Avram Finkelstein and LJ Roberts are artists and writers who came to AIDS activism at different moments—Avram in the mid-1980s as awareness of AIDS was just emerging, and LJ as a high school student a generation later. They connected on Zoom from their homes in Brooklyn and Providence to reminisce on their fated meeting, mentorship, and their responses to this moment in time.

There we go. Yeah, it's actually a little overcast, but we have all of these windows that are amazing.

Do you want to reminisce a little bit about young Avram and young LJ?

How we met? Yeah, for sure. Go ahead. Let's hear your version, and then I'll tell you mine.

My version is that we were at the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History that Hugh Ryan founded. You were showing a dress that had a print that had to do with uprising, derived from historical propaganda.

It was based on revolutionary textiles, which I was obsessed with at that point in time, the whole idea of inserting radical ideas into everyday life. Revolutionary textiles were produced in Japan, England, the US, and mainly Russia. The print was based on images of the White Night riots from a radical screed, 

I remember we were doing the install, and I was transfixed by your jacquard weaving. I tend to leapfrog over differences and seek connectivity because I've seen so many things in my life. When I saw the jacquard—I think it was based on a flier that was on a refrigerator? From a queer collective in Brooklyn?

 This very water-stained eight-by-ten piece of paper that had the graphic on it and was on an ex-lover’s refrigerator. There's been a pattern of me seeing things on people's refrigerators that then get absorbed into my work. I mean, talk about the queer and the domestic.

I said, I need to meet this person. Who the fuck made this? And that's how we met. You started talking and I felt like we had known each other our whole lives.

It was an immediate connection. I didn't even realize what your history was and how much it overlapped with my lineage. There was a connection that was very intuitive. And then it was a series of unfoldings, in which we discovered that there was an overlap with upbringing, and then the methods that I was using were similar to what you and your generation and the people you were working with used. Clearly they were seeds in my brain that I picked up somewhere along the way.

It was very easy because I knew the history, but I didn't know how entrenched you were in it. But then it was also shared histories of being Jewish, being queer.

Yeah, that tracks with my memory. I think that's the fucked up thing about historiography. It's storytelling that's frequently external. I forget how old you are, but I think I'm older than you. When I met you, I felt like a hand was reaching across time and space, and that's what I mean when I say I felt like I had known you my whole life. It was more that I felt like I needed to know you.


And then you're right, there was this slow reveal. Because I'm so suspicious of histories and how they're constructed, I've done tons of things that people still don't know that I was the person who started it, who did it, whose idea it was. I tend to not care that I'm associated with things that other people have been influenced by because I feel like that's the nature of social justice and public spaces and individual agency. When you superimpose ideas of capital on top of that: Who did it? Who gets credit for it? What histories are taught? Those are all capitalist superimpositions.

But I also think that for you, and others, that anonymity was really important in terms of having impactful action. This idea that there were many, many people who were standing up, particularly with AIDS activism. Attributing someone would take away from this group that needed to be a giant mass to get a point across.

There’s something that a friend of mine wrote in regards to what's happening right now in Palestine: “I wanna see your actions and not you.” I've been thinking about that a lot because something happened during the pandemic for me where I wanted to take up less space in my activism. Which doesn't mean that I'm not doing things. I feel very cognizant of the space I want to take up, where I want to be working in the background. In certain ways, it's important for me to say things as a Jewish person; there’s an anonymity that also feels productive, so the anonymity you spoke of is insightful for me. Right now, very visible activism has transformed into something that feels like it would have been impossible decades ago with the left being silenced and the far right being urged to attack the capital. The criminalization of abortion or medical care for trans youth and people explodes my brain. So, I'm also reconsidering my tactics—what is most effective with the specific resources I have—material resources I am lucky to have. Being quieter than I have in the past feels useful.

I think of you as politically engaged in everything that you do, whether it's quiet or on the street. And that's part of systems of valuation as well. The other thing I'll say about us meeting—I feel like I was hiding behind the skirts of collectivity. Some of it had to do with risk-taking. You could break the law under the veil of anonymity, in ways that involve risk if you're not anonymous. A lot of it had to do with that and that came out of the sixties. Figuring out how to fuck with systems in ways that they couldn't reach back in and stop you.


When we met, I was beginning to reevaluate my practice as an individual artist, because that's the stage I was at in my life. So I think we have an inverse mirroring of experiences in relation to these questions.

And now I want to shift this conversation to think about what public space and what meaning is, what art’s function is. And the ways in which it functions, which I'm rethinking from A to Z right now.

I actually have had some experiences that are very fresh at the moment, in terms of my work being in public. But I think you'll have interesting things to say about it because you and I have also dealt with censorship over the years. I remember calling you when my work was going into the Renwick after David Wojnarowicz was censored at the National Portrait Gallery.

 I didn't know if I should do it. You ended up encouraging me, “Take up as much queer space as you can, LJ. Like, put that graphic imagery out there. You know, really. Go all out.” Which I did.

You're filling me with ideas, so I don't know where to start, but let me start in the middle and maybe work out. I think that part of the anonymity thing is about fucking with the systems of valuation and institutional systems.

But part of it is that I don't need to know if a baby dyke in 2050 sees one thing I did and has an idea that changes the world. I don't need to know that to feel like the work is worth doing. So that's part of the way in which I think about social justice and change.

As I become increasingly disabled, I feel like mortality and corporeality are commonalities that we tend to overlook or give short shrift to. Forced migration, reproductive justice, all of those things are rooted in the body, but we're trained to think about the body as a mystery. Part of it is being Jewish, and another part is having been raised by a microbiologist, and another part is being an AIDS activist—I know way too much about physiology. I don't need to know as much as I know in order to make the work that I make. But we're trained to think that other people know more about our bodies than we do, and to cede participation as a result of that.

I feel like the understanding of what I think of as our internal planetarium—the vast systems of cells and organs that interact, that actually create the thing that people are fighting over—Life. Independence. Autonomy. Expression. We’re trained to think those systems might as well be the stars in the sky, we’re so unfamiliar with what happens within our own bodies. Race. Gender. All of these questions are tied to systems that are deeply internal. Which is why I say I'm rethinking public space. I'm rethinking meaning, I'm rethinking institutions.

I would be a person who up until recently was unencumbered by the question of institutional interaction. Because everything I've done is in the public domain. I don't own any of it, it belongs to the world. It was meant to be the world’s.

I was involved in AIDS activism starting in high school, and that was a continuous thing for me through college and into grad school. But I entered New York and the realm of AIDS activism there with an MFA. I had been professionalized by that point. At that time there was a definite group of us getting involved through Visual AIDS and other groups. We were young artists about the same age, born circa 1980. We were college-educated. We weren't moving to New York when apartments were $300.

And here we are in your ecosystem. As young people. And you and your generation have gone through something really different. You didn't have all of the medical technologies that we had. We're in a place of working on care for long-time survivors, and people who maybe aren't living with HIV, but survived. And I wonder what you think of this younger group that came in and how we handled ourselves. Did you see us as naive or taking things in the wrong direction?

There is no short answer to your question. As to what became of people of your generation, I'm inspired by the young queer artists that I know. I think every single thing in its failure and its brilliance has meaning to me. I don't think any level of achievement or participation is hierarchical.

We ignore our commonalities at our peril. We all die. All of us die. That is something everyone in the world who has a body shares. And the fact that we're deterred from talking about mortality and its meaning is the trauma of the world. That has tentacles and roots, both above ground and below ground, that impact the way in which we see everything about shared space. So I don't think anything is devoid of meaning.

Just to be perfectly blunt, watching one of my close friends, Frederick Weston,

 die really knocked me on my ass. When I had begun doing the care work for him, I remember you saying to me, “now you're getting a taste of what we went through.” Because I would be on the phone with four doctors a day, not able to get any kind of information, becoming a health proxy, going through all these things during the summer of 2020. The pandemic made it feel impossible to get almost any care for him. It was hitting wall after wall with no answers.


Going back to our mentorship and the way that we met, it was extremely organic. Serendipitous, but really it's not totally surprising. It's actually quite likely that we would have been in that place at the same time and that we would have been the ages that we were. It was like this with Fred too—so many things in common. It was like a magnet brought us together.

We had a connection and we’ve gotten to know each other in multiple ways. The past, the present, and the future.

I think institutional mentorship programs can be really beneficial, but mentorship being organized, and even carrying prestige, feels so different in terms of the mentorship relationships that I’ve had. When I think about the people that have been mentors to me, it's not like they're teaching me all the time. I’m not coming to them and sitting down for advice or critique. It's a relationship that has a lot of different facets to it that is extremely rhizomatic.


It does not come with a structure. It comes first with an initial spark.

SILENCE = DEATH Project (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás), 

Here's another secret—we're never allowed to understand this: teaching is learning. I'm the one who is enriched in a mentorship relationship.

I can't tell you how many phone calls I field from people like LJ who approach me and say, I'd like to talk to you about my work. I never say no. I'm asked by activists to help think through strategically how to make work or how to intervene in a public space and it almost invariably comes back to a version of Silence=Death or a version of the Bloody Poster. I had to consult on how to dye a fountain red because people who know me know that I tried to dye every fountain in Washington, D.C., red in the eighties.

My response is like, sure, but why would you want to remake a film that's already been made?

Yes, I'm happy to tell you how to dye a fountain red, but there are a million things that one can do in public spaces or as expressions of solidarity or agency that aren't built on the superstructure of work that had a time and a place.

As queer people, we barely have a history, and it's contested at best. So, what else do we have but to build on the building block of something that worked thirty or forty years ago?

Avram Finkelstein is a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. He is a recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Grant and 2023 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images, was nominated for an ICP Infinity Award. He has written for frieze, BOMB, and Art21, and has spoken at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU.

Website

Avram Finkelstein

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps and amplifies nonlinear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance and reimaging craft practices. Born and raised just outside of Detroit and immersed in car culture as a child and teenager, the artist has a particular interest in how queer and trans people encounter freedom, fear, possibilities, and perils while traveling on the road and living nomadically. Roberts has been active in HIV/AIDS activism for over twenty years and has produced numerous collaborative projects that address the ongoing AIDS pandemic.


They have exhibited widely internationally. Their first solo show in New York City, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits, was exhibited at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) in the fall of 2021 and traveled to Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA). A cloth-bound hardcover book published by Pioneer Works was made in conjunction with the show, and includes writing by Sur Rodney (Sur), Carmen Hermo, Tirza True Latimer, TT Takemoto, and Theodore Kerr.


Beginning in the summer of 2024 the artist’s light box installation, “Stormé at Stonewall,” will be featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in the Struggle for Justice Gallery.

LJ Roberts

Another Way

Avram Finkelstein + LJ Roberts

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.”

I don’t know where I first heard this saying, somewhere near my Blue Ridge Mountain home, but I suspect it was from the fellas up at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It made sense. As a theater artist, I’ve been joy-struck by the untamed imagination of “let’s just play around and see what happens.” The discipline of maintaining no attachment to outcome is based on a trust that you don’t have to go looking for inspiration; it comes to find you. Any road will do.

 know where you’re going (or at least in what direction you’re headed), there’s usually more than one way to get there, and some traveling advice can be useful

: Watch out for that big ditch on your left

, it’s easy to fall into a tangle of mission creep.

People who have traveled various paths before us have wisdom to share. These “multiple knowledges, perspectives and approaches”

 not only guide our successes, they can also expand our appreciation of the journey itself: 

Be sure to stop at the bend, turn around, and look back at that patch of trillium blooming on the hillside.

