Rick lowe & Kevin beasley

Rick LoweLet’s start by talking about locations, specifically places related to our source materials. You’re coming out of Lynchburg, Virginia; my painting practice emerges from my experience in Houston’s Third Ward. But my sensibilities come out of my experiences in rural Alabama, which has very intimate connections with raw cotton, one of your materials. Tell me about your experience in Lynchburg, but first, I’m curious if you were actually in Lynchburg? Because for me, growing up in rural Alabama, I wasn’t actually in a town, there was nothing there. So I adopted a nearby town, which only had 10,000 people, and I didn’t have much of a connection to that town, it was just a way to point at a map and say, “Oh, it’s there” [laughs].

Kevin BeasleyI grew up in Lynchburg, within the city limits. But my mother grew up in Harlem and my father grew up in New Brunswick County, Virginia, in Valentines, a very rural Black farming community. He moved to New York when he was a teenager. Both of my brothers were born in New York City, then my family moved to Lynchburg and had me. When I was growing up, we’d go to New York a lot, because most of my family lived there, but I was in Lynchburg and we’d go to Valentines, where we’d all see each other for family reunions or just to visit the grandparents. That’s where everyone would gather, whether they were living in Florida, Texas, California, it didn’t matter—everyone would always come back to Valentines. Those memories really helped shape me. We’d visit New York and we’d see family all the time, and it was great, but there was something different about seeing everyone in the South—barbecuing, hanging out, relaxing, playing games, and taking care of the property. There was just a different dynamic.

RLWell, what you’re talking about, those things are the glue of this notion of the social. The thing about rural spaces is that people are dispersed and working, you don’t see them much. When we’d go to church, we’d be there all day. Sunday school at 9am, services at 11am and 1pm, and everybody brought food and shared it. And the games we played became ways of socializing. But how do you bring those experiences into artmaking? How did you end up working with cotton?

KBActually, I was surprised that the material resonated with me. Originally my family had a lot of pine trees on their farm; they’d grow pine trees and then every once in a while they’d cut them down, and they’d get paid for it. They stopped running the farm before I was born, but there was always some residual stuff—chickens here and there, a few fruit trees, potatoes. It was about nine acres, but the first time I saw it planted I was in graduate school, and it was planted with cotton.

RLWho planted the cotton? Was it your family?

KBWe had sharecroppers.

RLThey leased the land out to someone else?

KBExactly. And cotton was the cash crop for that year. I’d never experienced cotton in the growing season, like in August, when it’s just blossoming. You see the shape, but the cotton hasn’t revealed itself yet.

RLIn the beginning it starts as pretty flowers.

KBYes, it’s really beautiful. It has a distinct shape and look—I recognized it. I went to the house and talked to my mom about it. She was funny because we were there for a family reunion and she’s just like, “Well, that’s why we’re here, right? We’re going to be picking cotton. This is a family gathering.” But I wasn’t ready for it. It was too emotional; I felt like I didn’t understand it. Of course I understood it on an intellectual level and a historical level, but I never associated that level of history with my family. That was when I knew that I had to work with this material. I needed to know more about my relationship to it. I’m wearing cotton T-shirts and garments all the time, so I started thinking about who’s planting it and who’s picking it now. Where is it coming from? How has the industry evolved? It took about seven years for me to actually work with the material.

RLThat’s probably around the same amount of time that it took for me to work with dominoes as a material. In the late ’90s, Project Row Houses was just getting started and a lot of people from the neighborhood were volunteering. There was a group of older men who would sit across the street every single day, under a little shade tree, playing dominoes for hours. They never came to participate with us. This went on for probably about two years. Then one day it started raining and I said, “Hey why don’t you come over and sit in the A/C and play.” They were hesitant but they came inside. And I said, “You know, you could come over here and play all the time.” They played outside a few more times, then they went back and forth for a while, but eventually they started coming in regularly. At that point I decided that I should play a little bit, and that’s when I realized that playing dominoes was a great tool for getting to know the community. The more I played, the more I got into it. It still took seven or eight years before I started connecting to the aesthetic outside of the experience—the physicality, the way the dominoes spread across the table. Then I start taking photographs of the games, which evolved into using dominoes as a material with meaning on multiple levels—the social aspects of it, the aesthetic aspects of it, and all of that.

KBI did the same thing. I took tons of photos of the cotton fields. And I sat with those images for years, just looking at them over and over. How do you think the photograph, the immediacy of it, functions in the development of your material language?

RLThe photograph allowed me to hone my interests. We all look at material and then let it go, but artists will hone in on something and transform it in a way that lends itself symbolically and materially beyond the experience of the everyday. If I hadn’t started photographing, it would never have become more than an experience. Capturing objects in the photograph allowed me to remove myself from playing the game and instead just see the material as it is.

KBYou’re rapt in that moment, you need to find a way to remove yourself from it, there needs to be an agent. Taking photos allowed me to engage with the landscape when I wasn’t in it. Which led me to start thinking differently about it—turning the images upside-down and just doing funky stuff with them.

RLWhich then leads to the question of how that material becomes a source for artmaking and particularly how it becomes meaningful in an abstract way. Even your use of cotton-based clothing, starting from a point where we have a certain sense of what that is traditionally, but then you’re taking it and using it in a way that abstracts it from that initial understanding until it becomes something else that opens up a possibility of thinking beyond the mundane uses of the material itself.

KBTotally. I mean, I feel like I don’t have to describe it because you just did [laughter].

