CHRYSANNE:

You are our first interviewee from South America. In this presidential election cycle, there is a major emphasis on immigration, especially regarding Mexico, and Spanish-speaking people. In looking at your history, how does being born in Colombia, South America, with an American father and Colombian mother affect you and factor in your work? I have observed that you are constantly exploring this duality.

NANCY:

The themes of being bicultural have always existed in my life. When you’re a child you relate in a feeling kind of way, not so much knowing exactly what is going on. I felt that I belonged and that I didn’t. That duality has also been in my work. Not only did I grow up in a bicultural family, but I also went to school in Colombia, and in the U.S. In the U.S. my experiences in college were interesting, as they were not only about learning art, but also about learning American culture and how to integrate. Those feelings of standing inside and outside of the system are always there, and they feed my artwork.

CHRYSANNE:

Is there a body of your work that you think really portrays those two themes of integrating yet being outside of American culture and the history of American art? Would it be a combination of minimalism coupled with your interest in colonial art and feminism?

NANCY:

Yes, my work of the last ten years portrays those themes more overtly than my older work. However, from the beginning, I have made art that expresses my experience as a human being that lives between cultures. I was conscious of class when working and living in Colombia. My first works had to do with the state of life there. When I moved to L.A., I discovered feminist art. It was an amazing revelation because it allowed me to look into issues in my own life that were important in a deep and personal way. I had a grandmother who was a traditional woman of her time and who raised four kids and I had a mother who took a completely different approach to life. She was an anthropologist and someone who broke with many of the traditions of being a woman in Latin America then. I had those two role models and I thought about gender roles. Gender in Colombia wasn’t discussed in art school. It was invisible. This was in the 80s. The topics in Colombia were about art history, politics, the war, or violence. Ideas about gender barely existed. So my arrival to the U.S. turned into an explosion of something that I could explore and which felt very fresh and close to my heart. To answer the question further, it’s the work of the last ten years that deals with the complexities of migration; being an insider/outside aside from gender and feminism.

SUSAN:

Many of the people reading this are going to be familiar with American schools and art schools but will have less of a frame of reference for Colombian educational institutions. Can you just tell us a bit about what you studied when you were in Colombia and how you feel that was different from what you studied when you came to the United States? I also wonder whether your consciousness about class came from life experience or from an academic understanding?

NANCY:

In Colombia, I studied with some of the most important artists and the topics that were discussed were very different from those discussed in the U.S. We studied European art history like Marcel Duchamp, but were also aware of pre-Columbian, colonial art and modernism. There weren’t graduate programs where students could get specializations, so people looked towards the north for sources of information and degrees. Things have changed with multiculturalism and identity politics. Universities now have graduate and doctorate programs, but it was not the case then.

While in school in Bogotá we discussed local politics and the growing unnamed civil war inside the country, which was affecting everyone and therefore discussed in school.  In Los Angeles as an undergraduate, I remember studying European art movements of the 20^th century but mostly art from the U.S. There was never a mention of South America. It was as if it did not exist. I suppose it was a very ethnocentric education. I felt a similar thing in graduate school at New York University; even further, it was a very New York centric educational experience.

CHRYSANNE:

Could you tell us more about the war?

NANCY:

The war in Colombia had its origins in the assassination of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in 1948. He was a progressive leader who wanted to create social and economic justice in the country. In the early 60s the guerrillas appeared, and in the 80s drug cartels emerged. The paramilitary forces emerged too and together they all contributed negatively by escalating the conflict. Eventually all parties involved joined in the drug trafficking business. This affected everyone, as a massive dirty war enveloped the entire nation. It eroded Colombian society in so many ways, creating a climate of insecurity and fear. The situation was complicated enormously as the U.S. aided the war on drugs and injected the country with huge amounts of money to make more war. As a consequence, it produced a big exodus from the country and a terrible internal displacement of thousands of people.

SUSAN:

People felt unsafe?

