by AGT EDITORS
November 20, 2019
Our Spring 2019 featured artist was Aziza Gibson-Hunter with her series French Doors. Based on the photographs of doors taken in Paris, the series explores the legacies of French colonialism and the African material foundations of European opulence. They evoke ancestral communication and energy in order to complicate our view of modernity. Our editor, Josh Myers, sat down with Aziza Gibson-Hunter to discuss her artistic practice, which she calls “a gathering,” in synergy with our work here at A Gathering Together.
(This interview was edited for content and clarity).
AGT: So I was charged with asking the questions that the editors came up with and I have my own questions of course, about the series but also about your larger artistic practice, and I think that’s where we want to start, probably, because that helps contextualize how you got to this particular series at this point in your life and in your work. And so, what got you involved in artmaking as a practice, as a way of engaging the world?
AG-H: Well, this is what I’ve done all my life. I’ve made things. I like making. And I think it just gave me a way to express myself. Things that I was thinking, things that I experienced. And just to share the joy of sometimes making things that I considered, as a young person, pretty beautiful. So it’s just been a part of my life. And there have been times when it was overridden by other things, and then times when it surfaces much more. So it has an ebb-and-flow thing to it.
AGT: So you decided to get, to gain formal training.
AG-H: Yeah, I have been in art school ever since I can remember. I mean, literally. My Saturdays used to be in Saturday programs. I was in Philadelphia, I lived down the street from…West Philadelphia High [which] had a field house, and in the field house, they offered classes. I took dance for a while. [But] when I walked into that art space, I was like, “Okay, this is it.” I would spend my entire Saturday from 1:00 ‘til they threw me out. And there was a Black woman named Ms. Banks. She had this look. She looked like Nina Simone. She had that look. She was well-spoken and vibrant, and all about art. I was just like, “Whoa. Who is this?” She had programs with Moore College of Art…I must have been in junior high school, maybe even younger. And you got to visit the college, you got to look around, and you got to experience a couple of classes in there. I mean that was unheard of. You just didn’t see Black people…She and Mr. Moore, [who] was in the Saturday program too.
That has been a part of my life. I used to make things to make extra money. I used to write my own books, illustrate them, and put ‘em in the doors for the kids in the neighborhood. And earrings and bracelets—I’ve just been a maker. When I was in college, they used to ask me why I was there, and I would always say, “I’m here to create work for my community.” And they used to look at me like I grew a third head. But that is how I thought about it. I thought, “Okay, well I’m going to create these things that would help us to feel good about ourselves. Or enlighten us about something about ourselves.”
AGT: Were you consciously connecting that to what other Black artists were saying during that particular time or was it something that you came to on your own?
AG-H: Well, let me see. At that time, when I was in college, it was during the minimalist time. We had passed the “Black is beautiful” phase and all of that. And we were into this minimalist thing. So when I went in there, they had no idea what to do with me because I was thinking figuratively, I was seeing some of the AfriCOBRA stuff. Samella Lewis had the first book, and basically what she did is she had an image, a little statement about the work and in it, a little statement about the artist and it was just…there was no contextual thing that held it together. This was this book with these images and a little something about the artist. Every student, everybody that I knew, we wore the thing [out]—I mean I literally had three of them until they fell apart. Because really we didn’t get a chance to see that much. It’s not like we were having major shows any place. That was what I was looking at and I was thinking in terms of, “Okay, I’m gonna use my art in those kind of ways.” So there’s these beautiful images of women with their Afros and all of that. But when I got to school, it was minimalism.
AGT: What years are you talking about?
AG-H: I think I went in ’71, ‘72. Something like that. So the work was just, you know, a completely different kind of thing.
AGT: But you were aware of the previous generation.
AG-H: I was aware of those things. Like I said, Samella Lewis’s book definitely helped to bring that into focus.
AGT: I’m kind of…not shocked, but surprised to hear that Philadelphia didn’t have a similar thrust. Because if you go to Chicago, Detroit, if you go to LA during that particular period you have Black artists trying to build institutional space. Here in DC as well, with Jeff Donaldson coming to Howard University. But also Philadelphia has a history of building that kind of institutional space, if you think about the Albert Barnes and that legacy on one hand…
AG-H: I went to visit them. Yeah.
