*Describe how you came to be an artist

The only way to answer is Since The Beginning Of Time, but our college essays beat that trope out of us and it is no longer relevant, even in poetry. Maybe I can approach it in a personal way: a lower middle class girl learning art in public school in the middle of the Midwest fell in love with Vincent van Gogh in third grade during a parent’s Art Appreciation Presentation. I never truly gave up “arts and crafts” as a kid, which means now I am an artist. I have a website organized with photos of things I’ve made, and a list of places that those things have been “seen,” and “accepted,” and paragraphs about why I’ve made these things.

Re-reading Art & Fear for the billionth time during a pandemic has reinforced how little anyone else’s opinion about art should matter.

An Alt-Art History

Anyone else fighting through their Saturn Return? This year is cyclical and I am taking advantage of the writing time. My speech is broken because I am splitting my language into two halves (three if you consider visual). What dreams?

Like clockwork, we’re nearing the end of our first lease on the studio space. This is my first political act (other than the poorly-spelled signs I made in 2017). A declarative strategy, maybe madness, building on itself through context. Re-reorganizing thoughts that had taken hold before the last era frightened us all, like a bad dream.

Rembrandt at Heart

A lifetime ago, I unfurled a roll of Japanese rice paper and wove a tapestry with delicate pen strokes. The piece measured to be six feet in length, a drawn subconscious built from criss-crossed lines. I set the waves with gesso on the back which discolored the ink and added further depth I did not ask for. It was a strange world that was to be read like a story, dark and light undulating within the abrasive drawing, similar to how an etching scars paper. “Much like Rembrandt,” my professor cleared their throat. This human would later go on to “read” the plexiglas goddess I created a year later, weighing on my self-esteem further.

It’s subliminal weaving-drawing, I declared, that shares the cycles of life and pulls reference from the hero’s journey. Just another Bayeux Tapestry, I think to myself now, and I believe they meant to compare me to Durer.

خلاص/Khalas

Woke to a resounding KHALAS reverberating inside my head. The end-all, all-caps response to life right now. It has a doppler echo and continues to boomerang around the space between my ears. Enough with it! How does one scream in Arabic while typing on a computer? This is no looped-song-opera stuck on repeat forever. This is someone drop-kicking a drum set across the stage, or tearing hundreds of thousands of paper sheets in unison, or millions of street cleaners taking on the same neighborhood.

The problem with sounds in your head is that you can’t unplug the cable. The speakers can’t shatter, because they’re not ruled by the same physics as our body parts. So how to silence the noise inside this make-believe physics? I find myself back in that cinderblock high school, tracing my finger and watching the walls explode behind me. I am dancing with my whole heart in the middle of a concrete hangar that is filled with light. My shoes are off and I am running through silt that belched up from the drowning creek.

Like Water

Anybody else pre-order an ebook a month in advance, just to take care of their future self? Wading through Lev Manovich’s latest book, Cultural Analytics, and thinking on the politics of art history. I was reading a novel by a poet with precise vocabulary, which really messed with my Arabic lessons. What does “غريب” mean on a granular level? I need to know the boundary, so I can smudge it or erase it. My bravery toward writing poetry in Arabic has only extended to the labels I make for my studio materials: غريب/weird fabric (yet to learn the word for fabric).

I dream about visiting eternal springs in the Californian desert. Packing and unpacking dirty laundry, making breakfast for forty with only my 6-cup French press and the slowly crazing cookware from my childhood. Sharing studio space with strangers (أستاذ غريب) and blind to what I am working on.

Beat

Two months later and I’m still exploring how to illustrate time in different ways. Let’s revisit cutting out squares of fabric and connecting them with a common cotton core, stacked strata and growing steadily. Or look at collections of photos, the changing picture planes as a back-and-forth flipbook. We can move up and down, or charm and strange, within the same universe that has Dolly Parton, Miley Cyrus and Jack White singing “Jolene.” A place that shares sunlight with those who turn their faces toward it.

