![]() ![]() I was thinking about trap music in the context of driving to the farm and seeing cars with amazing rims and the most pristine paint jobs and amazing stereo systems. Memphis has two hip-hop trap stations, 97.1 and 107.1, which is pretty interesting because most cities have one. When Colin Kaepernick knelt, it was a problem yet when someone’s kneeling at church, it’s accepted. And oftentimes, when you think about America and the stereotype of who farms, we picture older white dudes. Farmers kneel to check their seed population. The work engages the act of kneeling, albeit abstractly. It’s the first piece of farm equipment that I ever bought and used. For Whom Awaits the Harvest (2023) is a planter that has a sound component it vibrates with trap music, and beside it is a kneeling pad that I bought from a church store. I’ve never really let those components openly exist in installation form. It talks about things that I’ve kept really near and dear to me: farming, faith, and fireworks. MMF Black farming is present in the work that you recently had in the Tennessee Triennial, right?ĭL Yeah, that work represents a pretty serious shift in my practice. The 1619 podcast has a whole segment dedicated to the loss of Black farming, but there was always an extra layer teaching faculty and my fellow students. This is a topic that’s been in the news a lot during the last five years. It’s really bizarre to have to educate your professors about Black farming. The MBA prepared me to confront that-and the relative conservatism and whiteness of these fields. Ultimately, I got the MBA because I work in three volatile industries where there are no guarantees of output, even when you give them everything. I was doing full-time school at night, which was hard, not only physically but also emotionally. Why?ĭL I got the MBA after the MFA but while I was teaching full-time at Yale. MMF You got an MBA in Agricultural Management directly after your MFA. MMF And you recently bought acreage to farm on, right?ĭL I bought acreage in Memphis for a new studio, but my dad and I have been looking at the farm next door to land we currently have outside the city just in case it comes up for sale again. Once you lose land, it’s really difficult to get back. Now that I’m older, I understand the importance of Black land ownership in the South and how precious that is. I grew up going back to my dad’s childhood home, which my grandparents once farmed-it was over six hundred acres-and that has since been sold off or lost. I wrote “farmer.” My parents saw that and did everything in their power to steer me away from the profession because there’s nothing guaranteed about it. I remember when I was in elementary school, in the yearbook you put down what you wanted to be when you grew up. Michelle Millar Fisher Why is farming and agriculture particularly important to you, and how does it form part of your practice? That might not be immediately evident for people if they’re coming to your work through an online search or into an exhibition of your sculpture.ĭesmond Lewis I grew up playing with toy tractors and playing in the dirt. Lewis often uses steel as a frequently invisible yet structurally imperative building material with rich potential as a metaphor for the concealed contributions of Black individuals and communities to US history. ![]() I arrived at his land in Tennessee to find him standing in front of a small shipping container inside of which were a few of his steel sculptures. I had read about Desmond’s hybrid work that synthesizes fine art, farming, faith, and pyrotechnics in the service of Black community making and preservation, and I wanted to know more. My goal was to meet artists and makers to ask them about their craft education and, in particular, the teachers who brought them to their practice. Desmond Lewis grew up in Nashville, teaches at Yale University, and recently bought a small plot of land in Memphis, a city I was passing through on an Amtrak odyssey that took me across all forty-eight contiguous states via train.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |