July 2020
At Fountainhead, we’re quite used to receiving perfect strangers who wind up fast friends after spending a month relishing the intimacy of art-making in a shared home and studio. But since the pandemic struck our shores and forced us to quickly recalibrate the residency’s regular course of business, we’ve shifted to inviting artists who already share a familial bond in order to ensure we remain a safe haven for artists looking for space to create. Such was the case when when we reached out to March resident Amani Lewis to see if they were eager to finish what they started, what now seemed like so many months ago (Amani’s residency was unfortunately cut short as a family emergency shifted their plans and resulted in an early return to Baltimore).
Delighted to welcome them back, Amani would be joined by their partner and peer Ambrose, a multidisciplinary artist from Asheville, NC with roots in Florida, and Jo Nanajian, a Boston-based abstract artist who was originally from Beirut, Lebanon but also a long-time friend and fellow MICA grad. For the first time ever, their friendship was pushed into a different context, in which their time together wasn’t just about their personal experiences but how those experiences fused within their art practice.
“One thing that was really special about this is that I hadn’t seen Jo in a long time,” Amani says. “So I thought it was a great opportunity to rekindle our friendship and be in a space where it’s not just about that friendship, but also the partnership that arises from working together in the same space.”
Each of the artists took advantage of that opportunity despite being at different stages of their personal process - with Jo feeling encouraged to break from her typical practice, Amani feeling like they needed a break altogether, and Ambrose feeling particularly focused on revisiting old ideas and materials. Reflecting not just on each other’s work but on the role of the artist during uncertain times, Amani, Jo, and Ambrose agreed that the beauty of such uncertainty is that the essential becomes abundantly clear. Beyond that, they believe that their role as artists can take many forms - from offering something tangible by way of action and resources, to cultivating opportunities to experience beauty quietly and abstractly - and making space for the idea that anyone and everyone is inherently an artist.
“I’m always asking what art can do that is tangible and has an impact for people and the world,” says Ambrose. “For me it’s like a constant inquiry of how I can connect this image I’m making on the wall to an actual change in policy and access to resources.” She questions who decides what makes an artist - while Amani reinforces the notion that being an artist has more to do with how you perceive the world than it does what you make. “I think when I am driving down a beautiful road I have a visceral experience that I internalize more than the everyday person; I’m in communion with that visual and it makes me want to react in some way,” they say. “I think about that often when I call myself an artist.”
“I feel like you don’t even need to create things to be an artist - just have the ability to process abstractly,” Jo adds.
According to the artists, these opportunities for reflection were precipitated by the context of the residency - which pulled them out of the friendship zone and into a mode that emphasized examining each other’s work.
“Seeing them work has been very special - seeing them immersed in their practice has been really inspiring,” says Amani. “Whenever we are talking about a work it’s like we’re giving each other feedback and it’s all couched in love and care and friendship. You wouldn’t necessarily have that with someone you don't have that relationship with.”
Through portraiture, Amani creates images embedded with a deep attention to their community. Amani’s work attempts to complicate the traditional relationship between artist, subject and viewer by beginning each piece with an intentional relationship to the subject and their story. With a practice grounded in observation, Amani draws from the people that make-up their everyday life in the city of Baltimore. They depict these figures in saturated mixed media works incorporating textiles, glitter, collage and screenprint. Their paintings elevate their subjects into a heroic context.
As an artist who moved frequently with their mother - living most of their adolescent years in PG County and then Columbia, MD - Amani was able to step more fully into their identity as a Black artist once they moved to Baltimore to attend art school at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Being immersed in a predominantly black community strengthened their practice and creative vision to be able to hold the complex experiences of an environment entrenched in anti-Blackness while, at the same time, capturing the beauty, vibrancy and creative insurgence that Black people breathe into the city.
One that caught their attention was the notion that Black Americans simply weren’t used to seeing images of themselves in art history. “I had a show in Pittsburgh before and these little kids started seeing the sculptures and paintings, and said, ‘This is why I don’t go to museums because I only see white people’ - and really when you’re in an exhibition of Expressionism or Impressionism, black people are not the main subject,” they said. “So I started thinking about painting as a way for people to see themselves represented.”
They began to observe the people and places they came across in Baltimore, a city where the signs of racial inequity are left bare for all to see. Neighbors, squeegee boys, and passerby are quickly sketched into a one-line drawing, a method that Amani equates to tracing and mapping a lineage of Black migration across the faces and bodies of their subjects. “I’m tracing their characteristics and feeling closer to that person because of it,” they say. Those one-line drawings are then infused with color blocking, textile, and screenprint to create a vibrant collage that mirrors the complexity of the figure’s history and inner life. Often, these subjects are depicted within nature, like in Amani’s prominent series “Negroes in the Trees.”