RLI saw your show at the Whitney [Museum of American Art, New York]. That was my first time seeing your work physically, and it was around the time I was digging in with painting. It was very influential for me because I saw that once you decide on your material, you can use it how you wish. And after you use it how you wish, particularly as more abstract forms, it opens up many more conversations.

KBThere’s so much weight there. I think about it in terms of your relationship to John Biggers and the weight of all of that—those paintings, along with what you were studying architecturally and what you were thinking about, how those spaces are socially used and how deeply connected we are when we don’t even realize it. You’ve been painting for a long time, thinking about these constructions and the ways they evolve, not just on an architectural level but also about mapping and the connective tissue in all of that. A lot of this comes through abstraction because you’re trying to speak to something that may not necessarily have a full-on representation. It may not have a clear, discernible image. And how do you do that? In some ways it’s about recognizing the weight of the material and its history, recognizing how connected we are to it and how important it is to acknowledge that and move with it, to accumulate those experiences. But in terms of the generative quality, how do you make something that gets to those recesses?

RLThose recesses go deep. For me it’s about trying to make the work as a way to explain the elements of my social practice. We can say that we know why Black communities are in the condition that they are—there’s a lot related to the law and politics, but there’s a lot beyond that. I was speaking with a political scientist at the University of Michigan, Christian Davenport, about Black wealth and the issues around it, and he said, “Have you ever considered the cost of Black wealth?” And I was like, “The cost of Black wealth? What are you talking about?” He was talking about what people lose in the process of trying to get there. For instance, in the ’90s, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development changed their approach to public housing, allowing the private sector to do it. They took down housing projects and dispersed the residents as a way of deconcentrating poverty. Later, after evaluating the success of that program, they realized that it came at a heavy cost for Black families who moved—they lost connections to family, culture, and all that.

KBThe losses.

RLAnd abstraction allows room for that stuff that we don’t know. Recently I had a conversation with [former Whitney director] Adam Weinberg about the kind of abstraction that we’re talking about now and how different it is from the initial art-historical movement toward abstraction. Earlier abstraction was devoid of references to life, it was just about the surface, the material, the form. This new abstraction that people like us are dealing with is also about color and shape and form, but we’re not pushing things out, we’re bringing everything in.

KBThat’s something I think about a lot. My studio is full of things that people have given me, objects that hold meaning but are not trying to tell a specific story. And it can be multigenerational: there are objects my niece gave me that also have my grandmother’s experiences ingrained in them. When I’m working with this material, it just happens to be in abstraction, and I can’t think about it in any other way without it being too didactic or too on the nose. There’s mystery there, you’re not giving too much away, but there are still codes and conversations that you’re having with people subliminally. And abstraction feels like the most generous way to engage in that process.

RLYeah, in this new abstraction we’re putting ourselves out there in very real ways, with things that we care about deeply. We have to be good stewards because it connects to other people as well.

I’d be interested to hear more about your piece for Prospect New Orleans.

KBWhen I was entering Prospect, I had this moment where I was observing a city that I didn’t have much connection to. I didn’t want to bring an outside object in and leave it for three months and then disappear; I wanted to create something conceptually challenging and pertinent that had longevity in terms of its impact on folks there, its audience. So I used the commission money to buy a piece of property in the Lower Ninth, with the process of buying the property as the concept: the work, all of the steps involved, like the certified mail that goes out to identify who owns it, the title, all the conversations with real estate agents, talking to people about retaining their land when they came back after Katrina. All of that would be the work itself, and then I thought whatever happened to the land would just be a byproduct of this much more interesting, deeper thing. But once you do that, conceptually it’s wide open because you’re leaving yourself available for whatever happens next. And that’s when the communal part came in, people were like, “You have this land now, what are you going to do with it? How can we help?” I knew I needed to get the utilities going so there was water and electricity. We planted some things because it’s land. And there needed to be free Wi-Fi for connectivity purposes, on a conceptual level, thinking about this as being something that people can have access to from anywhere in the world.

RLYoung folks often ask, “How do you get to do these things?” and it was always just, “I take the next step.” You take a leap of faith and see what happens next. And along the way, incredible things can happen. You took that leap of faith and said, “I’m going to buy a plot of land.” Then you have all of these things to respond to: you’ve got to research the land, and once you have the land, what are you going to do with it? And that allows social relationships to come into being that you would never have anticipated.

KB1,000 percent. And those relationships are predicated on something different—everyone knows it’s a conceptual idea, but some neighbors, trying to wrap their head around it, say, “So you just bought this land and the buying of it was to disseminate information?” And it’s like, Yeah, that’s kind of it. But the way it evolves truly feels organic. It just leaves all of these other possibilities open, and the relationships you have with the community are based on those kinds of possibilities. Versus a corporate entity that comes in, makes a bunch of big promises about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to change the world, and then none of that gets accomplished because it doesn’t actually address the needs. It doesn’t come from a point of rigor or criticality.

RLAnd it also doesn’t come from a perspective of belief in the possibility of people to rise up when an opportunity is in front of them. You didn’t give them this thing; you created a context they could respond to. I started the Watts House Project in LA in the ’90s, and one of the things that was fascinating about that neighborhood at the time was that there had been three master plans for the community over twenty years or so—they’d spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and nothing had happened. People wanted to plan things out, as opposed to planting seeds. And you just planted a seed. You’ve planted a seed and it will find its way to grow. And in the best-case scenario, you’ll be able to help water it in some way.