But choosing a path means more than having a sure and certain destination. The choice of which path to take (or forge) is rooted in your values and vision: What is most important to you, and how do you want to be in the world? When I was younger, I’d drive home to Tennessee and my father would invariably ask me what route I took. He was always surprised that I didn’t take the interstate. He never quite grasped the appeal of the alternate route, which offered whimsies, vistas, curiosities—but that’s what I valued about the drive. If I had valued predictability, convenience, and speed, I’d have chosen a different path.

One value I’ve finally come to embrace is accepting the detour with grace and gratitude. 

: the funding didn’t come through. What pivot will move you forward? 

: a key collaborator withdraws. What new sights or insights might a detour provide? What mysteries are there to explore?

We’ve all experienced a huge detour with the COVID pandemic, and things are not as they were. We’re in new terrain, informed by 

. Our landscape and familiar markers have shifted, or disappeared. More than ever, we need to be asking questions, sharing perspectives, and A Blade of Grass (aBoG) is rising to this moment. For one thing, they are seeding conversations between mentors and mentees—people who have worn the path smooth (if not easy) and folks just setting out. Those conversations, these maps, will confirm some of what we already know; others will challenge our most dearly held practices. These dialogues will make visible the skills, strategies, and attributes needed for making art in, with, and for a community.

So, set forth on the journey, in your own way. Let aBoG be your traveling buddy. Enjoy the trip and send us a postcard.

Kathie deNobriga served as Alternate ROOTS’ executive director and planning/development director for ten years. Raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, deNobriga holds an MA in Theatre (Directing) from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a BA with honors in Speech Communications and Theatre Arts. Her early employment includes directing and managing community theaters in Smithfield and Sanford and working in the acting ensemble of the Road Company, Johnson City, Tennessee. DeNobriga was a visiting artist for two years for the NC Arts Council, and a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program and in the first Rockwood Leadership Institute's program for arts leadership.

Kathie is now a consultant, specializing in strategic planning, building organizational capacity, staff/board retreats, and creative conflict engagement. She studied mediation at the Justice Center of Atlanta, and is a board and founding member for Alternate ROOTS. DeNobriga served two terms as council member, and was mayor for the City of Pine Lake, Georgia, from 2012 to 2015, where she still lives as an advocate for and practitioner of arts and community development.

Kathie deNobriga

What new sights or insights might a detour provide?
What mysteries are there to explore?

As the A Blade of Grass team imagined new programs to support artists, we connected with independent curator Risa Puleo. Risa’s deep and significant work with practitioners demonstrates a vision for the field that inspires us

 Her recent work as co-curator of the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial complicated the medium of public art by presenting ephemeral and immaterial forms to, in Risa’s words, “create an exhibition that does not replicate occupation and can also evade surveillance.” Her 2018 exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System

, curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and later hosted by Tufts University Art Gallery, mapped the relationship between museums and prisons while untangling the prison-industrial complex from the problem of mass incarceration and highlighting artists who make strategic interventions to these systems in pursuit of abolition. Her 2017 exhibition 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 conceptually redrew settler-imposed boundaries to reconnect the Americas as continuous Indigenous land.

Risa served as an advisor to aBoG’s team this year and worked with us to envision this publication project and bring together contributors. Risa joined aBoG Program Director Lee Heinemann to reflect on the collaboration and her work, and to answer questions from Chloë Bass’s commission for this issue.

To give some history to our readers: My colleague Ixtzel and I met with you while we were conducting a series of informational interviews and developing what A Blade of Grass would do in its current iteration. We felt so excited by what you had to share and we enlisted you as an advisor before we knew exactly what we might do together. During this period of finding our form and voice as an organization, you've been an incredibly helpful sounding board to share ideas with. A kind of funny example of you seeing us and getting what we're trying to do is your edit to our acronym for A Blade of Grass—from ABOG to aBoG. Somewhere in your notes, you had written ABOG as lowercase 

—aBoG. Lu noticed that and had a moment of being like, “oh, this feels better.” Then Ixtzel and I saw and were like, “wait, that's actually cute.”

