made me feel as a xenograft shunned by its host. The rejection swept me inside myself, into the caverns of my own resolve, and that resolve moved me to change. The change brought my mittened hands to this moment, clutching a jar of remnants of a love affair buried in sugar and sealed in wax. Imagine the flickering scene:
You put the spell in the ground and the object transforms before
you into a tangible gulp of relief. You have nearly delivered
yourself through this time using every resource you could
assemble. This unwelcoming place has not stamped you out yet.
You are a sapling more difficult to kill than that. Even in the harshness of a high-altitude desert, you have lived through this.
you into a tangible gulp of relief. You have nearly delivered
yourself through this time using every resource you could
assemble. This unwelcoming place has not stamped you out yet.
You are a sapling more difficult to kill than that. Even in the harshness of a high-altitude desert, you have lived through this.
The dressing of the stage and placement of the props are too woven into my pandemic story to omit. It was the first month of a new year; the first year of a new decade; I had been hurt, and I was on the cusp of running away. The logical response to shutting the door on such a startling brush with my dreams’ fulfillment-gone-awry was to fling myself toward the place where I last felt I’d belonged, which was New York, a city I loved. I had artist friends and activist friends with whom I knew I could sink into familiar patterns. Despite the hard knocks, I had solid experience as a medical art therapist and I used my newly padded CV to land a carbon copy job at another hospital. It felt like a trick I was getting away with, to have kept a place bookmarked in a profession so gatekept and mired in scarcity.
You thought you’d never come back to yourself.
When immersed in making something, my brain and hands and heart are braided tightly. It feels like I can access the divinity of everythingness. Sometimes this communion takes the form of a person, an idea, a place, a feeling. Institutionalized art pedagogy nurtured a fear of time into me, namely, that all possibilities were chained to a very quantifiable, finite end. The longer I have lived, the more I’ve come to understand it for myself as a fear of death. Yet when I am at my best, this fear melts whitehot and condenses like electric nectar to become something akin to fertility. Art becomes devotion, magic in a form alive.
My art practice grew out of desperation and desire: I wanted to stare straight into myself without looking away, unapologetic and unashamed. Likewise, I pursued art therapy because I wanted to share this shapeshifting with others, to watch my clients build their own moments of limitlessness. When I think about being an artist and a therapist, I cannot separate these identities, nor from being ecstatically of service. To be of service is to run in cycles of hunger and sustenance. At best, art therapy is an ecosystem of potent choices. The landscape of this work enriches me. It is a terrain I can always return to, and upon crossing its borders, feel the core of me set alight. When I am thriving, my emotional capacity for service is the shining hammer that attunes me into a more fine tool for the task. Yet if the balance of my work is somehow thrown, I struggle to survive. A layer of dusty exhaustion falls over me, over the land, and I can’t recognize where I am.
I had once convinced myself that my art therapy education would always remain a soured dream to shake a skinny fist at, seasoning it with my most colorful curses. I was just old enough and disillusioned enough to know when landing my first dreamy job that it had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t that a system could recognize my merit or my skills, it had everything to do with the terror built into the circuitry. The flipside of most everyone being shut out is that someone makes it in. Life had spoon-fed me this proof, like when a physician caught my arm after starting my position in Salt Lake City: you’re the new art therapist; I was on your hiring committee. I noticed you had an impressive resume. RISD is a great school. I went to Brown. I laughed so much about that on the phone with my friends from undergrad, the ones in retail and food service jobs, and the ones still bemoaning living at home, and the ones who didn’t make art any longer. We shared the kind of laughter that you can notice as dainty foam atop pooling sadness. We knew, without having to say so, the encounter with the doctor begged the question, how much longer might I have spent upselling watercolors in the suburbs if it had not been for a string of five words under an eye primed to recognize the signal? It was a signal as easy to overlook as it was to celebrate. It was a signal anchored to the reality of one hundred thousand dollars of debt. Put yourself here:
You have spent eight years percolating in the womb of academia
and after great laboring, you take your first wobbling-fawn steps
to find that there is no place for you after all. How you will be able
to sleep at night, what food you will get to put in your cart at the
grocery, and what amounts of hope you will allow yourself to feel
at any given time has always been decided for you by a ticker
tape of endless digits. These numbers will only add up to larger
and larger numbers and you will watch the world around you
surge onward, unmoved, because this is what you signed up for.
When I emerged from general anesthesia, I was sobbing for the whole world.
didn’t know or even think much about my father as a child, but somewhere in between the bookends of college semesters, I took a week to meet my father in rural Florida. For the first time my hazy abstraction of what a father might be was superimposed with, finally, a verified person. These memories of us meeting as strangers are encoded with a delicate, almost otherworldly quality. One feature of him turned smooth in my mind from handling, the thing striking me even now, is the ease and force with which he could weep. I had come to know that in the order of things, personhood must be fenced by stoicism. Emotionality had been yoked to distaste in my growing-up, however so subtle, however so well-intentioned my instructors. The legacy of this idea haunted me as an emerging adult. At the moment my father breezily chose to enter my life, I was still unlearning the resentment I harbored for my own stormy and tear-soaked nature. As such, I was fascinated by his tears and even more drawn to his comfort with them. He hiccuped over our morning coffee as he described concepts like Beauty or Patriotism. He positively dissolved describing the life of his favorite poet whilst weaving through heavy traffic. He wailed wetly in a Denny’s parking lot after singing along to a cassette containing original songs his much younger voice embalmed there. I hadn’t yet witnessed such virtuosity of surrender, and I didn’t immediately know how to categorize a phenomenon I found compelling, yet one which could easily enough be dismissed as some shade of unwell.
