BmoreArt

Cara Ober, BmoreArt: Thanks for coming out tonight for a conversation with Seph Rodney and Vlad Smolkin. As you know, Vlad is the director here at CPM Gallery. Seph is an art critic, curator, and world traveler, so we’re really glad to have him here in Baltimore.

Tonight, we are going to have a succinct conversation about materiality, curatorial process, and the context surrounding this show. The talk will last about forty-five minutes, but we are very informal, and we invite questions from the audience. How many people have never been here before?

[About half of the audience raises their hands]. 

That’s exciting. We have a real treat for you tonight. Vlad is the person at this gallery curating shows and selecting the artists. After spending over a decade in New York City, he has returned to Baltimore and is curating excellent exhibitions in this space, a combination of Baltimore-based artists, New York based, and international artists. 

This is the third exhibition where a guest curator has worked with CPM and we love having the guest curator from New York with us tonight. 

The exhibition features three globally respected New York based artists: Chakaia Booker, Leonardo Drew, and Trenton Doyle Hancock. These are all original pieces. None are prints, so none of them are in multiple. We’re going to center our conversation tonight around the way that this show came together, really thinking about the title of the show. As you can see on the wall, the title is Material, and this is a topic within the art world that I am quite opinionated about.

I think that materials are sort of the underrated superstar of the art world… They’re basically like the Idris Elba of the art world. 

[audience laughter]

Cara: When you go into a museum or gallery, the text emphasizes an artist’s biography, their politics, and/or their ideas. And, the reality is that these subjects can actually alienate viewers.

But materials, I believe, offer a real sort of familiarity and kinship. We talk a lot about accessibility in the art world and wanting to bring more people in and certainly that is a key part of the mission of BmoreArt. But thinking about material as a way to attract people regardless of their age, regardless of their background, their class, their race, their level of education is something that I think is powerful.

And so, we all have our personal experiences with materials. We all have a direct experience of what materials are, what they do, how they function. And the best artists harness materials not just for the physical things that the materials can do, where they want to surprise or impress us with what they can do, but also the meaning that is in materials.

The best artists are able to take specific materials and rely on the meaning in them—and you think about natural materials that are here on the wall… We have all kinds of natural and man-made materials that are embedded in the work. What these materials do are lend actual histories, civilizations, stories, nature, the environment, all of these additional elements that elevate the work and sort of expand the story that they tell. 

So this is an exhibit about the power of materials and Vlad and Seph have a longstanding relationship based in the New York gallery world. And, I know that curating and putting this exhibition together was something that both of you have been wanting to do for some time. For those who are new to the exhibition and even the gallery, what I wanted to hear about first was just setting the stage and telling us how the exhibition came together. 

Vlad Smolkin, CPM Gallery: Thank you for the introduction, Cara. I think that’s a pretty good overview of what’s happening here. For me, I think this gallery and making exhibitions is a multi-layered process, and the most important aspect is the connections that I have with people that are based on a similar kind of creative motivation in the world. 

This kind of an abstract idea then comes back down to earth in terms of what we can do together. Do we want to work together? Do we want to collaborate? Do we want to share our names in a place and time?

Seph and I, we’ve known each other for some time, and he is someone I deeply respect from our time in New York together. And when I opened this gallery in Baltimore four years ago, he was at the top of my list of people that I wanted to be involved with what I was doing, and that this friendship and mutual respect, could accumulate into something that we can look back at over time, and see as a window into what the relationship is today.

So for me, it’s an honor and a privilege to have Seph be involved with the show.

Seph Rodney: I think it’s worth talking about the degree to which you are really helpfully critical because–and I appreciate you saying that you were honored to put this together with me–you really helped me work through some of the early ideas around what this show would be titled and how it would come together. And I think it’s worth talking about that because initially the title that I wanted to have with this show was Raisins in the Potato Salad.

[audience laughter]

Vlad: I love that. That’s great.

Seph: So for those who don’t quite have the cultural reference, I’ll explain. There’s a thing for Black people where we say to each other, you know, we don’t want so-and-so bringing this person to the cookout because they’re gonna put raisins in the potato salad. It’s a weird thing that some white people do.

Vlad: Nobody wants that.

Seph: Nevertheless, they end up in the potato salad. So I was talking about this idea for several months and Vlad had some very pointed questions. He’s like, these Black artists, so are they the raisins? 