Amazing! I’m so glad this resonated. This really makes me happy. This suggestion was a happy accident. I think I was just accustomed to uncapitalizing articles and prepositions when abbreviating the names of museums, like MoCA or MoMA, for example; it seemed the natural way to abbreviate the organization’s name. What is the difference for you between lowercase aBoG versus the all-capital abbreviation?

We're trying to be an organization that is for and by artists and works in solidarity with our peers. When A Blade of Grass was founded in 2011, socially engaged art was less recognized, and this organization was an authority. It is a different time now, and the small change to refer to our org with this jumble of lowercase and capital letters feels better to us in that way.

I'm always thinking about uncapitalizing my name; descaling and situating myself as one amongst many who is supported by a larger field is central to my work. Thank you for sharing that with me and thanks for a fun conversation and a fun collaboration.

Yeah, this has been so much fun. We definitely couldn’t have done it without you! We took you down a bit of a winding path that resulted in our collaboration on this publication project. Where we arrived seems to call upon some of the interesting experiences that you don't always get to work with.

It's true. Our collaboration has tapped into some of my lesser-known past lives. If I am known at all, it is primarily for being a curator. But there was a moment where I was known for my writing, and before that, I worked briefly at a granting agency. But I started by making exhibitions at alternative spaces and working in editorial capacities for nonprofit online and print publications in Texas. I bring these experiences into all aspects of my work. Writing is a practice that informs and structures my curatorial practice. Curating and editing, at least how I practice them, have a lot of things in common.

Your life as an editor has been extremely helpful to us as we're trying to figure out lots of things and how we communicate them to a larger world. You also have a life as an educator, and something that I've thought about throughout our time together is something I heard you say in a talk to students about an abolitionist framework not being punitive or disciplinarian. Through our work together, I've seen you demonstrate this as we took time to figure out what we could do together.

Drawing on my research for the exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System 

(2018), I teach a class called Keywords: Art and Justice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. If students only take away one thing from my class, I hope it’s the idea that being an abolitionist requires moving away from hierarchies and disrupting our learned tendencies to discipline. We spend a lot of time in class analyzing how all institutions are set up to discipline—in all senses of the term but especially policing—people into individuals through surveillance and how external surveillance is internalized into a self-disciplining that turns into policing of others.

This political position of abolitionism begins with a personal practice that I navigate within myself. I understand the deliciousness of anger and how yummy and good righteousness can feel. But also, how it can consume you and quickly tumbles into punitiveness. On topic with this issue’s theme of mentorship, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work has shaped my understanding of the physical space and social life in the United States. And I had the amazing opportunity to be in conversation with her as part of the Counterpublic Triennial. Last year, at the symposium for her Whitney retrospective, Jaune said something that has stuck with me about how she has made anger her friend, which I took to mean she can access it and use it as a tool, direct and shape it, in ways that don’t take over agency. For me, abolition is a daily practice.

That is also part of what I mean about when I talk about the everyday embodied practice of abolition as one that moves away from disciplining. It’s an extension of Audre Lorde’s “master's tools” logic. You can't dismantle what you're trying to build with the same tools.

Can you talk about this framework and how it enters your work?

 for a Texas audience required me to enact this logic. 

was part of a series of exhibitions I made as test runs for 

 to practice how to engage people who might have a different set of politics into a conversation about complicated topics, like questions of mass incarceration and border politics. How do you create a field to invite people in rather than tell them that they're wrong for believing what they believe? I try to use the exhibition platform to seduce people into seeing the beauty, but also the obviousness, of the prison-free or border-free world by creating spaces that manifest this as a vision.

Another set of mentors are the curators and art workers who organized the first A Day Without Art in 1989—an event in which 800+ museums, galleries, and art organizations closed for the day to bring attention to the government's inaction around the AIDS crisis. The event succeeded in changing conservative narratives around the epidemic and getting it back into the headlines of newspapers in a moment when it was actively being erased from public consciousness. So I think a lot about what practices build the solidarity that’s necessary for mass mobilization. I try to use the exhibition as a public forum and a platform for bringing people together. Publications, and the sharing of information, can function in this way too.

