Strange Fire

Q&A: Jami porter lara

By Abbey Hepner | December 19, 2019

Born in 1969 in Spokane, Washington, Jami has lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico since 1980. Rejecting the notion that humanity is the opponent of nature, Jami is a conceptual artist whose approach to making remains deeply tied to her concern with cultural inheritances and with becoming a citizen of the the natural world. Jami's work is in public and private collections nationwide, and has been featured in Art 21 Magazine, CFile, Hyperallergic, and on PBS. In 2017, Artsy named her one of the artists shaping the future of ceramics. Exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, NM; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA. She is represented by Peters Projects in Santa Fe, and Simon Breitbard Fine Arts in San Francisco.  You can find out more about Jami by visiting her website.

AH: I am interested in talking about two of your bodies of work, the vessels and your current work dealing with whiteness and the reproduction of whiteness. First, tell me a little bit about the experience you had along the U.S.-Mexico border that led you to create the vessels inspired by plastic water bottles.

JPL: In 2011, I traveled with a small group of artists to a remote stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border with a program called Land Arts of the American West. We spent a week camped in the high desert grasslands of Coronado National Forest, and I spent days walking the rolling hills of its southern extent, where the international border is marked by a low vehicle barrier.

On my walks I found many traces of human presence, but the most common things I found were two-liter plastic bottles that had been used to carry water. In the same places I found bottles it is also possible to find potsherds and other artifacts left by people thousands of years before.

Soon after, our group crossed the international border and traveled to Mata Ortiz, the northern Mexican village renowned for its ceramics. We were there for five days with master potters Hector and Graciela Gallegos, who taught us how to make ceramic vessels in the same ways they have been in that region for thousands of years. We learned to forage and prepare clay, build with coils, polish with stones and fire in a pit.

Upon my return to New Mexico, I kept thinking about how the plastic bottle and the potsherd are essentially the same thing. Both were precious objects -- vessels, capable of sustaining human life. I also began to think about them as evidence of an ancient and unbroken flow -- of people, culture, plants and animals-- that continues in spite of attempts to sever it.

And so the project began with two simple rules: I would 1) use the oldest local ways of working with clay to make objects that 2) reference the plastic bottle, the most iconic and ubiquitous vessel of my time. 

AH: You mentioned that the work considered ‘nature’ and ‘garbage,’ as well as the ongoing drought issue in the region. Can you talk about some of these ideas?

JPL: At the time I was thinking about how climate disaster is driving the movement of all kinds of living beings. I wondered if rather than trying to build walls around natures or around nations we might instead understand people, plants and animals on the move as guides who are showing the way to survival in a rapidly changing environment. 

Ideas about national purity have a lot in common with ideas about racial purity, and these are not unrelated to the way with think about nature versus invasive species. Consider, for example, the symmetry between the language used to describe invasive plants and the language used to describe refugees as invasive people. 

The international border is one of so many constructed borders -- between the U.S. and Mexico, between native and alien, between plant and weed, between clean and dirty. There is more sameness than difference between those straddling the binary -- natives and aliens are people, plants and weeds are both plants, clean and dirty are both arrangements of matter. It’s like so many native New Mexicans will tell you: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.” It’s the line that makes the alien. 

So, confronting the potsherd and the plastic bottle, I asked: What is precious and what is profane? When does trash become artifact? When does it become beautiful? 

What would it mean to pull our perceptions of the plastic bottle closer to what we perceive as natural? 

When I first began the vessel series, I was new to working with clay and found it impossible to make a symmetrical object. Everything I made had an organic, vaguely mutant quality, and it wasn’t long before I saw the vessels’ collective resemblance to seeds, fruits, and organs, despite their formal references to the plastic bottle. I found that the objects themselves problematized any supposed borders between what is human, technological and natural. Consider this short history of plastic:  a mined natural substance is converted by human technology into an artificial material which is now ubiquitous in the natural world, quickly breaking down into the environment, becoming part of the food chain, and changing us as a species. Where exactly in that story can you find borders between what is human, technological and natural? 