NANCY:

Yes, we all were unsafe. Everybody in Colombia has been directly or indirectly affected by the war. Everybody has been a victim in harsh or very subtle ways. Living outside of the country also means being affected by the war.

CHRYSANNE:

Were you part of this exodus?

NANCY:

Yes, I was part of a wave of people that left. I did not leave as a political refugee fortunately. I left because I had the possibility and because I had dual citizenship. I had the privilege to come to the U.S. and study here. But I can say with full certainty that the war was partly to blame. Had it been a peaceful country with more economic possibilities for young professionals, I maybe would have stayed. A huge part of my family left and are now spread out, living across the U.S. and elsewhere. That is a consequence.

SUSAN:

So when you came here, where did you study and who did you study with?

NANCY:

I came to the U.S. twice. I first went to Otis Art Institute in L.A. and did my last two years of college there. I had a great group of teachers including Mike Kelley, Carole Carompas, and Larry Pittman. I also had amazing classmates. It was a place for ideas. It was where I became interested in feminism and where I found a home for my work. I was introduced to Womanhouse in downtown L.A., and to feminist artists. Afterwards I returned to Bogotá, and being a nice Bogotana girl I went back to live with my parents. I started working and exhibiting work that had to do with class and the domestic space. My impulse was to deal not directly with feminism, but with the idea of domesticity and the private space. I exhibited alot, grew as an artist and then with the political turmoil I left Bogotá and came to New York in 1991. After a couple of years, I went to graduate school at New York University, and then I stayed in the city, got married and had a child. The conversations on feminism at NYU were different from those in L.A. and there was a less intellectual attitude with a bigger focus on the market. My impression was that women artists did not want to identify as feminists as they felt they could be pegged and put in a feminist drawer and tucked away. This is something that I felt as strongly against then as I do now.

SUSAN:

Now that you’ve raised the question of domesticity and particularly given that you went to school in California, where Womanhouse originated, it seems to me that roughly speaking, there were the feminists who wanted to elevate the domestic into something more important and there were the feminists who were more interested in the empowerment of women in the public sphere, with putting them on equal footing with the men. These two groups were not always sympathetic to one another. I would put Miriam Shapiro and Joyce Kozloff into that first category. I am curious if you see yourself attached to one of those branches of feminist thinking. Do you feel that one influenced you more than the other?

NANCY:

I think the first influenced me more. I still look at the work of Joyce Kozloff and Miriam Shapiro. I think what they did was powerful and groundbreaking. Sometimes I look at some of those works individually, when they pop up in shows and I am not intrigued so much by the aesthetics but very much by what they did conceptually. Those works dissented from abstraction and from the dominant patriarchal ideology. They still do. Those artists like me, who owe so much to the Pattern and Decoration movement, are still dissenting from the patriarchal umbrella that rules. I would even take it further and say that minimalism is still the dominant aesthetic for the mainstream art market and corporate taste. It rules like a lord.

SUSAN:

In terms of their effect in the world, do you think these two strategies carry the same weight?

NANCY:

The work of Barbara Kruger has more of an effect and more power in the public sphere. The work of Miriam Shapiro is groundbreaking inside the history of art, but less in terms of life for women in the world. I ask myself that all the time. Why don’t I take a more overtly rebellious and outward political position with my art? But it’s also who you are. My work is personal and it is political. It works in the place of resistance more than the outward militancy seen in an artist like Kruger. Both are immensely important and one should not claim more status than the other. Resistance in some cases can be more pervasive, persistent and subtle.

SUSAN:

I would like to follow up on one thing you just said, because when I was a student at Cal Arts, I studied the films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet quite intensely and to me the most significant part of their work was focused on the idea of resistance. And I think that idea still resonates as a form of political action. When you use the word resistance, what does that mean to you and what does it mean in relationship to your art?

NANCY:

Resistance in my own life is to be able to carry on an art practice, to show it, to have a family, to be a mother, and to pull it off with everyone in balance. I think that it is all integrated ethically. Actually in the north, in the U.S., it’s harder for women to do that. When I go back to Colombia, I see women artists with assistants, housekeepers; it’s a completely different environment. For women artists in the U.S. to be able to function in the world and keep all of these ends together is a lot harder because it’s done solo. It’s paradoxical isn’t it?

