The artist Justine Di Fiore was doing care work when we first met. She was working with a nonspeaking autistic youth—I believe that might have been the first time I’d heard the term “autistic,” that’s how long ago this was. I recall her describing communication with the child that was more sensory than linguistic. This seemed to chime somewhat with her painting practice at the time, which was basically solitary, often self-portraiture, light on surrounding conversation, and hardly was seen outside a basement workspace. But then a little later, Justine got involved in radical organizing, doing grassroots work that was intensely social, and heavy on verbal debate, persuasion, study, and reflection. I was always intrigued by these multiple, uncompromising paths—caregiver, artist, organizer. Finally, after more than thirty years, we had a chance to talk about these modes and how they became a single path.

I lived all over, but my adolescent years were in the Bronx. Probably the most important years.

Let me say a few words recapping how I know this artist. That begins a lifetime ago, back in about 1991, when Justine was new to Minneapolis and I was there as well. This was fresh post-college for both of us. Justine was the first person I met of my own age with a demonstrably committed practice as a visual artist. I split town not long thereafter, but Justine stuck around for years and became a true Minneapolitan.

Over the decades we had intermittent contact, less through art and more through grassroots organizing networks. Of course we’re talking about Minneapolis, which was then and remains a city full of radical streaks. Even though I assumed all along that she was painting, I knew more about her involvement in workplace democracy and other projects of a political nature.

Take an opening prompt here: In your estimation, how does the relationship between art and politics around 1991 compare to now, a quarter century into the 21st century?

 by Justine Di Fiore, 2024. Oil on canvas, 55 × 48 inches. Photo by Moë Wakai.

At that time I was painting in the basement, and I was focused on building my practice right out the gate of undergrad. I was super excited about that. Then the first Gulf War started. I had a buddy, my first friend in Minneapolis. She invited me to go to an anti-war protest. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I liked hanging out with her and I already had a developing consciousness as a young person about world events, cumulative histories, and forces that oppressed people. But I’d never gone to a formal protest.

It was my first anti-war protest, the first time I saw resistance on the street instead of reading about it as history or seeing pictures of it in the news. I felt that the war needed to be addressed in some way, and that painting in the basement wasn’t necessarily going to help that cause. I ended up involved in various organizations, and in grassroots organizing in general. As I met more people, I got more connected, and in particular, to anti-racist youth movements.

So I was continuing with painting, but the paintings that I made weren’t necessarily highly political in nature. But I think it’s a question also as to what is political. At that time, I let painting take a back seat and became active in organized resistance to the war and police brutality.

Did you have a community where you connected to other painters, people who were doing the creative visual art that you were doing?

I did. I was developing that at the same time. They were different ways of being a part of community. I took some extension classes at the University of Minnesota, and I had a show with a couple other artists. There was some momentum there. But over time it became hard to sustain a rigor in both community organizing and painting. So there was a period where painting took a back seat to illustration and drawing for zines or newspapers that I produced in collectives. I continued to paint portraits of people alongside this other work. Compared to my engagement with painting now, it was very different.

It sounds to me like the painting was never entirely solitary. You would do it on your own time, in your own space, but also would do it in a classroom setting or in a group setting, or a workshop setting, or you would engage people one-on-one by doing portraiture. What about your own goals as a painter back then? Was that something of a private sphere, where you’d have, say, five things to master in terms of technique and craft, or mark-making vocabularies?

There was an interest in developing technique, but the main motivation for the work was to allow myself a voice. It’s interesting to think about now, as I was coming into my own as a young feminist, an anti-racist, I was also coming into the idea that my voice as an artist was important to develop. So the work was a lot about personal experience and felt very diaristic. I had a visual journal that I worked in obsessively, the most blatantly political visual work that I produced. Some of it would include text, like a response to something I saw in the media. I was becoming really disgusted with television, which had shaped my identity and the role of young women in society. I was encountering bell hooks’s writing and Andrea Dworkin’s. Everything was turning upside down for me. When I think back, that probably allowed me the ability to have a voice in the public sphere.

One of the projects that was woven into larger radical networks was Emma Center, which you helped to organize. It was an infoshop, a thing back then. Lots of cities had infoshops, usually conveying a low-rent punk rock aesthetic, like the A-Zone in Chicago or 404 in Detroit. These were folks making autonomous spaces informed by anti-authoritarian ways of thinking, experimenting with horizontal structures, consensus, and so forth.

It seems like such a bygone time. It was valuable, being involved in those intense, pre-social media ways of organizing, struggling in person with like-minded values but against differing personalities while actualizing projects. How did that filter into your art making? Did it make your painting more of a refuge?

It was an interesting time to be in Minneapolis because there’s a strong history of collective organizing there. You know, the food co-op movement and all, some of it still going. And a strong history of collectivized workplace structures.

It was in that context that Emma Center came about. I developed relationships with people that I organized with. And there came a time when I felt the need to document these relationships. So I started a series of portraits of young activists who I knew from the scene.

