Renaissance Woman
I make art because I don't know how else to navigate this world.
Welcome to my Substack #19. Soundtrack for this post: SZA’s SOS
1. It is a rainy evening in Seattle and from across the street I examine the brick building of a gallery holding my art. Through the large windows I can see all kinds if AAPI-ish paintings – shibori dyed landscapes, anime-eyed portraits, collaged vintage Asian fabrics - and I look for my three little tigers. I walk in humbly and casually, slowly taking in all the art on the walls, though really, I want to run to the wall my art is on. But that would be gauche, right? I do find my tigers, scattered on a feature wall and wonder what I should do next. Do I stand next to my tigers for the three hours of the opening? Do I wait for people to ask which pieces are mine? Do I mingle and how does one mingle anymore with a mask? It all feels so silly. I know no one in Seattle and have no clue what do with myself.
2. My paintings are of tigers, in the Kalighat style created by artisans for the mass market in the 19th century Kolkata. I was never “into” tigers, until I realized as an adult that there were still high school mascots that used images of My People to cheer themselves on. The Alhambra Moors, The Coachella Arabs, The Indio Rajahs all with caricatures of big-nosed furrow-browed men. And the Hollywood High Sheiks, which is a mascot of not an ethnically Arab Sheik, but of Rudolph Valentino acting like a Sheik. If they could use My Peoples as mascots, then I would use myself as a mascot, too. And as a Bengali, what better take-back than the use of the Bengal tiger? Which, frankly, Cincinnati has no actual claim to cuz what about the city resembles Bengal? In the background behind the tigers, I’ve used photos of my mom and her sisters as a child standing in the lush green wildlife of Bangladesh. I wanted these tigers to have the legacy of Bengali femme ancestral power behind them. Bengal is green and lush, always.
3. When I told my dad the week before that I was going to Seattle because I had an art pieces in a gallery show, he somehow found it as an opening to lecture me on being unmarried. It is a feat of gaslighting acrobatics, frankly. My art and creative expression, just a reflection to him of how this body is un-disciplinable. The morning of my flight, he drives me to the local airport and asks if my friends are going to meet me there, and I tell him no one is meeting me there I’m going alone. He doesn’t respond which I guess his form of a truce.
4. I am not an artist-artist but I am an artist in the way we are all artists. A maker of things. I am art, I make art, my existence is art, my legacy is artmaking because My People’s life making is an art form. An Artiste. I don’t *understand* art. I did not get a Master in Fine Arts. I did not take art history classes in college. I didn’t get a minor. I did not take after school art classes - I was upset I learned about Basquiat in my 30s. I am not educated in visual art or essay writing or poetry. I understand political change, social justice, and upending power. I understand theory of change, not color theory. I do not understand why the golden ratio is more aesthetically pleasing on the eye, I just know when my eyes are pleased. I can’t tell you what different poetry forms, but I know when an open mic piece moves me. I don’t know how to braid an essay, but I know the feeling of when a certain essay make me cry.
5. As I walk around different art shows and galleries, I wonder what makes certain art “good” art, the kind of art that can sell for thousands of dollars and have people wait 30 minutes in line to get in. At the fancy art shows, people are barely looking at the art and passing sweeping judgements, they have shown up to be fashionably seen. Then there are those inspecting every crevice through a magnifying glass. Art is egalitarian. Art is for everyone, not just the elite. We did, after all, first learn to fingerpaint, before learning our alphabets. Art is something you make, that you put all this feeling and meaning into, and then, it says something - at least it does to you. Relative, subjective.
6. In Seattle, I am my own witness. I keep thinking about what it means to have a witness to your life, as a single female, creative, change maker. Am I making visual art for myself? To sit in my closet collecting dust? Am I writing these scripts and essays to sit on hard drives on my laptop, rejections piling up? Do I make art for an audience or for money or is the act of just making enough for me? I want to stand by my painting and ask people what they think. But then I don’t want to hear what people think. A couple of Desi women at the gallery show come up to me and ask which pieces are mine. I say it’s the tigers, and they comment that they had noted them and they were nice. I want to ask them if they saw my mom’s baby photo in the background or if they’ve been to Kalighat but I don’t know what to say so I smile under my k95 face mask and say “Thank you.”
7. I appreciate art museums more now that I paint, the way I appreciate good food because my cooking is average or the way I appreciate music because I once wrote my own song when I was 13 years old or the way I appreciate vaccines because I spent many hours in an organic chemistry lab. Sometimes when we do things, it just makes us appreciate when we see it out in the wild. I am not a narcissist, so I don’t see a piece of art and immediately think that I can do it better. This is my dad’s way of making art. When Mom died, we bought him art supplies because we decided he needed a hobby that wasn’t watching problematic Imams on YouTube. Instead of imagining designs, he found the most expensive piece of art online, and then attempted to replicate it, so he too can make a lot of money from his art. I tell him this is forgery but he doesn’t understand ethics and I give up. He now makes art that is a kind of pointillism with birds, rice plants, the name of Allah and never filling up a canvas fully with color. He saves his little tubes of paint like they are going to run out. Painting for him is a game of economy – painting a lot of canvasses at once. He is disappointed that my paintings have too many layers and take too much time, the detail work a reflection of inefficient time use.
8. We were in the hot tub of a hotel in Cabo when the Desi rapper told me I had to pick one. That he was talking to a poet and they thought it was strange I dabbled in so many things. It was too confusing to other people that I was into too much – was I a writer? A poet? A visual artist? An activist? I couldn’t be all the things – I had to just choose one an do it well. That conversation shook me, I didn’t realize my practice as an art maker made my peers uncomfortable. So I spent some time making a list of people whose art did inspire me – they were the activists-artist that had something to say in the world. Artists like Favianna Rodriguez, Ernesto Yerena, Nisha Sembi, Sabiha Basrai and Traci Kato-Kiriyama. They were grounded in in a political education that fed their art and their art spoke to the political issues of the times. I am far more confident now in how the medium doesn’t define me, but thematically, I stay consistent - speaking to the intersection of counternarratives and culture shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. Whether podcasts, phone banks, poems, essays, or collages, it will be on theme. When a White Man does it, they call him a Renaissance Man.
9. What kind of art would you make if you threw yourself into creativity, inhibited & unrestricted? I am a writer, first and foremost I thought. I paint when the words get stuck in my throat. It stills my mind, and gives me something to grasp on when I start spinning out. The first time I truly threw myself into art like this was after my mother died – the words wouldn’t come. I obsessively painted in the colors of sunsets, because that’s the time I felt closest to her, and by 2012, I had enough pieces painted for my first solo show. I do believe in the practice of using art to make culture shifts – I have poems encouraging people to vote and visual art made from reclaimed hate signs. But when I make art for myself, it’s an observation, a societal critique, ancestral symbols made anew. Something to calm my brain and remind me of who I am. I don’t make for an audience, or sell for capitalism - I make for me.
10. I used to write post-it poetry when I was in an office job in my 20s, writing down all the buzziness on neon notes that I would re-visit into poems later. When I write, I am filled with words buzzing around my head, ideas blustering around bumping into each other. Notebooks full of post-its and notecards. But art – cutting, collaging, color mixing, painting – it’s meditative practice. I’m notoriously unable to still my monkey brain when sitting still, but with art, where I’m cutting the same shape over and over, or painting the same shape over and over – it’s my form of meditation. Everything around me quiets, including my brain, as the repeat actions of my fingers force me to forget all my anxiety.
11. At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought I was going to write a book. For the past three years I opted-out, choosing to focus my life on radical rest and creativity as a healing practice. I was selfish and cutout everything and everyone that would make the cancer cells grow back. I thought that was what the book would be about, but it was instead painting Aunties and eyes and dunes and horizons and moons and tigers. It was writing comedic fiction scripts of stories I wish other people would write. It was staring at the sky and waves on the beach. It was pruning my life to a budgeted living that would maximize peace and decrease toxicity. It was not punishing myself for failing at writing a book, but trusting that as long as I was being creative in some form once a day, that something would come of it, eventually. Now I look back and look at how my Aunties w/Deadly Stare series was my most prolific creativity to date - resulting in commissions, magazine cover, invitations to museum and, now, on a billboard. Who would have known? I’m still going to write that book. It just looks different now.