Our team was so excited to dive in and start bringing artists into the project, and you, very reasonably, led us to actually begin with some of the formats and structure for the publication before inviting others to contribute.

It's interesting to hear that reflected back because the process we enacted for the publication is what I do in my curatorial practice. I don't invite artists until I’ve surveyed the larger field I’m investigating and I have a historical grounding. I then stage some kind of intervention in that field and invite artists who are asking similar questions to be in dialogue.

It is worth noting here that y’all’s goal for this first issue was to celebrate a lot of different artists who contribute to the expansive field of social practice. What do celebrations entail? In their most basic form, celebrations are some sort of party. How do you stage a party on a page? Celebrations can also be gatherings and gift offerings. And so we prioritized offering the artists we invited something that would be fruitful for them.

The theme for this first issue was y’all’s idea, too! I thought y'all came up with a beautiful idea to introduce this publication through a lens of generationality. Putting cornerstones of the field who have been practicing for decades in conversation with younger artists they have long histories with to begin to show the longevity of social practice and build out a genealogy.

Many of the contributors to this issue are cornerstones to us personally. So many of the practitioners here have contributed to my development as an artist and administrator.

It's an amazing group of people. And to be able to celebrate their contributions within the larger worlds in which they operate, and see the passing down of that knowledge.

Now that we are talking about the riches of these conversations, both Mary Patten and Avram Finkelstein are incredibly important to me and in very different ways. I have long identified Mary as—I think Mary would say that it's never a singular person, it's always a set of relationships—but I think that her life and her work, and she herself, are so remarkable. It's always really wonderful to celebrate her. And then the contributions that Avram Finkelstein has made to our understanding of the field, and his work as a graphic designer and one of the engineers of the Silence=Death Project changed the world, literally. Those posters initiated a radical shift in how we conceptualize, think about, and care for people who are HIV-positive, and our own imperative to speak out.


Chloë Bass is someone who thinks about care for others beautifully as a practice in her own life and work, so it's great then to share a conversation between Chloë and her former student, Ari Wolff. As a chair of the Social Practice Queens MFA, she brings her own long, rich history, as a mentee of Lorraine O’Grady, and is passing that wisdom down to younger voices.

These conversations are the features in this issue. Can you talk more about the formats we came to together for commissioning contributions?

We all wade through the news. We are constantly inundated with information. In this daily practice, the kinds of published information that I find particular joys in lately are advice columns, book reviews, or editorials—established forms with changing content. These formats have come to feel like safe spaces of reading in a news stream full of complications and came to inspire our design for aBoG’s publication.

We have a fairly standard division between features, which we described as “related content,” and columns. The features are thematically driven and allow readers to go deeper into topics that feel of the moment.

The columns function as containers, what we called “repeated forms,” for holding different content. In thinking about how to translate these repeated forms to aBoG’s mission, we tended toward practicality and transparency, thinking about how aBoG’s publication could provide a service to artists and art workers. In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.

This resulted in columns that invited artists to create a how-to guide teaching something from their practice and a process diary reflecting on the creation of a recent project. We also began highlighting practitioners through a series of questions crafted by Chloë Bass.

Chloë is really amazing at asking questions, which is why we commissioned her to write a series of questions that could be asked to a number of different people. Within her questions is a sort of understanding that language is just like an iceberg. You're only getting a certain bit. How can a question then allow you to navigate an unknown field—in this case a practice or a person in a way that's organic to them?


Well, now I can’t resist but to ask a few of these questions to you. 

Where did you learn to work, from whom, and how? And how does that impact the way you work now?

I loved this question and I had an immediate, visceral response: My mother. My body. And the land. Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply, I recognize the continuity between my three teachers.

My mother is a Virgo, and when I told her I was working in the arts, she empowered me to follow my own path as long as I learned actual, practical skills. I think I rise to that mandate by thinking of complex questions—in what ways can we utilize the public platforms that we have to generate common language to move in certain directions?