SUSAN:

I would agree with this. It is very difficult without significant wealth.

CHRYSANNE:

Many of my friends in the eastern countries such as India have housekeepers, cooks, and drivers.They are supported in a way that the artists I know personally in New York are not. They have easier access to a support system whether or not they are married or have children.

NANCY:

Right, you can be a feminist in Latin America, also because to be a feminist you have a progressive education that you get with some means. So your feminism can be performed on the backs of other poorer people. It’s complicated.

CHRYSANNE:

It’s a class system?

NANCY:

Yes, in the end it’s about class.

CHRYSANNE:

Did you feel free of that class system living here rather than in Colombia where you had grown up and first started working?

NANCY:

Definitely, in the beginning; but then you live here for a while and you realize it’s a class system too. The codes are just different. In the U.S. there has been a tradition of a larger middle class and higher standard of living. But that sense of freedom also comes from not entirely understanding your new place in that society. In the U.S. things have changed enormously socially and economically. There are bigger gaps between classes and races now.

CHRYSANNE:

Do you think Colombia is comparable to the English class system?

NANCY:

It’s comparable to the Indian class system, maybe less rigid. Going back to the war. The cartels broke by brutal force the rigid standards and created social change and a nouveau rich class. In Colombia, that class is called la clase emergente. The drug cartels injected the country with money, produced change, and corrupted the ethics and values of a nation.

CHRYSANNE:

While you were speaking about Barbara Kruger, I remembered that your earlier work was based on words, writing in intricate patterns. Can you tell us a little bit about the texts you were writing and how you evolved from all of that intensive, obsessive writing to images of flowers and birds? What was the progression between the word pieces to the flower pieces?

NANCY:

I was making crochet doily paintings in graduate school and then I complicated those doilies by superimposing texts of boleros and poems. I placed those texts in Spanish, as under painting. I was interested in the way that so much American painting was discussed in terms of a figure ground relationship. I thought that it could be a tool to understand American culture and the process of migration and adaptation.

The under painting as writing in my work was in Spanish. It was sentimental, dramatic and existed in the background. On top, visible, were a series of abstract marks that together functioned like the geometric systems in a crochet doily. In this case, the doily was an American icon that functioned as a dominant cultural form even though it was a feminine form and symbol. It was dominant because I had learned about feminism in the U.S. and because I turned it into an abstract geometry.

These drawings and paintings were a battleground of conformity and confrontation. I was getting an American education, a colonial education from the perspective of someone from Colombia, as I was studying the great masters of American culture. For me, Kozloff and Shapiro were great American icons and they still are. In my view they were as important as Serra, Reinhardt or Ryman.

At some point, I started bringing the text forward in a Pollock like, push and pull. Those word drawings and paintings were a figure ground struggle of culture, of Spanish and English, Colombia, the U.S., and gender as well. Dominant and subordinate: the text came forth becoming the visible form of that crochet system. Initially, these drawn texts were translations of poetry by Sylvia Plath, or other poetry by women. But soon, I realized that I needed to put in my own texts. I did these kind of centrifugal drawings where I would write quickly words that I thought in Spanish and that would relate to Colombia. On other works, I drew storied fragments in English and Spanish that would relate to personal narratives. I did many works in this fashion and experimented a great deal.

SUSAN:

How did you move from that work to the solid black ground with flowers or other kinds of intricate surface painting that I see now?

NANCY:

During my tenth year living in New York, I started thinking: “Okay, I have spent all this time learning the culture that I’m in, that I’m a guest in, that I belong in, that I participate in, but it’s not in my blood entirely. It doesn’t really run through me as naturally as Colombia does, etc. It’s time to go back and look at those roots and visibly include them in my work.”

