When Garner joined Johnny Carson on TV in 1982, she wore her famous “half suit,” cropped to reveal a muscular abdomen. On the broadcast, Carson calls her an “inventor,” and she presents herself as a businessman appearing on TV to show off new gadgets. In reference to the suit, Garner explains that the “abbreviated” style popular in women’s fashion ought to be adapted for businessmen too, since all its formality comes from the collar, tie, and lapel anyway. It’s an example of the deadpan logic that underpins Garner’s creations—logic that is as absurdist as it is indisputable.

Garner often gets labeled a “performance artist” because her personality seeps so fully into her work, and because she doesn’t bother with distinctions as to where her body ends and her art begins. She began transitioning in the 1980s, buying estrogen on the black market; she once described the endeavor as an “art project to create disorientation in my position in society, and sort of balk any possibility of ever falling into a stereotype again.” As a bona fide trans elder, her creative output has found an audience among young people today. Last year, her survey “Act Like You Know Me,” organized by Kunstverein München, traveled around Europe, and this summer, Primary Information published a facsimile edition of her Better Living Catalog (1982), which advertises provocative inventions like high-heeled roller skates and a virtual pet that predates the Tamagotchi. Garner’s current solo exhibition, at Art Omi in upstate Ghent, New York, through October 29, is accompanied by a new book surveying her practice, copublished with Pioneer Works. Below, the trailblazing artist discusses refashioning her works for a new era as the world catches up with her.

Tell us about your legendary tattoos.

My underwear? Well, I got a bra and thong tattooed because it just seemed logical. I figured, even if I gain 300 pounds, it will still fit. Also, I never have to wash it. The only problem is that I’m no longer allowed to go to nudist colonies!

I also got wood grain tattooed on my leg after I was hit by a car while cycling. They put me back together after three months, but my left leg didn’t match my right leg anymore. So I thought it was an opportunity to have some trompe l’oeil installed.

Rumor has it that Art Omi has plans to tattoo some of your drawings onto visitors to your show.

Yes, I might get some tattooed on myself. That way, I could be a walking portfolio.

You have characterized your transition as an artwork. How so?

Yeah, and it fascinates me that, these days, you can enhance the body to your own tastes, using silicone. Bodies like silicone; they don’t reject it. If you want to emphasize your cheekbones, just squirt some in! It’s like makeup. Fifty years ago, nobody would have thought of that.

I often wonder, What if all the politicians were transgender? Maybe we could blend the best of male and female and avoid some of the negatives. For instance, men have 10 times the testosterone that women have, and that makes them more aggressive. If all the politicians were transgender, maybe we could have a balance.

Sometimes you’ve called yourself an “inventor.”

At one of the three art schools I got kicked out of, I majored in industrial design, thinking maybe I’d become a car designer or something. I do have a US patent on a push scooter I designed. I rode the Santa Fe Century [a 106-mile cycling route in New Mexico] with that scooter.

Why did you get kicked out of art school?

Everyone took design so seriously. People were designing taillights as if it were the end of the world. I started making fun of it all. I made this thing that was half-car, half-man. The front part was a typical ’50s-looking car, and then it became this male figure—quite realistically sculpted—lifting his leg on a map of Detroit. That was it for them. They were getting a lot of money from the car industry and didn’t want to see that sort of thing.

I went to work for a toy design company for a while and started documenting LA, which at the time felt like an overgrown small town. People who were feeling restless moved west after the war. What do you do for freedom? You come to California! A lot of really goofy people did weird things to their cars and their houses. I noticed all this while driving around and kept thinking, Gee, I wish I could stop and take a picture. So I got rid of my car, and got a camera and a bicycle. That way, I could pull over and document postwar LA when it was still funky and whimsical.

How does that relate to your work Backwards Car?

I made the original Backwards Car in 1974. Cadillacs around then had these big tail fins, to make them look like they’re moving even when they were standing still. One day, it struck me: what would it be like if this thing was going backwards? Then I thought, That would take a phenomenal fabricator and all kinds of facilities that I had no access to.