I have a photograph capturing the moment of my birth in which both my parents are gazing at me during my first minutes spent earthside on my mother’s chest. She once told me that I did not cry out when I was born, I simply stared at the world, sullenly clear-eyed as the midwife handed me over. When I peer at this photograph, I wonder what it must have been like for these freshly-made parents to hear a few weeks later that the neurological machinery of their baby’s vision was not properly made. My pleasantly blue eyes were connected to something broken behind the curtain of their prettiness, and there was no reason why, and no way to fix it. My mother did not consent to a pediatric surgery that involved the manipulation of my extraocular muscles. She was not impressed by this medical option to improve my developing vision. She did, however, have people lay crystals on me and shine blue lights into my eyes through something that looked like a megaphone. It was her way of helping, effects still unknown. Similarly, sometimes I try to watch myself grow up through pictures. At every age, from babyhood to adulthood, to the untrained eye I appear frozen at some humiliated angle, tilted and askew inside every image. This was the effect of adjusting my head to the null point where my vision is best, so as to regard the camera regarding me; knowing this, I still find it unsettling.
Decades later, I chose to have the surgery my mother had not chosen on my behalf. It was eerie to be the patient after extended time spent on the other side of the consumer/ provider power dynamic. I felt irrational shame to undergo a procedure most people have completed by toddlerhood. It excavated an attachment grief inside me that I had avoided for years by only licking at the edges. The nurse I met readying me for surgery was unnervingly cold, but eventually animated into some human form when she learned during the pre-op interview that no family would be coming to stay with me in the recovery suite. Rather, I was expecting an acquaintance whom I had sheepishly asked to come collect me. I studied her as she visibly processed the information, incorrectly assuming through some arduous mental calculus that this must be due to my gender and sexuality markers documented in my medical record, a recent addendum to the hospital’s protocols. She whispered, “you’ll build your own family now,” knowingly, but hoarse with her hesitation. When I did not respond, she repeated it more decisively and even patted my lower forearm for greater effect, as if she had aimed for my hand, but couldn’t ultimately commit. I swallowed the strangeness like a nasty drink and let her enjoy the thrill of her own noble kindness.
When I surfaced from the surgical sedation, I was flooded with pain so terrible it had a pitch, like a voice. I had never experienced sensory dimensionality to pain before, pain that held memories and could whisper secrets. As I struggled to open my eyes, I instinctively reached to touch them, howling. I remember someone restraining my hands. There was a woman there, patiently asking me why I was crying. I was frustrated that I’d even need to explain, that they wouldn’t just know it alongside me: I could feel our world’s suffering etched on my eyes. Layers of sorrows and injustices were being channeled through my body and I struggled to express my powerlessness to mend it, generations of turmoil rippling through me like waves. The acquaintance who had come to take me home told me, days later, that when they had entered the recovery area, the exasperated nurse’s greeting was: oh, thank god you’re here, she’s going to tear out her sutures like that, crying for everyone in the whole world. When I tell the story, there’s ghosts of my father rattling in there, and it’s the only thing I can see. It takes up the whole sky.
I imagine tenuous threads, perhaps soft and seeping spaces between the physical body, the emotional body, the lived-in, lived-inside, lived-in-spite-of body. These spaces are where the work finds us:
You are out of place at a party, oscillating a cocktail from side to
side to hear it clink, but it makes less and less satisfying a sound
as the ice melts and the mixture thins. Strangers make
conversation around you, the dreaded so what do you do, and
when it’s your turn to be interrogated, you repeat what you’ve
practiced; the response is as always. That’s so nice. How fun. The
bottom of the room drops out and your head swims in
neurochemicals as you think about a sixteen year old you
watched fade away slowly, then quickly. A kindergartener whose
cancer relapsed, just a month after she rang her end of treatment
bell, beaming in a plastic tiara. The boy who fell off a mountain
and cries in the dark, because his injured brain can’t stand the
light and he doesn’t understand why he can’t go home. A child
who had to be intubated, who later draws fuzzy conclusions that
it was a punishment. A mother who writes prayers on post-it
notes and sticks them to the NICU crib, for hundreds of days.
People will ask you why art should have a place in healthcare,
what it can possibly do for anyone ill or injured, and you just
won’t know what to say, even if you could form words to try.
What am I willing to let die?