The idea that I had, and I should mention too, that there was, in, in the initial conversations, I’d imagined the painter Jeff Sonhouse with Chakaia and Trenton… And we went pretty far into discussions with Jeff to be in the show, but then he had to pull out for reasons that are not worth getting into. 

Seph: Part of my thinking around having him alongside Chakaia and Trenton was that they’re the unexpected thing in the potato salad that was hard. It’s difficult not to, and I think this is part of the problem I was running into, and I’m glad Vlad pointed out was that it had a very negative connotation and I didn’t want it to be negative.

I wanted to say they’re actually bringing something to the table that a lot of more well known Black artists aren’t. And, I can rattle off the names, you know? In fact, where I’m staying today, at good neighbor [guest house]… There’s a book of Amy Sherald’s paintings in the hotel room, which is great. Lovely. Amy Sherald is not that great a painter though.

She makes some really important statements by having the Black figure confront you, showing two men kissing and embracing, and the men on motorcycles. She’s making a concerted effort to normalize these things about Black life, right? Making it part of the American story. That’s great, but as a painter, there are other, well-known artists who do this, like Kehinde Wiley and Derrick Adams, and, and I feel like there’s a certain kind of impoverishment of our view of what Black artists are doing because we are paying so much attention to this talented but small figurative group. 

And I feel like Chakaia Booker, Leonardo Drew, Jeff Sonhouse as well, and Trenton are outside of that kind of talent. So I wanted to bring an argument to the table around that. But through Vlad’s really careful and, and perceptive questioning, I realized eventually that I just had to let go of it.

The concept just didn’t quite work. And so I went back to the drawing board and I thought, Okay, so what’s uniting these people? What is important? And frankly, for me it was the manipulation of material.

Seph: These artists are such savvy thinkers about their materials, and you can see how they ping off each other, right? You begin to see when Leonardo Drew is next to Chakaia, how structure starts to become composition, how it starts to become part of the way that you think your way through the work, and how they think their way through making the work. And that comes out from having them next to each other. 

So I see this sort of decision that Trenton is making with the swirls and the bottle caps, and I can see a similar kind of thinking in certain of the pieces by Booker, right? So after I got over that hump, I think the rest of it just kind of came together. I mean, we spent how many hours on the install? Like one or two, right? It just simply fell in.

Vlad: Well, because we spent months evolving this thing. I mean, what you’re hearing is that behind the scenes of “how the sausage is made” in an exhibition, which I think isn’t often talked about, but what it amounted to in this almost reverse way is emphasizing and focusing on why we stand in front of artworks, right?

So it seems obvious, like Cara was saying material, but arriving at a subject and a politics even out of a fun, very fundamental thing of what is in front of me? What’s it made of? What color is it? How does it feel? Is it old and or new? And then having the material let you release from it, and start to get the content that we expect from an artwork: What does it mean? Why is it made this way? How is it existing in popular culture and the current political moment? So I actually think in a kind of backwards way, we arrived at the raisins in the potato salad thing too.

Seph: The unexpected thing.

Cara: So in terms of these particular artists, we have this emphasis on materials, materiality, process, abstraction. And I think, there is a dominant narrative right now in the art world specifically around Black artists making figurative work.

And it’s the idea of showing up and being seen and being a part of the conversation and people being able to digest that and that becoming comfortable, and that becoming a part of the canon. So while that makes sense, where do artists like this go, who are really masters of their craft? Where do they fit? And, Seph, as an art writer, do you prefer the term ‘art critic’ or ‘art writer’?

Seph: Critic. Because it makes me sound meaner.

[audience laughter]

Cara: Nice! You might as well just own it. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about yourself, personally and professionally, and… do YOU feel like you’re the raisin of the potato salad at times? Is this exhibit a way to align yourself with artists professionally that are meaningful to you?

Seph: That’s exactly right. I do. I mean, I feel like there’s a very conscious effort to go against the grain because frankly, I just get tired of seeing a lot of figurative work, which is essentially representing Black life. A lot of it is mediocre.  I live in New York, I go to galleries and museums…

Cara: As your job.