AGT: So I think, I don’t know, it’s surprising to hear that, it didn’t produce a sort of reaction during that time.
AG-H: Well in art schools, no. There were about fifteen of us in undergraduate and graduate program. We were at Tyler College of Art. That was a very, it was, you know, out in the boonies. The library had some books on African art. But there was nothing about African American art. To the point where I left Tyler to go to the main campus, because the main campus had a Pan African [Studies Community Education] department and I figured at least there would be books available, there would be something to help me contextualize, some conceptual frameworks from my work and even when I was there I told the painting instructor, “Hey, you know, look, it’s nice painting all these pink ladies, but I’ve got Black people I’ve gotta paint. And this is not helping me with that.”
AGT: So after you leave Tyler, where do you go?
AG-H: I went to Temple University for a couple years and that’s where I finished. And I taught for three years. My family friend brought me down here [DC], to go to homecoming. Well, first the thing that just knocked my socks off was that she had these friends and they went to each other’s homes and they ate and they talked and I was like, “There are people that actually kept in touch after you graduated?” The Black students [at Tyler would], yes. But there was just 15 of us and there just wasn’t many of us. So when I saw that I was like, “I missed out on this?” And then I went to the department and saw some of the work, I was like some kinda way I gotta get back here. It took me several years, but eventually, I got to Howard, which was just like…I lost my mind, I did.
AGT: Who was teaching when you got there?
AG-H: Jeff Donaldson was there. And Winston Kennedy was there. [Raymond] Dobard was there. [E.H. Sowells]-Adewale. Tritobia Benjamin was in art history.
AGT: Was Skunder Boghossian gone by then?
AG-H: No, Skunder was there.
AGT: Lois Mailou Jones was gone?
AG-H: She was gone. She was gone by then. Ed Love was there. I took Skunder’s class. He was so emotive. And I was like, “Whew, I don’t know if I could handle this.” So I dropped the class and I used to sit and watch him paint. And he used to talk while he was painting. And I just used to watch. You could just watch over the weeks you could see the forms literally develop out of the piece. First, it would just be all these patterns. Drawing on top of drawing, and then you could just watch him push forward, by him pushing back, using colors that push back and pull forward and it was amazing.
And it was one of the most diverse…I mean I had in my studio, I was in printmaking. I had [Agbo] Folarin, [who] was from Nigeria. Falaka [Yimer] and Wosene [Kosrof] were from Ethiopia. We had a gentleman from Guyana. The discussions that we had were just phenomenal. They were older. So just listening to the similarities of our experiences. It was very powerful. Jeff Donaldson and I, we had a few falling outs. [Laughter]. At first he just didn’t get me. He didn’t understand me. But after a while, he was very supportive. It was a wonderful, it was just wonderful.
AGT: So basically, you found your match in terms of what you didn’t have while you were in Philadelphia. You found it in Howard’s Department of Art.
AG-H: I found it. Yes. And I knew it was gonna be there. Because when I was at Tyler, there was Martha Jackson-Jarvis, [who] was coming to Tyler. I saw her work and I was like, “Wherever she went, that’s where I need to be.” Because her work had all of this…she was working with spirit and an African sense of aesthetics. And I was like, “Oh my goodness.” She wanted more technical information which Tyler was a school that would polish technique. But as far as the conceptual framework. You just couldn’t, there was not enough there I felt.
At Howard, I mean just some of the things…I remember you go to, the people that came in…Romare Bearden came in and talked. And you’d be sitting there and Ruby Dee and…they would be sitting in a room and say, “Come on in.” And you’re sitting on a floor and you’re listening to her and her husband…talk about their experiences. That was…it was the first time that I really heard gospel music. A real raspy voice…
AGT: James Cleveland.