But I just couldn’t sleep at night until the world had a backwards car. I settled on a ’59 Chevrolet, because they had flat tail fins. You wouldn’t be able to see over a Cadillac tail fin while driving backwards; it would block your vision. The Chevy was still very directional, but flatter. The whole car was teardrop-shaped.

I made sketches and sent them around. Finally, Esquire magazine said they wanted me to do it. They assigned a photographer and paid me a fee up front. I found a car and rented a space in a parking garage in San Francisco. I got everything unfastened; the body was no longer attached to the frame. By this point, it was just a matter of lifting it up and turning it around. I had a big party and invited all my friends. We ate and drank and, after a while, I said: “OK, everybody get around the car, shoulder to shoulder. On my command, I want you to lift.” And we did it! I didn’t know it would be possible.

By then, it was a matter of reconnecting all the controls and reattaching the body. I got that done, then got behind the wheel and started driving around San Francisco. Only some people noticed. I’d glimpse somebody on the sidewalk saying, “Look at that!” I went across the Golden Gate Bridge a few times and got some nice pictures for the magazine, with the car going 60 miles an hour looking like it’s about to have the most horrendous head-on collision you can imagine.

When it was over, I had the car shredded. I wanted it to exist as a ghost, something people either saw or thought they saw. Also, I didn’t want to kill anybody with it.

What has it been like reconstituting the car 50 years later?

I always thought that was the end of that, until the curator at Art Omi called me and said, “We want to do Backwards Car again. We have a fabricator and a budget.” I said, “You can’t possibly do it now with all the restrictions.” The rules were more lax back then: all I needed was a windshield wiper on the back window and to flip the headlights and taillights. Also, modern cars look the same on both ends. The only way you can tell cars apart now is by looking at the logo.

Then it struck me to use a pickup truck and put the bed around the engine. I made a few other suggestions to emphasize the directionality: giant truck nuts, and a couple of bumper stickers. One says women should be free (no charge). I’ll be interested to see how people react now that we’re moving into a revolutionary period of autonomous cars and electric cars and all that.

You also worked on a car assembly line.

I worked on the Chrysler gear and axle plant assembly line in Detroit for about six months. It was good money at the time, maybe $3.50 an hour, back in the ’60s. Maybe Backwards Car is a spoof on mass production—like, what if the assembly line backfired?

While working in Detroit, I got a notice that said: go back to school, or we’re drafting you. So I enrolled in the Art Center College of Design in LA, and lasted a semester or two, then got drafted anyway. I ended up spending 13 months in Southeast Asia as a combat artist. Nobody believes that job exists, but I was making sketches and photographs, and writing. The leaders referenced those materials when deciding what to do next.

Does the car symbolize something to you?

Back then, cars symbolized freedom, and all boys were interested in cars. Now, they don’t symbolize freedom so much as just transportation. In fact, they’ve started to behave as if in an army. When you see traffic on the freeway, it’s all lined up as if there was a sergeant telling them “Forward march!”

People are ready for something else. Autonomous cars will be weird, and then we will take them for granted. Maybe traffic lights will wind up as junk in thrift shops. Let’s see what happens with the Information Age as it moves forward. It may turn around and go the other way. We might wind up back in primitive times. Who knows?

On that note, you made a car without a motor and labeled it “the most fuel-efficient car in the world.”

I removed the machinery from a small ’70s Honda and made a pedal-powered car. I drove it around Burning Man. Now it’s in the Audrain Auto Museum in Rhode Island. I’m fascinated by human power. Of all mammals, humans have pretty limited strength. My Persian cat has the leg strength to jump the equivalent of me jumping into a second-story window! But lately, human power is being overlooked because of these electric vehicles. Everybody wants to put a motor on something.

What’s next for you?

I’m very spontaneous. I never really know what’s next. But sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with something poking me. It’s like there are two versions of me: when one starts to get comfortable, the antagonist comes in and stirs things up. I love that—it’s good to be separated. It’s like when I look in the mirror and think, My body is just an appliance. It’s mine to play with, so I’m going to have some fun with it.

I have chronic lymphocytic leukemia, ostensibly from my exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam. It’s affecting my vision; it’s given me pneumonia. I’ve been a big gym rat for the past 50 years—I feel responsible for keeping this thing [points to body] in the best shape I can. We don’t live forever.

I want to make an animated video that’s set in the wilderness. You’d hear this rustling that turns into a rumble until suddenly, streaks of materials come out of the ground—windows, steel, and fuel would flow up and form a car. This beautiful, shiny new car would sit there for about 15 seconds. Then, it would start to tremble. You’d hear the same roar, and it would all just get sucked right back into the earth.

I think of myself as a shorter-lived version of that. A car, if you don’t grind it up, can last a couple hundred years in some form or another. Humans don’t even come close. I’m going to be 81, and with my issues, I’m lucky to have gotten this far.  

One must tread lightly around Humeau’s latest work, which is titled Orisons and located in the San Luis Valley. Nestled under a big sky, the work extends further than the eye can see, spanning 160 acres. More than 80 small, kinetic sculptures are scattered about, many of them just over a foot tall. Visitors must remain attentive so as not to miss, or bump into, these sculptures—and, so as not to step into one of the numerous ankle-deep kangaroo mouse holes that litter the landscape.

Humeau deliberately cultivated this kind of attentiveness, asking you to think carefully about where you step. There is significant distance between the sparsely populated sculptures, and visitors, as they search for these works, are asked to bring the same reverence to both the artworks and the land. In fact, Humeau insists that “the land is the artwork,” adding that it’s a work about “transience and resilience, life and death,” as well as “coming from and returning to dust.”

Orisons is not the kind of monumental intervention into the earth that typifies the Land art genre—think Michael Heizer’s vast and newly completed City, or Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty, which has jutted into Utah’s Great Salt Lake since 1970. Pulling up to the site, or looking at photos of Orisons, one might wonder what the artwork is, exactly. When we spoke, Humeau wagered convincingly that “perhaps the lighter touch is the more impactful touch.” Her piece is on view until June 30, 2025, rather than indefinitely, as is the case with other earthworks.

Humeau’s is a work staunchly uninterested in controlling or dominating the landscape. It is bent instead toward cultivating appreciation for what came before. Piles of bricks that Humeau calls “benches” are scattered throughout, and though they don’t look much like seating, they are clearly the most hospitable place for rest and contemplation.

The site also features several stunning hammocks that invite the viewer to commune with the land. Ropey nets are anchored by sculptural steaks that culminate in sweet heart shapes. They’re painted in blues and pinks that blend in with the sky at golden hour, but they’re also punctuated with splashes of high visibility orange to catch the meandering eye. The hammocks are intended, the artist says, to enable you to hover over the land like a bird.

On a tour at the opening, Humeau also took visitors into an abandoned cattle pen. It was already on site when she arrived, and she considers it part of the project. She asked us to sit low and assume the vantage of the cows that once populated the land, an unfarmable plot currently owned by a family of organic potato farmers.

Walking about, visitors might encounter the bones of a cow or a tomb Humeau made for a dead bird she found on the property. It occurred to me that this is not normal human behavior, to pay respect to birds and cows, but it really ought to be. By the time you read this, those corpses may already be gone with the wind, which blasts intensely in the arid, high-altitude San Luis Valley.

The wind, Humeau pointed out, has carried ancient sand to and from this valley for thousands of years, dropping it off at North America’s tallest dunes, which are visible on the horizon from the hammocks. These majestic, massive dunes are easily mistakable for mountains.

Humeau, who was born in France and is now based in London, worked on the project with the Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, which is headquartered in Denver and commissions site-specific works like Orisons. The museum enabled her to spend time in the valley over the past three years, where she enlisted collaborators to explore what exactly came before. These include conservationists, historians, ornithologists, indigenous communities, and geomancers. That latter term describes clairvoyants who read landscapes like palms, or as the artist says, “they can see the landscape past, present, and future.”