Seph: Over the last couple years, in fact, Lowery Sims, who lives in Baltimore now, who you all may be familiar with … She was the first Black curator hired at the Met Museum [in 1972]… She and I talk every now and again… she would be here tonight, but she’s out of town. Anyway, I went to a lecture of hers at the art student league like two or three years ago, and she talked about how she started collecting emails and notices of work that pertained to Black figuration. She talked about what all this glut of figuration meant and began to embrace and break them down into various categories. And around a year ago, I started doing the same thing.

I just started pocketing some of the emails I was getting because I look like this. So you can imagine people at the various PR firms are like, ‘Oh, Seph would be interested in this, let’s send Seph this show’… I’m frankly just tired of it. I curated a show at Slag Gallery in New York City last summer and specifically chose people who work in abstraction because I don’t wanna do figuration. I specifically chose women because I think that women don’t get enough airplay in the art scene. 

I specifically chose women who did not already have gallery representation. That’s a very different show. But there was that same pull towards abstraction as here. I wanted to put together these folks because it felt like I could do a different kind of thinking. And, it also felt celebratory to me to be able to enable that kind of thinking. 

This is not always a welcome conversation, but I want to be able to say to my peers and my colleagues, Hey, this figurative thing is happening. Is this great? Do we want to keep doing this? Is it kind of boring? Can you do something else? Is that possible? And one of the things that we’ll get to, I imagine in the conversation is the fact that these three artists are Black. And I didn’t mention that in my curatorial statement at all because it didn’t feel necessary to me to emphasize that. 

Seph: One of the wonderful things that my friend Steven Fullwood, he’s an archivist and a filmmaker and an independent publisher of a lot of LGBTQ+ work said to me, was recalling Toni Morrison, who said that, ‘I’m Black, but that’s not the most interesting thing about me.’ It’s not the most interesting thing about me, either. There are other things to say and I love that these artists bring these ideas to the forefront of the conversation.

Cara: I’m glad that there are other things that are more interesting to consider and you’re carving out a space to name some of those things… So Vlad, you live here and so that means you get to live with this art for an extended period of time. You see it every day. It’s in your peripheral vision. It’s here when you’re having your morning coffee. It’s here when you’re, I don’t know what you do in the evenings, but I’m curious…

Vlad: What, more coffee? 

Cara: I’m curious about what’s been most surprising about living with this work, what ideas for you have risen to the surface that would be interesting to us. What are the Easter eggs or the secret nuggets that we should look out for? 

Vlad: That’s a kind of a tough question. I wear different hats, right? Even the fact that I live upstairs is an uncommon relationship to an art gallery, right? So I’m an art dealer, gallery artist, artist, and I also live upstairs. And I think I’m really interested in the different kinds of obligations that I have, depending on what position I’m approaching the work from.

So how I am when I’m drinking coffee in my slippers in the morning with the work, and what does it mean for me to be able to do that at all, the kind of obligation that I have as just a citizen or art lover in that context, the kind of privilege that is, and the weight that that carries, not just in a negative way, but that I’m a steward of these things.

I set this gallery up like this on purpose, not just because I live here, but because when people come in, I open the door and I invite them in. That was very intentional—this idea of making an appointment: being intentional about wanting to go to a place, not being casual. This is something that was fundamental for me with this space in general. This kind of intentionality and attention.

And I think this show is about intentionality with materials and the attention that they require for you to be able to unfold the story of them, right? 

So anyway, when I’m drinking coffee, maybe I’m like, I like red. You know, it can be a casual relationship. But then as an art dealer, a curator, a gallerist, I have to think about context in a different way. What does it mean in this neighborhood, in this city? Who am I, who is Seph? Who am I inviting to work with me? Who am I inviting to have a conversation with me? Who am I inviting to be a part of that conversation? 

It’s something that I’m mindful of and I’m mindful of across time. What does it mean today? Well, I’ll go home and experience this, and what might it mean in 10 years to have this conversation in this space with these artists, with this curator, you know? I don’t want to go on and on, but that’s my process basically.

Cara: But you love the work, and you love artwork in general.

Vlad: I think my commitment is to its validity and necessity in the world.

Cara: You don’t have any favorites here?

Vlad: I do have favorites, but I won’t say.

Cara: Why not?

Vlad: Well, if we were having a coffee together, I’d tell you the favorites.