A-GH: Yes. I just walked in the auditorium one day and I’m like “Whoa!” …He was there and he had his whole choir and they were throwing down in there. People were like in the aisles. I was sitting there, I was like, “Whoaaaa…” And then at the same time Jessye Norman was there and you could meet Jessye Norman. The range was just like…
AGT: It’s almost like, you see that there’s a whole world that’s not limited to the visual arts, that the visual arts also have to speak to…
AG-H: Exactly. And this is all stuff that you can pull from. You can pull from all of this and it was just…whew. It’s a wonder I got through. Because I started reading poetry. I was reading poetry with Greg Tate. Ethelbert [Miller] used to have these poetry readings up in the top floor of Founders [Library]. I used to be up there reading poetry and then I started writing some plays. I mean I just lost it. But it wasn’t losing it, there was just so much that I could try—I could give. I could express myself in all these ways. It was like I was gathering. And part of my artistic practice is this gathering. It’s like I’m a sponge. I’ll just be taking in all this stuff, and some kinda way it starts to become cohesive, then it becomes some ideas that then I can flesh out further. But there is this gathering thing.
AGT: I’m thinking about fragments, first of all. There’s this idea among Black historiographers, that because of the nature of the archives that we have to use to do that work, that Black existence doesn’t appear in the same away, so you have to gather fragments to put it together, to develop a narrative about our reality. So, to me, that’s also a spiritual practice, it’s inherently a spiritual practice. The gathering of fragments, or the gathering pieces of things that you need to put together to affect something. To affect a change, a reaction. I think about conjuration, for instance as a gathering practice.
AG-H: I used to think of it as… I used to tell people that practice was Osirian.
AGT: Yes, absolutely. Was that something that you built toward or was it something that was always there?
AG-H: I didn’t know what it was because I would feel as if I was going off my path. I would be very frustrated with myself. Like here you are, you’re up here writing plays. And taking your furniture of out your house, and you got all these musicians in your house…and actors and actresses and you’re going over stuff and you’re supposed to be producing some paintings and some prints. So I didn’t understand it. It really didn’t begin to focus for me, until I would say, I was in my late twenties. I was out of school, raising family, and things started to come together, I started to understand it better. But at that time it felt like I would veer off on something, but I wasn’t…I was gathering.
AGT: So what were you trying to gather with French Doors?
A-GH: I was caretaking for my father who was [in] the late, last years of his life, and my son called me up and said, “Mom you need a break. I’m gon’ send you to Paris. Take a friend with you.” He said, “Tell me when you wanna go, I’m gon’ send you.” I thought about it and said okay. I got my girlfriend Adjua. She said, “Girl, you for real?” So we went to Paris for five days. We were at the Louvre. When it opened, the two of us were standing there, ready to go. That Egyptian collection there is, oh my goodness. You see images there, they’re just, you see ‘em on Georgia Avenue. I’ve seen that brother on Georgia Avenue. It’s full of things like that. And then we’re just, we went to the district, the section where Langston Hughes and all the expatriate people used to hang out.
When we were walking I kept saying to Adjua, “Look at these doors.” I’m looking at these doors and I’m thinking, “How does the little country get these doors?” I mean they were fabulous, they were large. The wood. Where does this come from? For me, it was just registering colonialism. I’m thinking about all these African countries they’re taking the wealth from and that’s why they can have all of this. I went to Little Africa, which is a poor section of Paris. They had these doors. The doors, they’re enormous and some of them are so elaborate. And some are downright ostentatious. You just see all of these stores and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna take photographs of them.” I didn’t know what I was gonna do with them. I was just gonna take photographs of them and that’s what I did.
When I got back, I wasn’t sure what to do with them. I decided to have them, have my photographs, scanned and put on printing paper, beautiful printing paper. But that wasn’t enough, I didn’t want them to sit like that. I bought this Black paper. And tried several different things. Then I started putting these brushstrokes on them. I looked at them brushstrokes and I was like, “Man, you know, our ancestors must have, whipping around looking at that stuff in Paris, they must be like these people have just taken our labor, our resources.” So I would just make these strokes, these brushstrokes for me started to capture that energy, that force of our ancestors.