For the first time in a while, Amani is finding themselves without much impetus to make new work - and is reckoning with what that means for them. “Usually when I’m stressed I move, move, move, but you can’t do that in quarantine,” they say. “So in sitting with all of my shit, I think I need to accept that my art just isn’t a priority at this time. There’s something I have to tackle inwards first before I can keep going.”
Ambrose’s work is designed to communicate the power and knowledge that lives within our bodies, mined from research into complex histories and woven into delicate textile works that incorporate found images and materials. Ambrose, who grew up in North Carolina and Florida, implicates a Southern history marked by blaring silences in both the historical archive and national narrative. As a whisper into these silences, she creates tactile, multi-layered and mystical scenes as a method to sew herself and the stories that she grew up hearing, witnessing and imagining into the fabric of our collective consciousness. Pain present, familiar and haunting is traced generationally to the present day, where Ambrose often weaves her paintings of faces into collages with fabric she hand-dyed or sourced from thrift stores, fabric stores, or her own closet. She often incorporates subtle details that carry enormous weight - in a work-in-progress at Fountainhead, Ambrose reveals that the stars and moons sewn into a figure’s head are a nod to a surreal story that she heard a scholar share from Paul Taylor’s Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics.
“He shares the story of a slave ship where a slave trader recounts witnessing a group of enslaved Africans emerging from the ship with stars and moons shaved into their hair,” she says. “He asked the ship captain, ‘What did you do to them? And he replied, they did it to themselves without soap.’ This story really struck me, and I learned from Fred Moten’s response to this scholar that it is not as important to know why they did it. But their story can become a source to continue telling, imagining and creating stories of insurgent possibility and mystical potentiality across and against the realities of state violence and anti-blackness that we face everyday.”
A mystical monument to the stories that have no words and no language, yet live starkly inside and through our bodies, Ambrose describes her work with the phrase ‘historical memory, mystical potential.’ She says that through her work, she “aims to further the work of Black scholars, cultural workers and storytellers by making visible the multilayered myths of Blackness we are forced to both wear and bear, and how they are integral to making this Nation’s origin story, its wealth and more possible.” The figures she incorporates into her work morph into ancestors or angel figures weaving their stories into large-scale, quilt-like pieces, with materials like silk and lace and cotton. Her process involves careful research, sourcing images online, and textile hunting before she begins sewing and collaging in a manner that experiments with light and texture.
“Each work is a spiritual experience for me, and the conversations around my work are designed to help us become more in touch with ourselves and the knowledge that lives within our emotions and our bodies,” she says. “Each piece is like a prayer.”
As an abstract artist, Jo’s practice is driven almost entirely by gesture and intuition, with the goal of capturing a fleeting moment of feeling in memoriam. It’s her view that her practice has always responded to a perceived sense of control - drawing charcoal figures onto canvases and slowly chipping away at their existence with repetitive motions until they are amorphous and unrecognizable, Jo equates the process with the death of her own American dream. Immigrating to the United States from Lebanon in adolescence, Jo recalls a gauzy promise dashed by the sting of reality.
Where most people today find themselves tearing away at excess, Jo finds herself doing the opposite. Her practice, which usually takes a subtractive approach, is now geared toward adding more and more layers on what Jo perceives as a journey of self-discovery. “I’m thinking a lot about how we’re taught to believe that negative emotions are bad and positive ones are good, and that we should suppress the negative ones because of that. When in all actuality a feeling is a feeling, and should not have any connotation to them. But when you suppress those emotions , what do they turn into? Is that where aggression comes from?” she asks, pointing to large-scale black and white abstractions layered with charcoal, glue, and paint.
“It’s this idea that in coming here we would gain control but then realizing we actually lost it, and finding that this sensation comes up again and again for me,” she says.
Jo, who has previously shown interests in medical illustration - and studied human anatomy in minute detail as a result - realized that she was more interested in deconstructing the human form. While the process of erasure has long been present, at Fountainhead she is incorporating layering and discarded materials in an additive process that represents an exploration of her identity.
“Making art is something you’re doing your whole life, and you’re changing everyday along with your work. That’s why I say this is a transition for me and what I’m feeling, because I’m doing what I feel is really happening inside me,” she says.
Images courtesy of Alex Nuñez
Words by Nicole Martinez