Seph: Do I have any favorites here? I do, but my favorites break down into different categories. I think what Trenton brings to the game is whimsy. And being funny in art, in contemporary art particularly, is hard to pull off. I think a lot of artists feel sort of like they’re white knuckling it to be fanciful or to be different. And with Trenton, it’s just like, he comes from this place of genuine mischief making, which I really love. 

And Leonardo, if you have experienced one of his allover installations, it’s like entering the cosmos. He shows with a gallery I know pretty well, Galerie Lelong in New York City. And I’ve developed a relationship with them over the years and have written about some of their artists. Leonardo is one of the ones who’s most impressed me. I actually think he’s one of the best artists working right now. Period. There is something–and Vlad said this to me the other day– there’s something quite wonderful about recalling that experience of being aesthetically overwhelmed and having that thing be sort of distilled and contained here in the works in this show. There’s a way in which it changes one’s entry into the work because it is so much more distilled and contained. 

And then Chakaia is a very recent intellectual acquisition. I only saw her work for the first time when I was in Miami in 2021. She had a huge show at the ICA and I walked into that room, it was a huge expansive gallery, and I couldn’t believe I didn’t know who this person was before. I was just like, where have I been? This is ridiculous. She’s astonishing. And I wrote about her for Hyperallergic and since then, she’s just been here in the back of my mind.

She’s one of the handful of artists where I think: you deserve a big show. If I can make it happen, I’m going to make it happen. Just kind of endlessly fascinating. In most of the work that she’s known for, she’s using recycled tires.

But she has this print practice and she was telling me about it via email, and so this is going back to ‘the ways the sausage is made.’ There’s a very practical consideration, to get the work that consists of the recycled rubber. I would have to travel to Allentown, which is where her studio is. And I thought, from where I live, that’s difficult, you know, it’s gonna take a long time. And she said, well, I have these prints at the Robert Blackburn studio in the city. Would you like to see those? And I said, okay, That could work. 

So I went and she showed me a lot of the work. And again, her facility and subtle intelligence about the relationship between the heaviness of line, the lightness of it, and the interjection of color, the energy that gets contained in an abstract composition. She just  knows how to do that. She just knows how to make a thing compelling. And so it was great because we were able to arrange the transport of her work here relatively easily and did not have to go all the way to Allentown and have to worry about getting huge crates, blah, blah, blah. And these works speak to each other. So that’s a very long-winded way of responding to your question, Cara, but they are favorites in very different ways for me.

Cara: And how many of you, how many people in this room saw the Material Girls exhibit in Baltimore at the Reginald Lewis Museum? Forever and maybe 15 years ago with Chakaia Booker’s tire sculptures? Yeah. She also did a big show at Grounds For Sculpture. 

Audience Member: She has a beautiful piece at the African American Museum too. I just love her courage, which is fabulous.

Cara: Seph mentioned Hyperallergic. Many years ago, he was my editor at Hyperallergic when I was able to write regularly for them. He was full-time there for many years as an editor, but also, writing about art all the time. I think one aspect of his writing that I respond to a lot is his willingness to incorporate popular culture into his thinking about contemporary art.

And so, there was one article today that actually Ines from our BmoreArt team brought up. It was an essay that Seph wrote in 2016 after Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl. And it was a performance that I think most of us remember for a variety of reasons. It pushed a lot of buttons, it got a lot of cultural criticism, and specifically cultural criticism around the definition of Blackness in America around the idea of her sneaking some radical things into her beautiful message and performance. 

For me, this was meaningful because the idea of this show is, almost a decade later, a concept that Seph has been thinking about all this time. The idea that artists don’t have to put our identity and our politics, our self depiction, in a certain way that makes other people comfortable. 

I want to read an excerpt from that essay. You guys should check it out. 

“The video and performance of “Formation” is about Beyoncé, but she herself is just a stand-in for the dream of a blackness that encompasses everything. Swallows up all the contradictions of being enslaved yet being survivors; being oppressed yet being originators; being irresistibly sexy and yet being ignored at times; being hybrid and yet being authentic. We go to the well of pop culture for easy cultural signifiers and simple identifications because they give us a break from parsing all the things we have to parse just to cross the street. And, also because we want so damn badly to be free.”

That was the conclusion, my favorite part, expounding around the idea of contradictions and creating a space for freedom from whatever the hell it is that you need to have that freedom from. 