On my yearly trip to Bogotá, I visited churches and museums looking for inspiring clues. I started looking at the colonial botanical illustrations, done by José Celestino Mutis, a catholic priest who was sent by the Spanish crown to record the flora of La Nueva Granada of what is now Colombia. I started working and drawing these botanical images because they represent Colombia and its history. The color black that I utilize in my work is influenced by Spanish colonial painting, but also has a correspondence to minimalism. Both historical forms represent patriarchal and dominant ideological forces.

CHRYSANNE:

What about the flowers that are in your newer work?

NANCY:

The flowers in my work have to do with the history of Colombia and they are present in colonial painting. They also allude to the Pattern and Decoration movement. They represent femininity. The subject of flowers is often derided in “serious” intellectual circles. I see the flowers that interest me in the bodegas in New York. Colombia is a big exporter of flowers. They also represent global trade and neo-colonization. You can see them in the books of the botanical expedition and still growing freely in the Sabána de Bogotá. That cultural memory is present and those relationships of colonizer/colonized are replicated in the present. These icons via art and imagery have come all the way from the colony, the colony of genders, the colony of Spain, the colony of north and south, of the U.S. and Colombia, the multi-nationals, Monsanto and its current doings in Colombia, all of these have a correlation.

CHRYSANNE:

Your sister has done research on this topic? On the roses and the women? You once mentioned that the roses and flower industry have empowered women from Colombia to be financially independent even though it is very hard work. Has that influenced this body of work?

NANCY:

I think it’s deeper. My mother was an anthropologist and was interested in social justice. I grew up spending many of my vacations in some of the poorest and culturally rich places in the country, particularly in the north of Colombia where she was doing research in Afro-Colombian communities. Those early experiences had an effect. My parents made efforts to send me to private schools and so I saw the contrast between the very wealthy and the very poor. In my work, I replicate those images that I have seen of the dominant and the subordinate.

SUSAN:

It’s interesting to talk about the roses that appear in our bodegas, because they are an example of how the colonial experience is still misunderstood by “well-meaning” liberals in America. I remember a movement to boycott those cut flowers in the stores because those workers were being exploited just so that we could have cut flowers on our dining room tables. The idea was that if the market for them disappeared, the exploitation would stop. No one was thinking or saying that actually providing employment might be making someone’s life better, even though by our standards it’s exploitative labor. So there is an endless confusion about what’s going on between the two countries and little guidance as to what might be responsible behavior on the part of individuals here.

NANCY:

The rose industry has created a lot of employment. Certain aspects of cultivation employ large numbers of women, in part because this is work that men don’t want to do; it supposedly degrades them. Flower farms employ women, which allows them to have financial independence. Money allows women to avoid domestic violence, because they can leave an abusive situation. It’s my understanding that many of these flower farms provide employment and training for women as well as day care.

SUSAN:

Which is not well understood here.

NANCY:

And that’s my sister’s research. We are often interested in similar topics from our own disciplines.

SUSAN:

I wanted to focus a little bit on another aspect of your work. In the exhibition you had most recently at Black & White Gallery in Bushwick you had paintings in the show, but you also had objects attached to them. I wanted to clarify whether all of those objects are found objects and how they stand in relationship to your painting practice?

NANCY:

I moved to Nebraska five years ago and live in New York part time. The process of moving is gigantic. You end up reformulating your life. I started a completely new body of work. As I moved into deep America, and farther away from Colombia, I thought: “I’m an artist, so what have I done up until now?” If I were a writer, I would say: “I’ve done poems, essays, short stories, so I’m going to jump into a novel, a novel about reaching for the American dream, migration, loss, adaptation, and all of this, from the point of view of a woman who lives between cultures.”