At my worst moments, I revile this hospital. For weeks, there is no sign of preparation,1 no coordinated effort we can observe to plan for the storm we have watched play out in other places across the country and across the world. Hospital leadership dismisses the mounting unease amongst patient-facing workers by staying silent on the matter, yet I notice blurry harbingers of dysfunction: We are reprimanded for wearing surgical masks in the hallways and in elevators and when facing patients. The nurse managers and administrators tell us we are seeding panic. A terse email goes out to inform us that any employee who is discovered stealing PPE will be immediately terminated. New York’s first coronavirus case was confirmed on March 2nd, thirty-five days after my first day to show up to my new job in my practical shoes and my just-trimmed bangs. This is where I mark the start of my pandemic, though yours likely begins before or after. I request to pivot the scope of my services away from group art therapy and inquire about telehealth infrastructure. An administrator flicks away my ethical concerns with five beautifully coffin-shaped nails the color of oxblood: it’s just like the flu, wash your hands and you’ll be fine. Ominously, she will be the first person I know to fall very ill, and I will replay the footage of this moment in my mind like a looping .gif image, an infinite boomerang.
By mid-March I am terrified to go to work. We don’t have enough surgical masks, N95 respirators, or gloves, or gowns. My hospital puts donated Yankees rain ponchos into the brown paper bags of PPE we get once a week. We are instructed to hoard and reuse these supplies until the next offering. A resident physician tweets a photo of her bag and our PR department puts out the fire swiftly, since this was, of course, just a misunderstanding. As cases continue to rise, my morning subway ride will become less and less populated until I am the only person on the noisy N train. I will spend an increasing proportion of the daily commute crying myself into hyperventilation, until I develop the strategy of shutting my eyes for the whole ride as taught to me by the other essential workers whom I study from the other side of the subway car. My coworkers rent vehicles during the whole of April, to avoid the exposure of the subway. They scold me for taking the risk, but I can’t drive. I finally become so numb to the routine of the three hour commute that after a certain point, I am not afraid of this particular part of the day anymore.
At the height of the first surge of patients, there is nowhere to keep all the very sick and dying people. The hospital administrators will do all they can to discharge the children, so they can fill the empty beds with adults. The pediatric operating rooms become ICU space. Even the outpatient waiting rooms are converted into patient care areas. Out of a whole hospital with ten floors built for children, there is only one unit where you can still find a child. We don’t even have enough room to keep patients’ bodies after they have passed away. The first time I see the refrigerator trucks rumbling outside the hospital, I am horrified to notice people snapping pictures of them, as if someday we’d need the documentation to verify we hadn’t dreamed up the detail.
Other creative arts therapists in the city are providing virtual support while sheltering in place, or they have been furloughed, or they have quit their jobs entirely. Why not quit if you’re so afraid? why not take an unpaid leave if this is too much for you? isn’t this what you signed up for? why would you want hazard pay, isn’t being able to help enough? I am blindly angry. I am brightly angry. I feel like a pawn as my job becomes something I do not recognize, one I even resent at times. I keep coming in, not because I believe I am effectively helping, but because I am without resources which means being without choices. I am convinced that with one contaminated exhalation, I may be the reason someone I am there to help will die, but I keep coming in. My working life becomes a dissonant wound and I keep coming in.
What did I do in this year when no art would exist outside my body?
While my pandemic raged at its zenith, nothing artful would come out of my body at all. I watched my friends rollercoastering through their own pandemics via digital timeline. Through an intravenous drip of images and updates, I watched the people I know turn into all manner of things: tiny students of virology and sociology, homesteaders and survivalists, watercolorists and vigilantes, radicals and amateur economists. Laid-off friends became chefs and tailors, woodworkers, authors. From the outside looking in, I imagined my working-from-home friends carving out new realities for themselves in between refreshing their inboxes and tiptaptiptapping in shared Excel sheets, finally the horticulturists, conflict mediators, playwrights, and historians they had wanted to be. I tell myself now that this image was an amorphous fiction, tinted with the unrealistic envy of a person questioning everything. The bitterness became a form of perfunctory self-flagellation.
In a year of my own artlessness, I quietly watched the ebb and flow of my friends’ endeavors. I joined Zoom-based poetry readings inspired by their anti-oppressive reading groups. I tuned into their experimental livestreams based on the lifecycle of fungi. I read their essays about the merits of a slow life, even an unremarkable one. I subscribed to their anticapitalist podcasts. I watched their embroidery timelapse YouTube videos. In the most harsh light, at my most depleted, to be an art therapist living through a pandemic seemed to me to be trapped by one’s work. Art as a force for interpersonal, intrapersonal, and societal change was unfolding around me daily: in our personal rituals, in our rage and our defiance, in our grief, in our altruism, in our will to survive, in our eagerness to understand each other. As a mental health worker, I looked at the pandemic and its waves of reckonings with an augmented sheen of awe: this is art, this is artful, this is healing work. And I just wanted to put it all down, this precious burden. It felt too important to look away, yet too difficult to honor it in the way it deserved. And yet, in its best light, the honeyed light of golden hour, my identity as an art therapist brought me an eerie gratitude. I was grateful to experience the impact and the cultural urgency of making art, to witness the hopes and fears of the friends and strangers making it, and to feel the faint vital signs of my movable, emotional heart reverberating within myself. At a moment when my creative animus felt so far away, like some elemental lie I had convinced myself to believe in, I needed to steep myself in art conjured by others to remember: yes, still alive.
Full text