Seph: I’m talking about the sort of freedom from feeling the obligation to constantly signify your self-worth or your value to that particular African-American story. A good example is when I was a visiting critic at Pratt Institute for a round of crits for the graduating, class. There was a woman, a student, with a variety of work up. She had masks that she fashioned, that referred to, and I’m gonna be really crass here saying just “African” masks. I mean, I know that that’s a whole continent, but I don’t know specifically what traditions or tribal history she was drawing on, but she also had this thing, which I’ve seen a lot now, which is the cross section of one of those ships that would take slaves in the middle passage. The cross section where you see the bodies bunched up against each other and I just thought, come on. I mean, it’s not only cliche, but it’s also not very imaginative. 

And, I’m looking at a work of art. And we’re standing in a sort of semi-circle around the work, and I am one of three people designated to talk about it. And as I look at the work, I realize that this was the same conversation that I had about the Hip Hop show that was at the BMA where we had this huge round table, and there was a bunch of people in there, musicians, writers, and Ekow Eshun, who used to run the ICA in London was part of the round table conversation, an independent curator now. And we were talking about all the things that we could do, all the tentacles to Hip Hop that move out into the culture. 

And, there’s this question, from the director, Asma Naeem… How do we separate out this from that? And can we do everything? And Ekow said, we have to come to this show, not with a sense of duty, a sense of obligation to say everything about Hip Hop, but rather come to it with a sense of, this is what we’re excited to talk about. This is what we want. This is what is gonna be great to explore. 

And so, back to the student … I said to her that I feel like this work is made from a sense of obligation, a sense of duty, and being a Black woman. That you have to be interested in social justice, showing the cross section of the ship from the middle passage. But I said, You don’t have to do that. In addition to being a Black woman, you are an artist who’s really interested in texture, really interested in remaking the human face in such a way as to make it just a little bit alien. I can see that in your work. There are other things going on.

All that to say – We don’t have to operate from a place of duty all the time. I try to operate from a place of actual excitement, of interest, and this is a thing that doesn’t get talked about enough in the art scene. I’m interested in being surprised. I’m actually interested in walking into an art gallery and seeing something that I have not seen before. 

Seph: For example, René Treviño had had this beautiful show up at the Wellin Museum in New York at the, on the campus of Hamilton College. And I remember struggling to write about that work because I was trying to say all the typical things about identity. And then, I realized that there was a way in which he was approaching making the show that he made, which was NOT about identity in any of the typical ways. 

He was celebrating himself, using the things that were at hand to kind of make identity something that essentially constitutes a party–for him and others. A celebration. That’s a surprise, right? Not operating from a place of duty, but operating from this place of, ‘I wonder what happens when I do this?’ What could come about when we mix and match this? How might that feel? I think that René and I have similar projects in that we’re trying to surprise ourselves. 

Vlad: So I wanna say one quick thing. I don’t know if you said the word radicality or if it was just in my head, but when we think about contemporary artists, this idea of—are you being radical? What is the radicality in your work? And I find that to be somewhat confusing sometimes because a show like this, which is a little bit more downplayed, can actually be very radical.

These artists often make very big things. We’re showing small works that zoom into distinct material decisions. The way we think about radicality oftentimes now is associated with figuration and I’m interested in how this show is being radical in a different way.

I wanted to work with Seph because he has a kind of radicality that is not obvious, and a part of me feels like by the time that radicality gets to these big institutions, it’s no longer radical. It’s been accepted, you know? And so part of why I’m doing this and why I want to work with Seph is because it feels like there’s this embedded radicality. It’s a little bit hard to get to, but maybe down the line it’ll be a little bit more obvious. For some reason, this show at the Met from a few years ago, of Michelangelo drawings popped into my mind. Why is this Michelangelo show running through my head? 

Seph: Mm-Hmm. And I said it was, what? Supremely under lit?

[audience laughter]

Vlad: Yes. But also, that show was made to show this incredible sophistication of the artist. We know his sculptures and the Sistine Chapel, but look at this line, just zoom in on how much of a genius Michelangelo is. And I’m like, the show here is doing some version of that too. Why can’t I look at Leonardo Drew as if he’s Michelangelo? Why does the conversation have to be about something else, or Chakaia Booker or Trenton Doyle Hancock, you know? So for me, there was a kind of radicality in the way Seph is asking us to look at these artists’ works that for me is super important.