The work you saw at Black and White gallery is made of a variety of different works. I made a table with boats that I carved and of objects that came from Bogotá as relics or heirlooms. One is an iron from my grandmother’s kitchen when she was a child back in the early 20^th century. I remember seeing it in her house. I don’t know if her mother ever used it at all. It looked like a ship and that is where I found the direction for that installation. Then, I started finding these pieces of wood and I carved a set of minimal boats. I also put an old stirrup or horseshoe made of bronze on the table. This object came with the conquistadors. There were a few of those in my parents’ house. I don’t know how they survived so many years, but they populate many houses in Colombia. I had a small pre-Colombian figure from Tumaco in the south of Colombia. I placed them in a procession. With the use of these objects I found a new freedom that allowed me to tap into cultural memory and create art while not sticking to one particular voice. It’s as if I were telling the story in a novel with different characters. One is telling one thing, another character is telling another. We can have twenty characters telling a story rather than having just one. And that’s where I am. I’m telling the story from many points of view and many places in memory.

SUSAN:

We’re listening to all these birds chirping in the yard and I noticed that numerous pieces of yours have birds in them, both sculptural and painted. I’m wondering what their significance is for you?

NANCY:

Some of those birds are buntings. They appear in Prospect Park and are migrant birds that come from the south. The birds I have chosen, with that particular metaphor in mind, are birds of migration.

CHRYSANNE:

A few of years ago, you went to Mexico for a residency to learn certain techniques, was it gilding or domestic painting?

NANCY:

I went to Mexico to learn colonial techniques to use in art making and I just began working with them.

SUSAN:

When you say that what does that actually mean?

NANCY:

These were techniques that were used by the painters that were brought from Spain. Many of those painters taught the criollo to native artists and apprentices so that they could recreate the works that were brought by the Spanish. I am interested in one particular technique that is called encarnación. This technique was used to paint over wood carvings and to make the color of skin on different figures: saints, virgins, cherubs, columns etc.

SUSAN:

So what are you using them for? You’re not painting saints?

 

NANCY:

I’ve started gilding, but the encarnación is waiting for a future chapter. No, I haven’t worked with it yet. I usually research a way of making something and I wait, and at some point it comes to me. I was there for three weeks. It was a great experience just seeing all of the different churches where the saints are brown and have indigenous characteristics.

CHRYSANNE:

They’re brown, not white?

NANCY:

They’re not white, no. They’re brown, not all of them, but many. And they have black eyes and they have short bodies. It’s a fantastic display of syncretism. Yes, and sometimes they’re even wearing indigenous clothing.

SUSAN:

Where are they, in Mexico City or outside?

NANCY:

This is in Puebla where I did this residency. Puebla is a colonial city. When the Spanish arrived they wanted to make a city that had no indigenous population and Puebla is that place. There are churches on almost every block and it has an enormous collection of colonial art.

SUSAN:

So the Spanish came, they wanted a non-indigenous city, and yet the saints in the churches are brown skinned? That’s interesting. You’d think that they would have built these churches to represent their own reflection.

NANCY:

Yes, they built based on their own reflection and many times they built churches on top of temples and sacred grounds. They did the best they could to colonize, erase indigenous culture, but they did not manage entirely because the population was huge and they had to enslave and hire natives to build the churches and buildings. They couldn’t erase their cultural memory. The project carried out by the English in North America was more effective.

But going back to Colombia, which is where I’m from and to the history that I know better; the botanical expeditions occurred when the Spanish Crown sent Spanish painters. The painters arrived with Linnean techniques of botanical illustration. It’s a very specific format. It’s a centralized flower that floats without a horizon line, and it’s usually done with watercolor and a gum arabic base. The Spanish came with European materials. They started painting to record their findings and new property. They trained and hired criollo painters who knew the nature deeply, in a visceral way and who knew how to use vernacular materials. The new paints replaced the use of gum arabic with egg tempera and with the natural colors found in the new land. The outcome of that art was incredible. It was brighter, flatter; a completely new production. They created something fresh that was not exactly European. It had all of the information of hundreds of years of European culture, but it was a new modern image in its flatness and colorful life that expressed a syncretism of cultures and made a new creation.

CHRYSANNE:

Where are those very valued older works?