The three geomancers independently sensed a 150-year-old sadness on the property, in the lot’s northwest corner, where a jumbled wire fence lies in chaotic disarray. There, they say, a woman is trapped. Her family tried to settle the land in 1850, but in the process, she passed away, likely at the hands of the harsh climate.

Worried about the trapped woman, Humeau wanted to give her a gift. So she planted divination instruments that only spin at very high winds. “Maybe when a storm comes they will spin,” she told me, “and she will be set free.”

Before she began the project, Humeau thought it important to speak with local indigenous communities, who consider several sites in the region sacred. Eventually, Black Cube’s leadership introduced her to a member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe of Towaoc named Regina Lopez Whiteskunk, and they discussed both mourning the land and the weight of history. Whiteskunk told Humeau that “to move the Earth is to release the trauma.” The artist asked Whiteskunk if she wanted to contribute, and before production began, Whiteskunk blessed the land as her father played the flute.

Orisons is a significant departure for the artist, who was included in the most recent Venice Biennale, where she showed stunning, gorgeous, and permanent sculptures concerned with speculative and extinct ecosystems. But now, instead of imagining the world before and after humans, she is grappling with the fraught ways our species occupies this planet—the imperfect ways we cohabitate with other forces and beings. It’s not just a departure, but a whole new theory of art, one suited for these end times. “I’m pretty convinced that the future of art is not about new things, but about designation and poetry,” Humeau said, adding, “Maybe we can use poetry to acknowledge the presence of what is already here.”

Sometimes, property owners add devices that look like medieval contraptions to them. I exhibit these spikes as sculptures, and usually place them at roughly the same level as the standpipe they were originally installed on. Each work in the series takes a different form according to the aesthetic decisions of the developer who commissioned it or the fabricator who made it. The sculptures make the removal visible, since they’re not meant to be noticed. But the work is also about the growing series of absences across the city, and the increased possibilities for loitering.

That means I make most of my works by walking around in the streets, then use my studio as a space to store objects or try out installations. I’m invested in highlighting the ways that forces like real estate development, or the ongoing privatization of the city, continuously encroach on different aspects of daily life. I try to find moments where those forces become visible.

I’m looking for objects that are physical forms of policing. Another example is planters that are strategically placed to prevent access to areas where there might be shelter or a covering, such as under awnings. Often, they’re not even filled with plants but, instead, bricks or cement, making them too heavy to move. I’ve been removing some of these structures and reconstituting them as actual planters, growing things inside them. For a 2022 show at Artists Space in New York called “Everything is Common,” I placed three of these planters in the windowsills and grew parsnips and carrots in them. Those reference this group of 17th-century radical Christians in England known as the Diggers. The Diggers would grow edible crops on other people’s property, since they believed that everything is communal under their god. —As told to Emily Watlington

Video Credits include:

Director/Editor/Producer: Christopher Garcia Valle
Director of Photography: Jasdeep Kang
Interviewer: Emily Watlington

Additional Footage by Tomas Abad, Karla Coté/NurPhoto, and Mastershot via Getty

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Justin Chance’s Wool Quilts are Catchalls for Curiosity

My current body of work deals with involuntary migration and materiality. A lot of my work is autobiographical. I was born in Bosnia, and came to the United States as a war refugee in the ’90s. The Balkan region has always been a place of war and empire changes. It’s never really had a stable identity, but it still feels like home.

My dad’s side of the family migrated from Turkey to Bosnia through multiple empire changes, and every time they moved from place to place, they were kicked out, usually for religious reasons. It made me think about the material baggage and the historical baggage that we carry.

I make sculptures out of objects I collect from the streets. Hauling materials in the city has always been a challenge. How do you carry lumber on the subways? I just walk around the neighborhood and find things spontaneously: maybe stacks of egg cartons, or some little yellow plastic thing that clearly belonged to someone. I find myself wondering where these things came from, what their history is.