I would go to the, these stores where [this material] that’s made from crushed egg shells. And it’s used for religious rituals. I was looking at that and I was like yeah, these strokes, yes. White, that’s what I should work in. And then my work always has this rhythm, these patterns, and rhythms in it. Which, I think in terms of improvisation and I see a connection between rhythm and spirit. They just started coming together. And they’re collage. Which again, [is] from the gathering. Now they’re actually coming back together. They’re being fit together. And when I did them, I would literally cut a piece of paper like this. And the next thing would fit in. So these things, everything was like fit together, like puzzles. They were the first ones really, that I started doing that with. And it was like, that made me thinking of Osiris too. Fitting things back together again. That part of my practice, that fitting together.
AGT: There’s the invocation, too of Haiti, there’s the invocation of the Congo.
AG-H: Oh yes.
AGT: If you take those two together, you can see how there’s a connection in your work to liberation struggle, to resistance. The energy of the brushstrokes, sort of also, evoke the idea of being surrounded. Like, we are surrounded by those ancestors. But the world that they, their labor created. To think of the Haitians, that world is still haunted by their presence too.
AG-H: I see our ancestors as energy. Vibrating energy. Wind energy. I see them, you know, I see their energy just blowing around with their vibrations. So yeah, very much so. And all of these, that whole series, French Doors, is resistance. There will be dues. You just don’t do this stuff and think everything’s gonna be nice nice. They really whip through the pieces.
AGT: Which of course, evokes flight and motion too.
AG-H: Yes.
AGT: So your work reminds me of a kind of maroon tradition in Black art. We’re trying to create this space away from oppression in order to actually free ourselves, to be able to think about what we need to do in service of our own liberation. This work is contained in that tradition, but it’s not aloof from the problems that we [now] face. I think there’s a lot of conversations in art about if we should, protest, protest, protest or if we should just represent, represent, represent. And yours doesn’t make a choice for one or the other.
AG-H: No, it doesn’t. Because, see, I see us as boundless. I think these were the first pieces that I refused to put in a rectangle [or] in a square. Before, I’d have us fighting to get out of them, stretching to get out. But from here on out, everything is jutting, because I—especially once I came in contact through Molefi Asante, with the Zulu personal declaration, I was like, “Man, we did not understand ourselves as something, being spirits that could be confined.” So it’s just pushing out. And also, the sense that when I’m working, the past, the present, and the future are one. I feel as if I can tap something that I’m thinking will be, I can tap something that is, I can tap something that was, and I can put it into the piece. So it’s this sense of boundlessness is very, very important to me. My husband, before we were married he used to talk about boundless, being boundless. But I don’t know, from these works on there’s been this resistance to want to work within boundaries. I think that we are so much more than what we understand ourselves to be.
AGT: I think there’s also a risk to being boundless. Especially given the fact—I think about music—that people are used to containment. It’s not a risk in terms of ensuring that we do what we need to do. It’s a risk in engaging this model, this consumption model that art is attached to these days. The risk is that we may not be seen by the same people who are used to curating, producing, or presenting work that is contained by these particular traditions. So how do you think, or what do you do in light of that as an artist, knowing that there’s a world out there, an art world that may not be ready or prepared for that?
AG-H: All I can do is just try to present it wherever I have the opportunity to present it. But if I sat around and worried about what was going to work for them. I think I would lose myself. So I find that if the work, I just feel like if the work is strong it’ll find a way to get through. You know, right now, I would say probably the work, there’s a return to the figurative. I think Black folks though have been enamored with the figure, because we wanna see images of ourselves. But for me right now, we are so much more than this.
AGT: Who are some of the contemporary artists that you think are in that tradition of creating boundless and limitless art?
AG-H: To the figure? Kerry James Marshall is doing that. The sister out of Baltimore, Amy Sherald. I went to go see her work.
AGT: The one in New York? It’s powerful.
AG-H: It’s powerful. Definitely. She’s doing that.
AGT: Let’s stop there. Because people have— the people for whom representation matters, they have— problems with Amy Sherald.
AG-H: Because of the grey….
AGT: And as this whole conversation is going on, what would these people think about Kerry James Marshall, who uses black. So it’s like, is there something behind the sort of notion, you know, [of mere] brown skin, melanated people that they are trying to reach that people are just not getting?