My body teaches me about limits. Having spent the past twelve years navigating chronic illness, I use my own body as a metric for understanding and articulating my own passage through the world. The things that I do to move in and around and over and beyond the limits that the world imposes on me.My attention to my body’s limits also frames my ethic toward limitations where there should not be. My ethic makes space for ideas of trespassing or shoplifting, or smuggling—navigating into places that are closed off.

And then the land has been one of my biggest teachers because so much of my practice has been about the specificities of place, and the specific histories embedded within. I am trying to bring attention to how human-centric our thinking is about the greater field in which we all share, and that is a reorientation into place.

Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply beyond my visceral response, I recognize the continuity and connection between my mother, my body, and the land as three of my most important teachers.

Does your practice work in service of its own continuance? Or seek to render itself obsolete over time?

Both/and. The work generates itself. So, I'll make a show. It'll have a set of questions. I'll propose answers that generate more questions that lead to different places that allow me to be in conversation with people asking similar questions. It self-propels.

Institutions give back new opportunities, and there's always a sort of perfect synchronicity.

I left my role as co-curator of Counterpublic asking what it would look like to dismantle all the dams along the Mississippi River as a thought project. When Mass MoCA invited me to be a curatorial fellow, I discovered that they have a river. So I asked to help dismantle the flood chutes around that river.

At the same time, I’ve long held a belief that the best use of any power I have is to give it away by empowering others and sharing power. I think that I’m always working to dismantle the systems that determine what is useful and what is obsolete.

How does obsession shape or inform your creative work? Can you share an obsession with me?

I think we would all have to be a little obsessive to keep doing this, right?


One way that I tend to work is by putting things in the back of my brain. So I'm always thinking about a project and not thinking about it directly at all times. In the same way that bird songs are always in the background of our home in Chicago.

During the pandemic, birds really made themselves apparent to me. It was an aspect of the world that was insistent on presenting itself. It turns out I live in a major bird-migration zone, but it took the enforced quiet of quarantine for me to notice them, after having not for forty years. Now I can’t not hear them and try to work outside with them. Thinking through the lens of bird-watching helped me realize how the type of looking that happens in the biennial/triennial model is a practice very much akin to surveillance. So I have been developing a method of anti-surveillant or abolitionist bird-watching that is about engendering a kind of quiet that makes space for birds to present themselves.

My contribution to Counterpublic was guided by this new obsession. I once stopped a site visit because a northern flicker joined our group; it felt momentous. I had a particular experience with a violet-green swallow that inspired the Counterpublic work. As I write about in the essay for that show, swallows are very hard to see because they are very fast. This particular swallow hovered in front of us for about thirty seconds and showed us how it was able to be so covert: its little body had coevolved with the place where it lived so that it could shift in and out of view as it wanted. And so, it was making a decision to make itself apparent. What an amazing super power! And I immediately thought: If an artwork or a person could do the same thing, it could be uncapturable. This experience inspired me to make an exhibition that could not be captured or surveyed. My contribution to that show was an attempt to articulate and describe this fleeting and ephemeral moment of magic.

My obsession with birds took on new proportions when my wife and I spent much of our quarantine road-tripping to national parks, which is its own obsession. We’ve now been to 54, and after this summer we will have been to 63 of 64. The real obsession is to always be moving. This gets me back to the land as a teacher, the value of place, and the road trip as a method of investigation. aBoG’s support is helping me get to the Arctic, where I am going to meet the Alatna River—a wild river, meaning it hasn’t been dammed or intruded upon by human intervention and its waters can flow along its meandering paths as it needs—as research for the turn in my work toward water.

Risa Puleo is an independent curator based in Chicago and, currently, a curatorial exchange fellow at Mass MoCA. Risa was part of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition 

 was curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 was curated for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator in residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and the Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and more. Risa has master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, AsiaArtPacific, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and other art publications.

Risa Puleo

In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.