12. I was talking to another musician about how I wanted to find a job where I could have a non toxic work environment and spaciousness to have creative time to work. Her retort was that “Some of us don’t have the privilege to not work and be full time artists.” It was cute to be class-lectured by someone living in a brand new multi-million dollar house in the hills and newly married to a wealthy man, who, frankly, would be financially fine if she was a stay at home mom. I’m a single woman who didn’t marry rich, I don’t come from wealth, still have student loans, worked non-profits for 20 years, I live in rent control slumlord situation, and drive a paid off Yaris – I get it, my privilege is that I buy things on sale and don’t have a mortgage. Throwing your life into in a radical practice of healing and creativity, is a choice, I know. I made a choice to prioritize my life over other’s profit. Because after working three jobs and burning my body completely out, my doctor wouldn’t give me medicine and instead said I had to quit my job. Sometimes, your body makes the decision for you. And you just have to go with it, because there is no other choice.
13. But there are the chosen family of fellow activist-artists that validate your art-making and remind you constantly why we are makers. The ones that will dance with you in fields of mustard and hire a photographer so that you can write poems to photos at a later date. The ones that encourage you to submit to shows to get your art on a billboard looking over L.A. The ones you have silly art parties with, painting mermaids and hamsas. The ones that will drive with you to an Airbnb in the middle of nowhere and sit with in silence to write with. The ones that take pictures of you for you at any and all performances because we make our own archives of our lives. The ones that agree to table read your script no matter that they don’t know what a Jinn is or why Muslim Christmas is a thing. The ones that you write odes to and they write odes back, because to us a poetic conversation is how we save ourselves. The ones that sit with you silently on zoom in 25-minute spurts because body doubling is the only way you accomplish anything. The ones that tell you how they see themselves in your art, or your words. The ones that celebrate you with a round of applause over zoom because you went to see your tigers on a wall in Seattle all by yourself.
14. I live in a city where imagination is normal and for that I’m grateful. In Los Angeles, you can tell the random person standing next to you at the café that you’re writing a script about Christmas movie or a book of poetry, and they won’t bat an eye. They might even ask where they might see your work, hear your words or buy your art. They might, in fact, judge you for not being artsy enough, high-brow enough, esoteric enough. Every single person in this city has a screenplay they are working on or a novel they are halfway through writing or a podcast that they just posted. In this city, everyone is a hustler, a maker, a shapeshifter. But that also means, it’s a city where your imagination is valued, where people just make believe and play pretend and it’s completely normal.
15. Imagine living in a place where there is no imagination. Where when you tell someone you are writing, painting, or creating, that it is a novelty. Where no one is playing make-believe and imagining a different world to exist in. Imagine how quiet that life must be. Imagine how full of despair their future must be without futurism to imagine a different world.
16. I started to think of my art pieces as portals after Darshan bought and framed my Junglee women print. We had reconnected through a consulting job during the pandemic - she had been on the board of my first non-profit twenty years earlier. She texted me a picture of it framed on the wall at the foot of her bed “so I can see them watching over me. I love having the Aunties with me.” She passed away nine months later from the cancer that ravaged her womb. I think it fortuitous that we reconnected when we did. A mutual friend of ours bought the same print, and she mentioned to me that looking at the print on her wall reminded her of Darshan. I said it was no surprise since Darshan had the same print watching over her as she left this life. I wonder what happened to that piece, but I guess it doesn’t matter because it served its purpose.
17. We make art that is casting spells of protection and watching over each other. Our art means something, but they also MEAN something.
18. I wonder of how my Mom sees my art from wherever she is. At the art show in Seattle, the tiger with her image on it looks down on the biggest room of the gallery. I think a lot about these pictures that I used, and how they were the only objects that survived through wars and migrations. Photos Nana took on a borrowed camera. In the photos, the children version of my mom and her sisters playing in the grass and taking their breakfast in the garden or gliding down a slide. In these paintings, a portal into a legacy of play - ancestral trauma and ancestral joy, in the same stroke. I would like to think she sees it all.
Super interesting to read your thoughts. The tiger painting is great!