The Sketchbooks (myth)

During a time of illness, political unrest and social reconstruction, two women pieced together a joint mythos to make sense of the chaos around them. Combining their personal histories and cultural observations, the women formed new realities within the pages of two sketchbooks. Using their similar, yet unique, processes of creating, they gave new life to discarded materials, layering scraps of paper to create abstracted landscapes. The women continued pouring their anger, pain and confusion into their creations, watching figures emerge from lines of ink and torn paper edges to inhabit new planes of existence. The book pages could no longer contain these fragmented worlds, and spilled out into different forms, occupying three dimensions and transforming the womens’ own space.

The Sketchbooks exhibition

Detail of one sketchbook by Monica Lloyd and Aneesa Shami.

folklore ("Mad Woman")

Months ago I listened to Jad Abumrad’s “Dolly Parton’s America” podcast series, a wonderful story to ponder while crocheting rug yarn into a circle. A great research project that explores every facet of Dolly’s life and soul and symbolism, her prolific work and how she smashed the glass ceiling; “Miss Americana.”

When I was in undergrad, I purchased all of Taylor Swift’s discography. At the time, she had dropped Red and nobody knew 1989 was on its way. I was months from graduation when she announced her genre change, and soon after her new work blessed us. Arguably, Taylor has furthered a lot of Dolly’s work in the country music industry. Taylor is infamous for bringing country back to teen hearts. She updated the tropes and massaged them into contemporary pop, a cool young adult embodying everything Dolly had also sung about. Everything the industry expected of her and of every other woman.

The first time we really saw Taylor’s potential and range was in 1989. Jaw-dropping imagery and sound updating those damn country song tropes. Was she singing them because she believed them? Because that was all she knew? Of course I watched the Netflix documentary on Taylor Swift that dropped not too long ago. Throughout the documentary, it becomes clear that Taylor is another young woman who has been broken by self-esteem issues brought on by a white male-controlled system (The Industry). Did Dolly ever show this struggle so transparently? Or did she leverage the tropes (her sexuality and voice and childhood?) from the start?

Since 1989, we’ve been given Reputation and Lover, which are fine. They are songs I will still listen to and music videos I will still watch, but folklore is what music history needed. folklore is the album I could hear in the newness of 1989. Taylor is finally in charge and owns all of her own work moving forward, starting with her album Lover. This ownership is heard vibrantly in folklore, an energy and freedom that was last seen when she declared her genre change. Her renewed energy as a result of creating outside of her years “in the system.” A re-emergence of higher self-esteem through the pause our global pandemic brought.

folklore by Taylor Swift, album cover.

On Meditation

“Fate has dealt you a blow,” Carl Kurtz told our Foundations class in 2011. We sat in a circle around him on traffic-yellow drawing horses. It was the first day of undergrad for us all, in the temporary building the freshmen took their studio courses in. Ours was outfitted with a small loft and a side closet, a green chalkboard and plenty of pockmarked white walls. Carl says we are inheriting a confusing and chaotic world. We were not allowed to listen to music collectively or individually during our daily 4-hour period of class. Carl’s class was unique in regard to this, that he insisted on complete concentration on our charcoal and newsprint and subject matter. We all respected this rule and bent over our drawings, the room filled with scratching and sighing and mumbling while we made art. He taught us how to measure, how to use a utility blade, how to use hot glue and bamboo, how to sharpen a pencil. Most importantly, he taught us to work without distraction so our mind and bodies could focus wholly on the task in front of us.

Note from Carl Kurtz to read “The Art Spirit” by Robert Henri and “The Shape of Content” by Ben Shahn.

کریم‎ (Kerim)

Dreaming about folding endless piles of clean laundry while a thunderstorm destroys everything outside. Reading about how to read the same text more than once, peeling back layers of metaphor to create new meaning. Playing with scraps of paper and another’s sketchbook. Napping with one of three cats at any given time of the day. Knotting yardage and sewing it together for a greater purpose. Scratching at old scar tissue and medicating it with expensive products. Documenting the amount of water I am drinking every day.

I’ve learned how to read and speak at least 50 words in Arabic since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, both the Arabic script and English lettering. Lately, I find myself chanting the same word over and over to myself throughout the day.

کریم‎ /Kerim is Arabic for generous.