Cara: I have a question. You talk about coming from a place of excitement and imagination instead of the obvious obligations. So when you’re looking at work to select, as part of your curatorial process, how does that excitement register for you? Is it that you haven’t seen it before, because I do that too, and I always want to show the work that I haven’t seen before. So how does that register for you when you’re actually developing a concept for a show?

Seph: I can give you a practical answer that when I saw Chakaia at the ICA in Miami. I was almost literally running from piece to piece, standing in front of a piece and going, “What!?” And then running to the next piece and being more amazed. So, if excitement is registered bodily, I feel it, it is visceral. It’s like it wakes me up. I get excited. 

I mean, and I remember the first time I saw Leonardo’s show at Michigan University, I think, or University of Michigan and it was astounding. He works in a bunch of different materials, but this show was all wood, and I didn’t know that you could do that many different things with wood. It was absolutely titillating to me. 

The response for me is bodily excitement. I feel like I want to spend more time with this work. You know, it’s a typical thing, like those long conversations that happen in podcasts. People ask this question, if you could have lunch with anyone, if you could have dinner with anyone, who would you choose to have dinner with? I don’t want to have dinner with these artists, but with their work. That’s what I want.

Audience Member: Do you have plans to do any future projects or next shows?

Seph: I’m working on finishing up a project I started with a Ford Foundation last year. Essentially, they hired me to be a storyteller about these cultural organizations, called America’s Cultural Treasures. This started back in August 2023. They assigned me eleven, and they wanted me to embed myself within these 11 different organizations.

So I did them one month at a time. Their organizations are all around the US… Puerto Rico, Santa Fe, Chicago, Anchorage, Seattle, Project Rowhouses in Houston. And essentially I’ve gone to each of these organizations and I spent five to six days with them, interviewing people on staff, people they partner with in the community, and board members to answer these basic questions.

What is this organization for? Who do they serve? How do they carry out that service? Why is this service important? In what way do they add to or illuminate the sort of larger American story? I’m in the middle of finishing writing the report on the Arab American National Museum in  Detroit. And I have two more after that. Essentially what we’ve been discussing from the inception of the project is how we would get these stories out to the wider world.

So we’re hoping to partner with some publications. We’re gonna talk to a few different ones now, to edit them and publish them so that the larger cultural and arts community can get a sense of what these organizations like Penumbra Theater in Minneapolis are doing and why it’s important. 

That should be done by next month, but then there’ll be the editing process and working with an organization to get them published hopefully this fall. So that’s what has been taking up a lot of my bandwidth in the past six, seven months. 

And then I’m also co-curating a show on sports at SFMOMA, which has a title I actually came up with, a title, which I’m proud of: Get In The Game. It’s all about sports, and it’s the largest show that SFMOMA has done. I am co-curating it with Jennifer Dunlow Fletcher and Katie Siegel, who used to be here at the BMA. And that’s also been a demanding project. Get In The Game opens October 16, so later this year. 

Audience Member: Is the show traveling? 

Seph: It will go to Crystal Bridges in Arkansas and then the Perez in Miami.

Audience: I do want to hear how you came up with the title.

Seph: Ok. Do you remember when Serena Williams did her retirement tour? I think it was last year. And she was at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens for the US Open and everybody and their mom was in the stands to watch her. I mean, the whole Hollywood crowd and professional athletes, and there was a guy, Saquon Barkley, this running back with the Giants at the time.

I think he got traded but anyway… Saquon Barkley was there with his girlfriend. He was watching the game and he was doing this sort of thing, [head goes back and forth, back and forth as if watching a tennis match, making emotive faces] And as I watched him do that, and realized that we were both “bodily invested” in this game. And I just said it to myself, yeah “Get in the game.” And then, it just stuck.

Cara: So it was inspired by tennis, amazing!

If we have no more official questions, we can always ask unofficial questions to these two. Thanks for coming. Please have a beverage and we’re gonna turn the AC back on now!!

Material: Chakaia Booker, Leonardo Drew and Trenton Doyle Hancock

Guest curated by Seph Rodney
Critical Path Method Gallery, also known as CPM
1512 Bolton St., Baltimore
Ended June 22

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