AH: These are such beautiful sentiments and incredibly important questions that you are asking. I know that “Border Crossing” began before Trump was elected but you don’t shy away from the topic of immigration that often accompanies an exhibition of the work. I thought a lot about Benedict Anderson’s book on Nationalism, “Imagined Communities,” when we talked about some of the responses and questions surrounding the work. How do you deal with the timeliness of the border wall issue? Has this changed the way you think about the work or led you in another direction with different work?

JPL: It feels more important than ever to talk about the borderlands as a space of continuity, flow, and connection. I think that media images of the apocalyptic, desertified, denuded landscape created along sections of the border wall has come to represent in the American imagination everything -- and everyone -- that lies to its south. 

In the human history of the region, the border is such a recent construct -- both political and physical -- imposed on a place that is characterized by millennia of movement of plants, animals, people and culture. There is nothing natural or inevitable about that kind of severing. The land defies it. The unstoppable movement of people defies it. And I think it matters to remember that.

On the other hand, the practice of American border policy is a violent reality. I don’t want to objectify or exploit the suffering of people trapped by our unethical immigration policies.  Because of this, I try to be very deliberate about the words that I use, and also the forms that I make, which constitute their own kind of speech. Vessels are by their nature figurative, and I have been very careful with that quality. For the same reasons I talk about “people” rather than “migrants” in the borderlands, I have intentionally avoided making vessels that suggest human abjection, suffering or death. 

I’m always interested in the ways in which the things we make as artists can create the possibility of imagining a transformed future. Lately, I think the vessels are looking both ancient and futuristic. I have been thinking about them as totems, guides, or guardians. It is my hope that they can help us to imagine a different story for ourselves and our nation.

AH: In your interview for Southwest Contemporary, you mentioned that a museum was interested in your work until they found out that you are not from a pueblo. Rather than respond by telling them that your father’s extended family is from the part of Mexico, near Oaxaca, where black pottery originated, you decided not to work with the museum. You responded that you, “feel very aware of that requirement, that artists with non-mainstream identities are supposed to perform those identities as a way of invisibly shoring up the center. It’s like another kind of border work, where we make sure to authenticate the people at the border so that we can validate the difference.” I think this is a brilliant response. 

You talked about the ‘policing of cultural appropriation’ and questioning where that is coming from. Can you elaborate?

JPL: Because of the techniques I use for the vessel project and some formal qualities of that work, people often try to determine if my work is "authentic", and accordingly if I am "traditional". “Culture”, “tradition” and “authentic” appear to be terms of respect, but consider how they are used to mark people as racialized others. If you have doubts about whether these words have racial implications, ask yourself:  How often a white person is asked to explain how their work is influenced by their culture? How often are white people described as “traditional” if they are not poor, rural whites? And do you ever hear the work of white person described as authentic?

Artists of color are called upon to perform race in a way that white artists are not. If I identify as a latinx  artist, I will be called upon to explain how my art relates to being latinx. This mandate — that I demonstrate how my art is an extension of my body — reinforces the idea that racial differences are real.

I refuse this expectation and reject the racially essentialist logic behind it. But I look white, so my refusal to perform racial difference leads to the assumption that I am white. Which, in turn, has led to the suggestion -- by white people -- that my use of ancient techniques constitutes cultural appropriation. As we discussed before, I don’t see this as a simple misperception that can be resolved by an assertion of my non-whiteness. Rather, my problem is the racial essentialism behind this claim, which is that artists should perform personae and make works that are “culturally” (i.e. racially) specific. 

Ultimately, the people who end up being constrained by the policing of cultural appropriation are not white artists, who will not be called upon to explain how their work arises from their family traditions as white people, the memories and imaginations of white people, or their white culture. Rather, the white supremacist logic behind cultural appropriation -- which boils down to the idea that differences between bodies are real and therefore determinative of what we can and should make -- constrains artists of color, whose ability to succeed in the art world will be determined by the extent to their work fits within racialized expectations.