I definitely have a weird obsession with objects. Lately I’ve been embedding them in vessels: you’ll see all kinds of materials, salt and pepper, glass, hair. I like to imagine people digging them up 1,000 years from now.

I’ve also been emulating objects of antiquity, specifically rugs and pottery. On relic (35.3658650, -10.1964504), 2021–22, I collaged a vinyl picture of Poseidon that I procured from the New Museum, where I work as an art handler. They were just going to throw it away, but I thought it was so beautiful!

I started making rugs after playing around with pouring paint on the ground, then peeling it off. I’ve used these kinds of paint skins in performances and nailed them to walls, but over time, they start to crack. So I started adding cloth to stabilize them, and they sort of turned into tapestries and rugs. Sometimes I draw inspiration from Slavic folk patterns.

When pouring paint, you don’t necessarily have control. It feels sensual and cathartic. Maybe, when I peel it off, I’ll decide the back should be the front. Then I’ll start incorporating the fiber and embedding garbage, and eventually ask, How do I make this less chaotic? Sometimes I start with a sketch, but my process is intuitive. It’s all about trial and error, and finding solutions.

The works are both heavy and humorous: I’m thinking about things like war, but also, how do I soothe myself? How do I create a future? For me, the point of making art is to fuel my endless curiosity and to get excited about the little things.

This summer, catch up on the best five art novels published this year. They range from a beguiling dive into the psyche of a late performance artist shattering the barrier between fact and fiction, to a hilarious portrait of creativity and class.

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, Justin Chance talks about fascination with materials and carving space for curiosity.

My pieces begin as titles. Titles come to me when I’m washing dishes, or running, or showering. A recent example is Aloha Sadness (2023): I thought, That’s so dumb, but also so real. Aloha means goodbye, but also hello. I asked what would Aloha Sadness look like? I did a little research—looked up tiki culture, watched Lilo & Stitch, played that song “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride” in the studio.

I’m driven by curiosity, and I can get interested in literally anything. I’m less interested in judging whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, than I am in asking, What is this thing? Why is this thing? Exhibitions are a helpful way of focusing my curiosity. I can point to one and say, “That’s my oceanography era,” or that’s my how-TVs-work era.

For me, “artist” is kind of like a catchall term. Takashi Murakami’s 2008 exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum drew me to art. He was making mugs, pins, paintings… I thought, Maybe I could do one of those. I’m also a writer, but there’s something about the authority of language that feels daunting, whereas in art there’s more wiggle room.

The title of my recent show at Tara Downs gallery in New York was “Live,” and I left it deliberately unclear as to whether I meant the noun or the verb. I wanted to permit the viewer/reader to take it however they want. There’s something beautiful about the state of not-knowing, and I want my viewers to feel curious. I never want it to be, “I’m the artist, listen to me.”

I started making my quilt works in 2013, hoping to combine my love for making with my interest in painting. I wanted to be able to physically pick up colors and move them around. I also love learning how things work, down to the molecular level. If you’re dyeing something, you have to ask, Is this a cellulose fiber or is it a protein fiber? Some pieces incorporate resist dyes using wax. Since wax is nonpolar and water is a polar molecule, the two materials don’t interact.

Recently I was Duolingo-ing Norwegian, and decided to make a Norwegian-language web drama called Svak. I wanted to write a script in Norwegian to explore the materiality of weakness; I’m weak in that language. The project was about carving space for curiosity without utility, learning just for the sake of it.  

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The Painter of Modern Life: Kerry James Marshall Aims to Get More Images of Black Figures into Museums

When Marshall graced the cover of Artforum in 2017, inside, artist Carroll Dunham called him “one of the most consequential painters among us.” Around then, his goal was to make seeing Black figures in museums no longer exceptional. By and large, his plan worked: around the 2010s, as critic Julian Lucas put it in the New Yorker, matters related to the representation of Blackness became “a national conversation,” led by artists like Marshall, Kehinde Wiley, and Charles White. Now, the conversation is shifting beyond representation, and as ever, Marshall is two steps ahead. His new commission for this spring’s Sharjah Biennial is not a painting at all. Instead, the artist created an installation resembling an excavation site that engages histories and fantasies of slave trade and colonialism in the Arab world.