AG-H: Well, Kerry, definitely. He’s like—he’s told me personally, “Look. I don’t know how they looked at those images from Egypt, and somehow they were able to overlook that they were brown.” It’s delusion. It’s amazing, right? So he was like, “Well, I’m just gon make these people pitch black [so] there ain’t no way to get around it. It’s just in their face. This is what it is.” And for us, this is what it is. And there can be no question about it. I know he has said that to me.
AGT: At the same time, there are no “black” people in real life. The reason I like Sherald’s work is that she sort of displaces the notion that you have to represent race in that particular way, [epidermically], that’s there’s another way that you can represent our people that sort of displaces skin color. Because in [her work] you still see us.
AG-H: It’s just the beginning. I think it’s like just the beginning. There are things–we have, we just have so many ways to think about ourselves. I just find it kind of exciting. To be able, if we can just shed some of these confining ideas that we have been given about who we are, I think as we do that, it’s gonna just open things out. I think that you really see it in film. I think film is gonna kind of help the visual artist. In that, even with some of these, the opening of—in literature it’s all there—looking and trying to visualize ourselves in our future. And what we might be able to discover about who we are. I mean, you know, there’s things that people can do around melanin that has nothing to do with brown skin that could just…
AGT: Which is why the abstract tradition is important to me. It’s trying to access something that is not readily known, or not readily seen, but you can connect to it at the same time. Which is really what our existence in the universe is, there’s an “out there.” And we know that the out there is important, because [some of what] what we see right now in here is not it.
AG-H: The out there is [also] in here.
AGT: And you have to be able to see it.
AG-H: It’s like wide open. It really is. And it’s exciting to me.
Photo: John Woo
AGT: So what’s next for you? Do you know yet?
AG-H: Yes. I am interested in—I am asking the question, what is it that got us, that keeps us moving forward? Dr. [John Henrik] Clarke said to me one time, that, “We don’t owe the whole world anything but a butt-whoopin, because the whole world has conspired against us. And yet, in the face of all of that, we continue.” Sometimes, yes with the blues. And sometimes absolutely, exuberantly. Joy. And I want to better understand what that is. I have an inkling that when I read the Zulu personal declaration or when I look at the Mandinka artists, there’s an understanding of ourselves as intricately involved in this universe. And I think that we have been able to tap that. I think that there were times where we could tap it at will. But I think given the oppression that we are under, some aspects of that have become more difficult or calcified. I want to express that energy. I’ll call it energy. You know, I’m reading things. There’s a book called The Price for the Pound of their Flesh, by Daina Ramey Berry. In there…she referenced a planter that talks about how there were these elders that the planters didn’t mess with. They carried themselves with this aura of respectfulness, of integrity–above. One talked about [how] they seemed to have a soul-force. So I go “Hmm, I like that.” And I found a book called Soul Force. I’m reading that now.
I started thinking about how in the 60s, they talked about soul, having soul. And when people talked about that. There was like this warm energy between Black folks, it was like something we had that was ours. That we could tap, that gave us joy. And I’m looking at this place and I’m thinking we need to read, discover that, talk about that again, learn how to tap into it. Because we gonna need it. I’m looking at these folks, I’m like, people are gonna need it. I’m on kind of a little quest here, I’ve got a lot of stuff I gotta read, I’m gathering. And it’s coming from all different kind of places. I’m looking at Aretha Franklin, I’m looking at Coltrane.
I think of it like he’s, he was indeed experiencing his boundlessness to the point where he was integrating into the universe with his music. I go back to Of Water and Spirit by [Malidoma] Some. I—could we?—move dimensionally. I’m willing to ask these questions. Could we shapeshift? I’m willing to ask these questions. Because like in Some, in My Life in the Bush of the Ghosts by Amos Tutuola, there are things said. I think we came in contact with people that operated at a very low vibration. In order to survive, maybe we started vibrating at some of that level. And I wanna know, what happens if we peel some of that back? I have questions like that. They’re a little out there. So that’s where I see the work. I did a series called Potentia. And I was thinking in terms of the women in my neighborhood. They used to sit, and they used to say “that boy there, that boy got potential.” And when that boy had potentia, there was something that them sisters was seeing. I think it was an energy of what could be, of what could be. So I did a whole series of Potentia pieces. So that was my first layer of it so we’ll see where it goes from there.