NANCY:

They are in Spain. When the Criollos or Neo Granadinos started fighting for their independence, Spain sent a whole army for re-conquest. They arrived and installed a tremendous repression. Among many other things, they took all of the drawings, all of 3,000 or more. All the original art was sent to Spain including samples of plants and seeds. They are in the Royal Botanical Garden in Madrid. Those drawings, seeds and plants were considered Spanish property. They were colonial objects as they represented the Spanish holdings in the Nueva Granada.

SUSAN:

Now that you have moved to Nebraska, in addition to your art practice, you also opened an artist run gallery. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you’ve shown and how the community there has responded to what you are doing?

NANCY:

Charley Friedman, my husband and I, opened up an exhibition space in Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s called Fiendish Plots. We show artists that already have a developed language; they are not emerging, not fresh out of school. They are artists that have been working for a while. We show what we like. It often has to do with things that interest us from feminism to the environment and work that is critical of the art system, or simply work that has a mature personal vision. We run it from the budget of our household. We’re not a not-for profit, nor incorporated, and we are not a commercial gallery either. It’s a way of continuing a dialogue, of having a life as an art practice where everything is connected to art and to the things that we are interested in.

SUSAN:

Moyra Davey has done two films recently. One was very much a literary and personal dialogue. Another friend who watched it, who is also an artist commented to me after it was over that what she liked most about the film was the fact that a woman artist was taking up so much space and demanding so much time. That is a radical thing for a woman to do. I am curious if you see this aspect of making visible as important, since you want to see your work life and your art life integrated?

NANCY:

I have made work that is often inspired in women’s work. Making lace or crochet or making drawing about making lace contains a metaphor about taking an inward space to think. And yes, Nebraska has physical space that allows me to think about work ambitiously, which ends up being about taking space in the cultural landscape.

SUSAN:

I was talking about women taking up space in the public realm. But you have rather emphasized integrating art making with domestic life, more akin to the notion of ones life as an artwork.

NANCY:

I think that it is all integrated. I think of making art as a form of resistance. Resistance to capitalism, to the state of the art world, and saying I am here. I make art because it is not only about the market; it’s about the survival of the spirit. I look to art making as a primordial impulse that has no gender, but I am aware that historically males have been more validated and have had more conducive conditions. Nevertheless, my own aim has been to create a balance of making a family, sustaining it, creating art, and taking it to the public realm.

CHRYSANNE:

Would you like to talk about your social justice work? Maybe you can speak about your work at the school in Inwood with newly immigrant children, 13 years of age, who did not speak English. Do you want to talk about how that most recent project actually dovetails with your history, and your family’s history of social justice work in conjunction with your art practice? You are a teaching artist with a social justice practice.

NANCY:

There is a definite spillover from my own practice into teaching and vice versa. I’ve been working with Artists Space for fourteen years and it has always been about social justice. This last year of teaching was less subtle, much more direct because of what is happening with police brutality and the elections. This past season, I saw an exhibition of Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers artist, at the Sheldon Museum of Art in Nebraska. I met him. He is a wonderful person and I was moved by his work and his life. Only now, in his seventies is he beginning to be recognized. I decided that I was going to inspire the students with his work. I teach the class in English and in Spanish and the children are mostly from the Dominican Republic.

video ©2016 by MOMMY

SUSAN:

And what did you do exactly?

NANCY:

We made posters about the things that the teen students believe need change and which are close to their lives. We studied Emory Douglas. His works from the 60s and 70s are graphic and direct. Many topics came up from domestic violence, equal rights for women, LGBTQ questions, police violence; all of the same issues of today that are the same issues of yesterday. We had great conversations, and some controversial heated discussions. The students made terrific art and had a space to think and voice their concerns.

CHRYSANNE:

I see the project as a social justice art practice from a teaching artist’s point of view. A way to disseminate histories culled from different activists in the civil rights movement to inspire students by nonviolent means through the power of art. It’s very unusual from an art education point of view.

NANCY:

Yes, it is. It’s an overflow of the interests that I have in life and art and which go back to the strategies of the early feminists. My teaching is political and feminist and aims to create social justice while using art and aesthetics to create a desire to think. When you have the space to think you can resist. Ultimately, resistance is defiance.