It’s rare—and risky—for an artist to depart so dramatically from an approach that’s brought considerable critical and commercial success. But Marshall’s departure is less surprising when you look closely at what he’s doing: his paintings have always incorporated critiques of painting, and even as figures dominate his canvases, they’re also emphatically elusive and opaque. A.i.A. spoke to Marshall about his big pivot.

Why did you decide not to include a press release or any text for “Exquisite Corpse: This Is Not the Game?”

I didn’t want to give anybody a crutch for figuring out the show. I wanted them to really look. It’s become common for people to lean too hard on the press release to try and figure out what the artist is saying. I wanted to break that chain of behavior. I put a lot of energy into doing the work, and it’s not that opaque. The title is a clue to let you know that it’s not random choices being made.

What are some of those choices?

Each exquisite corpse has four segments, and each segment has a different version of my signature. They all represent me at different stages of my development. There are Black figures that look a lot like the images I do all the time, but there’s also some cross-hatching—I don’t use that technique much now, but I used to.

With each piece, I started with a head, then created a body. Together, those segments constitute relationships and meanings. I’ve described myself as a history painter, and that’s relevant here too. I’m looking at history and trying to draw out connections that people don’t automatically make.

What’s an example?

In Untitled (Exquisite Corpse Iceberg), 2022, there’s a man’s head at the top, connected to an iceberg. The iceberg becomes a pair of pants, and his feet are in sneakers on a basketball court. The portrait is of a man named Tippu Tip. He was one of the wealthiest African slave traders. He’s from Zanzibar; some people also describe him as Arab. There are viewers who might recognize him.

All kinds of people have profited from imperialist, colonialist, and commercial transactions, and all the exquisite corpses speak to those complicated histories. Today, you have the NBA and all those basketball players flying around and slam-dunking—this is happening in the wake of that history. History isn’t always tragic, but it is always complicated. My paintings tackle history in its most complex form. Nobody is getting off the hook.

Still, I really tried to avoid making any parts look grotesque, as the Surrealists often did. You can demonstrate how much you care about the representation of Black people by not treating Black people like silly putty that you can make into any kind of form you want. If “exquisite” means anything, it means do the thing well, make it elegant. I will not make monsters; that’s just too easy.

Doing the thing well has always been essential to your work, but at first glance, some of these paintings might look less finished. Have you experienced pressure to keep making art in your signature style?

Yes. Artists are professionals. There’s nobody who goes to art school who doesn’t mean to come out of there and be a professional. No matter what they say, all the things we do are aimed at a certain kind of mission. Part of that mission is to achieve recognition, and to establish the kind of singularity that sets your work apart from everybody else’s—and, in doing that, to try and produce something that might be meaningful. Some artists might call that a careerist position. But I think the moment you sign up to go to art school, you sign up for a profession.

Your project for the latest Sharjah Biennial, Untitled: Excavation, was certainly not recognizably Kerry James Marshall.

But it is consistent with the way I think about everything. The Sharjah Art Foundation asked me if I’d make a permanent installation. The title of the biennial is “Thinking Historically in the Present,” which is what I do. I developed a proposal for land they acquired in Al Hamriyah. In that square, the Foundation is building a café and doing some landscaping, expanding their footprint. I thought I’d do something to interrupt that development.

What disrupts development in that region? Hitting an archaeological site! Suddenly, you have to pause and figure out how to build around it. So I decided to create an excavation site. First I asked if there were an archaeological site in that particular place in Sharjah, what would it be? I had never been to the Middle East, but I did know 1001 Arabian Nights, that set of fairy tales from the Middle Ages based in the Islamic world. I wanted to confront how history is part fact, part fiction, and part fairytale, because people tell stories that sound nice and exciting to them.