AH: Tell me about your new work. You’re working with so many interesting and important topics such as mothering, inheritance, and exploring whitenesses' inability to see itself. When did this work start?

JPL: As we’ve discussed, my recent body of work has led to a confrontation with whiteness. Mine is a provisional sort of whiteness that I think of as “almost white enough”. My paternal grandmother was white enough to be admitted to a San Francisco Catholic school, but not white enough to be valedictorian. My father was white enough to join the FBI, but not white enough to be promoted. And I am white enough to benefit from many of the unearned advantages that whiteness confers, but not white enough to believe that when an authoritarian president talks about Mexicans as “rapists, murderers, and very bad people”, that he isn’t talking about me.

In 2016, the year that a majority of white Americans across every demographic voted for a white supremacist presidential candidate, I began to develop a new body of work about whiteness. In a time when the baroque racism of Donald Trump and his supporters had made it easier than ever for progressives whites to claim racial innocence, it felt urgently important to interrogate whiteness not as something that described them -- the stereotyped white working-class Trump voter -- but as something that described me. As a provocation to myself to see the violence that inheres in whiteness, I made a big white neon sign that flashes between W_IT_NESS and WHITENESS. 

The violence of whiteness functions invisibly -- to white people. If anything were needed to confirm that I have lived in the world as a white person, it is that I should have to be provoked to see the unearned advantages conferred upon me by a system of fake meritocracy designed to keep white people on top. The sign is as literal as it seems. I needed a giant flashing neon sign prompting me to see it - see it - see it. But whiteness is plainly manifest to all who don’t inhabit it. For people of color, the workings of whiteness are as obvious as a giant flashing neon sign. 

Just a few months later I was in Washington D.C. to protest the presidential inauguration and to attend the Women’s March. Peacefully protesting the inauguration with mostly people of color, we were flanked by police in riot gear and circled by helicopters. Peacefully protesting at the Women’s March with mostly white women, we saw no police and were high-fived by National Guardsmen on Pennsylvania Avenue. In the days that followed that marches, white women in pink hats greeted each other on the streets, excited about the size and success of the march. “No arrests!” they enthused. As if the reason that no women were arrested at the women’s march was because of our innocence, and not because no one wanted to arrest us. I went home thinking about white feminists’ unexamined preoccupations with innocence in the context of white male supremacy, where white women’s powerlessness and need for protection are a central rationale for white men’s violent speech and acts against people of color. 

AH: Tell me about the flour sack dresses. In our initial conversation, I thought about the history of white bread, like Wonderbread in the 1920s and 1930s, and its link to xenophobia amongst middle and upper-class whites. (https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/good-bread/)

In your work, there is a historical component but it’s also personal, correct?

JPL: My mom’s mom came to live with us when I was seven, around the time my mother and father separated. She was a vocally racist and anti-semitic woman and undeterred by my mother’s constant refutations. She also taught me to cook, a skill that has become integral to my adult identity. A few years ago, I did a project in which I attempted to record all of my implicit biases over the course of a week. Every time I had a thought that conflicted with my conscious beliefs, I wrote it down. The resulting document was appalling, full of sexist, racist, elitist thoughts that I did not believe. It was like I had a sewer line running through my brain, and the sewer line sounded a lot like my grandmother. I began to think about it as family inheritance, along with cooking and everything else my grandmother wanted to teach me. What would it mean to metabolize both her casual anti-semitism and her oatmeal cookie recipe? What if one was literally baked into the other? I cut up my week’s worth of implicit bias and baked it into cookies. On the recipe card that accompanied them, I replaced the all-purpose white flour with two cups all-purpose white fear.

My grandmother was born in Detroit to a family of German immigrants in 1910, during an American period of contested whiteness and intense xenophobia. Industrial food producers capitalized on anxieties that stereotyped immigrants as unhygienic by marketing industrial white foods like flour with language full of racial connotations, such as “pure”, “all-natural”, and “superior”. In 2018, I redesigned a vintage flour sack label, replacing “All-Purpose White Flour” with “All-Purpose White Fear”, which I printed onto muslin, and sewed into a set of girls dresses, like you might have seen in early twentieth-century family photos with the girls -- from babies to teenagers -- dressed in matching flour sack dresses. I wanted the work to address mothering and home as spaces supposedly innocent of ideology, but where white mothers and grandmothers are engaged in the very political work of transmitting the values of white dominance to children.

AH: As you have thought about your relationship with your mother and grandmother, what have you discovered?

JPL: I am interested in how white mothers who are portrayed as innocent, defenseless, and incapable of violence - perform the critical foundational work of perpetuating racism, sexism, and homophobia through the education and policing of children. 

Consider the talk that queer people and interracial couples get when coming out to parents, which often conclude with a tearful mother who may be worried about your choosing a life that will be difficult, lonely, and full of suffering. This talk, which is usually valorized as fierce maternalism and deep love, is a type of policing meant to exact conformity to oppressive societal norms. It is in the name of love and protection that mothers decide which friends their children will have, what gender they may present, which schools they will attend, and whom they should date or marry. Home is where so much of the labor of maintaining social hierarchy is done. It is violence, and it is maternal love, wrapped into one. 

AH: You mentioned the book, Mothers of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae. What did you learn from that book and how has it inspired some of the other work that you are making?

JPL: While I had been focused on the ideological work performed by women and mothers within the home, my understanding was greatly expanded by, Mothers of Massive Resistance, in which Gillespie McRae shows that far from being a history determined by the policies and laws of men, American white supremacy is a system that was co-created by the work of white women, who, using the constructed political identity of “mother”, expanded the domestic sphere far beyond the home into schools, policy, and politics. It is owing in large part to these women’s constant labor that racial segregation survives long after de jure segregation was outlawed in 1965. Years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, segregationist women were developing and testing color-blind rhetoric, innovating a new conservative political language that disguised white supremacist values in the language of property rights, states' rights, parental rights, and constitutional intent. 

It was this idea, of white supremacist values couched in the political rhetoric of states rights, that formed the literal basis for a piece I am working on right now. The States’ Rights Couch is a Victorian sofa, re-upholstered with white-on-white needlepointed texts that are drawn from the color-blind rhetoric of segregationist women after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  As I envision it, the couch represents white supremacist values -- a kind of family heirloom passed down through generations -- that is periodically reupholstered in rhetoric more harmonious with political aesthetics of the time.

I knew little about Victorian culture when I conceptualized this Victorian couch. But Katherine C. Grier’s book, Culture and Comfort, showed me that Victorians were thinking about domestic objects in much the same way I was thinking about the States’ Rights Couch. Just as Gillespie McRae describes the labor of segregationist women to soften the overt racism of Jim Crow era rhetoric, so did Victorian writers of home decoration advice manuals imagine the function of upholstery, which was meant to soften and harmonize the angles and defects of a room, and the function of etiquette, which could smooth, soften, and harmonize the defects of human character. 

AH: Tell me about the lithographs and the way that people respond to them in a space?

JPL: In 2018, while in residence at the Tamarind institute, I created a group of text-based lithographs, in which the things white people say to excuse racist family members, such as “She’s a good person”, “We don’t talk politics”, and “They mean well”, are printed in white ink on white paper.  The group of 8 x 10 prints are framed, glazed, and installed in the style of a family portrait wall. We printed the negative space around the text, which has awkward line breaks and doesn’t fit within the margins. Glazing frustrates legibility even more, and a straight-on view reveals nothing but a blank field. Legibility, which becomes possible only from oblique angles, requires that you contort your body to catch the right angle of light.

AH: What’s next for you?

JPL: A show of new vessels is up at Gerald Peters Contemporary through March 2020.  Starting in January, I’m excited about switching gears and dedicating the majority of my time to the whiteness projects. In March and April I’ll be in residence in Oaxaca doing an embroidery intensive at Arquetopia, where I intend to make some headway on the States Rights Couch. I’m anticipating that it, along with some brand new works in porcelain, can be ready in time for a 2020 exhibition.

AH: Thank you so much Jami!

All Work © Jami Porter Lara