The biennial also dealt with the impact of colonialism. Well, the Arab world participated in colonialism too. Egypt was a colonial empire, and today, people speak Arabic in a whole lot of places where Arabic didn’t originate. Egypt has been occupied by the Sudanese, the Greeks, the Romans, and the Arabs—like an exquisite corpse, broken up into four parts. The installation includes a mosaic with four segments. The top segment says “head” in hieroglyphics; then “torso” in Arabic; “pelvis” in Roman; and “feet” in Greek. That mosaic is in an empty pool, part of the small villa I created.

What else is in the villa?

It has three rooms and a small courtyard. You view it from a footbridge that hovers above the site. It’s all connected to the 1001 Nights tales, and to the Arab slave trade out of Africa. Maybe the villa belonged to a merchant. In all the 1001 Nights tales, there are genies, or jinni, as they’re called in the Quran—mischievous or evil spirits. In fairytales, you rub a lamp, and the genie comes out, then gives you three wishes; they’re servants. In the 1001 Nights, they are always Black.

I read an early translation by Richard Burton. In that version, the whole narrative starts when two sultans discover that their wives have been cheating on them with a Black man. Then they decide women can’t be trusted. You marry them one night and kill them the next morning!

It sounds like for you, combining exquisite corpses with history painting is a way to get at the idea of history as a combination of fact, fiction, and fairy tales.

Exactly. I want to undermine that tendency to project a certain kind of image of who we are into the world, and to interrogate our relationship to the struggle, and to the history of slavery. None of it is as simple as it seems.

You were making figurative paintings before the big boom, and now, you’re onto something new.

I’ve always gone against the grain. In 1966 Ad Reinhardt declared he was “making the last painting which anyone can make,” referring to his monochromatic black abstractions. Well, that was just a few years after I was born.

You told an interviewer that when you were applying to school, someone said your portfolio was too varied, that they wanted to see more consistency.

That comment has haunted me for most of my career. I make works because I want to see what they look like. I make works because I want to understand how images operate, so that I can best use those operations to do the kinds of things that I think need to be done. I’m not limited to doing one thing, because one thing never covers all the bases. When Jackson Pollock hit the end of the road—when he couldn’t see himself doing any more of those drip paintings—he crashed his car. Mark Rothko, too [he took his own life]. You can only make ephemeral rectangles for so long.

Some younger artists have expressed skepticism toward the rise of figuration. It’s less a critique of a work itself, more an uneasiness toward the tokenism institutions bring to it. They’re also wary of the way representation gets conflated with material change. Such criticism is only possible because of the work that artists of your generation have done: now, it’s no longer so exceptional to see Black figures in museums. But do you share any of that skepticism?

You can’t be all that worried about what other people might do with things that you produce and also reap the benefits of making them. It’s all about finding a formal solution to whatever problem of representation you’re trying to address. The market forces people to look for a gimmick, but those things won’t last long. Novelty is not that interesting, but for a moment.

The best way to sum it up comes from the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor. An interviewer asked him about how he felt watching younger artists, who seemed to be capitalizing on his innovations more than he’d been able to. The interviewer asked if he was bitter. He said [paraphrasing], “Bitter?! I am not bitter; nobody asked me to do this.”

For me, I’m just doing what I think needs to be done. I do the pictures I want to. I always have. If they have an impact on people, that’s fine. 

Art in America’s Summer 2023 New Talent issue includes a series of interviews with five New York–based artists to watch. A.i.A. senior editor Emily Watlington and photo editor Christopher Garcia-Valle visited each artist in their studio to learn more about their art-making process, inspirations, and influences. Below, in an edited version of the conversation, sculptor Catherine Telford Keogh explains how she conglomerates trash and landfill into striking sculptures.

Hardgood & Dolly (2023) is a piece of compressed landfill I extracted from Dead Horse Bay [between Brighton Beach and Fort Tilden in Brooklyn]. In the Industrial era, it was also home to fish oil factories, and garbage incinerators. In the 1950s, a series of highways decimated a number of low-income neighborhoodsin Brooklyn, and they moved all of those folks’ goods to Dead Horse Bay, then used them to extend the shoreline. The trash and their belongings were compacted, then covered with sand. Recently it’s been eroding.

Because this was the 1950s, there’s more glass than plastic. I extracted a hunk of landfill that included all these products that have been vitrified over time. It contains rubber, cement, plant matter, packaging, sand, and other miscellaneous objects. My students helped me drag this piece back, and it spawned my most recent show, “Shelf Life,” at Helena Anrather Gallery in New York.

Another piece in that show, Compost Index 3 with Volumes 2.1, 2.2, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2, 5.1 (2023), involves repurposed tiles I got from Marble Expo on Facebook Marketplace. The onyx tiles were originally extracted from Karachi, Pakistan, and brought to Marble Expo in the Bronx, which then sold them to corporations, a bank, and a Best Western. I purchased the leftovers. The multicolored onyx has all this depth, so you can really see the earth processes that happened over eons. I wanted to position them [on the floor] so that they signify earth or ground, but also a countertop at the same time. I waterjet-cut different advertisements in the tiles, borrowed from things like moisturizers that promise a healthier or more efficient body. I also sandblasted images of things that I found on the ground in my neighborhood: lottery tickets, gum, cigarettes, Modelo beer cans. I photographed them, turned them into stencils, and then sandblasted them into the tiles. Sandblasting is almost like a mechanized geologic process, but it also creates this ghostly or fossilized image of the waste.

I also remade plastic vessels in glass that you can carry around—like detergent bottles, milk jugs, or motor oil containers. I work with containers a lot. I’m interested in how they promise space cordoned off from temperature, climate, and decay, but are also everywhere in landfills. Positioning vessels on the onyx tiles, I wanted to point to deep geologic processes that have happened over years and years.  —As told to Emily Watlington

Mostly, I guessed wrong about the show. The exhibition focuses on works she made around the 1910s, in series and on paper. Still, I was fascinated by how similar the early and late works are. In both periods, she often used watercolor to draw bold lines. And in both, her watercolor was rarely, well, watery. O’Keeffe laid the paint on thick. She liked pairing greens with pinks—though the complimentary combo grows much bolder in those works from the end of her career. She’d try out the same composition with subtle variations, often leaving lots of the paper raw, working in series. You get the sense that spending time with the scene at hand is more about grasping and distilling its essence than it is copying it precisely.

One of O’Keeffe’s assistants, Carol Merrill, writes in a memoir that the artist kept her blindness private during her lifetime. She also recounted to Merril that she lost her vision slowly, but adjusted to blindness rapidly. Still, O’Keeffe was encouraged to keep it private by her dealer, who worried it would devalue her work. So often, we celebrate artists for helping us see the world differently; yet so often, we are reminded that certain perspectives are too different, unwelcome.

The oil on canvas works are traditionally considered her greatest hits, but critics everywhere—Jackson Arn in the New Yorker, Sebastian Smee in the Washington Post, Johanna Fateman in 4Columns—are loving these works on paper. They point to the obvious sense of freedom she felt in her youth, and absent the perssure of a canvas. It made me wish that more of the works she made late in her career, hiding her truth from an ableist world, could have been up at MoMA, too.

There is actually one painting on view that she made while blind. But it’s not on the checklist or in the catalogue, and it’s displayed in more of a stairwell than a gallery. Don’t miss it. It’s called From a Day with Juan II (1977), and it’s from a series of canvases she made that shows a foreshortened, rectangular gray gradient extending upward into a blue sky. In the slideshow up top, I’m including some other works she made after going blind—excerpts from series, works that I’d have included if it were up to me. They speak, I think, to the astonishing persistence of her artistic vision, which outlived her ocular one.