I was painting people from life. It was about the connection, the dynamic between myself and the sitting subject. It was a way for me to connect that felt meaningful. It was quiet, a connection between two humans that was very felt. I enjoyed that and continued it for a while.

I would allow the subject, the person I was painting, to help me decide what the environment of their portrait would be, what the setting would be. I remember one young activist who wanted a halo of paper dolls on fire hovering above her head. There was a collaborative process of creating these images. It was really fun.

Alice Neel comes to mind. A socialist partisan, she had that commitment to finding and even freeing her subjects in portraiture through brushstroke and decisions about color, shape, line, and surface, in a time when portraiture wasn’t in vogue.

Fast forward a couple of decades. At some point you started thinking about, let’s say, professionalizing, going to graduate school and foregrounding your painting practice as your primary activity, and even your livelihood. How did that come to the fore in tandem with the workplace organizing you’d been doing for a while?

I worked for 27 years in Minneapolis as a CNA. In the hospital structure there was a union that organized the nursing assistants, custodians, nutrition workers, and laboratory technicians. That became my primary community.

I phased out of youth-based movements that were predominantly white, to being engaged with communities composed of a diverse array of people living in the Twin Cities. I found myself involved in organizations to address incidents of police brutality, and then gradually became involved in workplace democracy and unions. That was an important transition for me. At the same time I started to feel that the artistic voice that I had been cultivating when I first moved to Minneapolis was a bit muffled and diluted. I had lost touch with that aspect of my creative practice.

I started to crave it. I took accordion lessons. Somehow that opened up my mind to getting back into painting and drawing. I needed that bridge of studying a musical instrument to get me back to thinking visually.

Justine sits in front of a grid of her portraits.

Probably around 2006, 2007. Then in 2013 I attended the Women’s Art Institute, a studio intensive program. I spent a month off of work, which I hadn’t done in about twenty years, and devoted it to painting.

I continued with portraiture, painting from a live model, mostly friends, people who I was interested in spending time with. That catapulted my practice and it continued to ramp up. Certain concerns became an obsession, dealing with light and form and color on a two-dimensional plane. I was thinking about how the figure/the body occupies space. I found these things liberating in terms of processing information.

I think that working in the institutional setting of the hospital and being very regimented put me in a grid-like way of thinking, as Deleuze and Guattari talk about in 

, versus a nomadic, open way of thinking. Understanding this difference really opened things up.

I couldn’t leave alone this desire to think visually any longer. An important connection between my career as a nursing assistant and my current work happened when I received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant to do a series of portraits of hospital workers in 2013–14. I made twelve diptychs, twenty-four different portraits. I showed the work at the Mall of America through the initiative called Made Here, which brought artists to vacant storefronts and other nontraditional spaces that reached a wide public.

It was a great experience for me. I was hooked and invested in continuing along this trajectory. That project was a way for me to out myself at the hospital as an artist, and it was a way for me to out myself as an artist who was a hospital worker.

From Emma Center to the Mall of America, that’s quite a range of public exposure.

It’s interesting, you might think a radical infoshop would be the more public venue, the place where you’d be reaching people. But that community, which was beautiful and had a lot to offer, and impacted people’s lives in important ways, was insular, protected, and isolated from other people’s experiences. Of course, thinking about the mall as this completely opposite site, and an expression of corporate capitalism that promotes homogeneity, all these things that punk rock butted up against—yet in some ways the Mall of America is a more public space, a context in which to connect with people of all different experiences.

So let’s take that to your painting from recent years, having relocated to Los Angeles after graduate school. Now, most days you’re painting, maybe for many hours a day. Can we see any of these long-brewing histories in the work?

One thing I started to think about in grad school was, what is the function of my work? It was a big change of identity. Until then I identified as a worker. Not that grad students aren’t workers. What I mean is, I identified with that class of people that worked in a hospital; that was my comfort zone.

I began to think more about how I represent figures, the motivation and the intention. Where do the marks that construct the figures come from? This activity of touching the canvas—what was it related to for me? I began to integrate my experiences as a worker and painter. I thought about the differences between my perspective as a caregiver versus as a student of the figure, a cool and distant perspective versus the up-close perspective that you experience when washing, supporting, holding bodies, physically turning bodies. All of that informed how I understand the figure in space. So I experimented while at UC Davis, triggering my muscle memory, in particular, of washing bodies, beginning with a process of wiping paint on a surface using the gestures of caregiving. It started with painting on bed sheets, and then evolved into using plastic because I could paint on plastic and transfer it onto my canvas.

This horizontal nature of painting on the floor simulated the patient in bed. I found the figures in the paintings and the contours of the body through the gesture of washing the body. All of that brought me to an interest in depicting the figure in states of being held by another. Now all of this is part of my vocabulary of painting. I’m remaking the figural form in painting through the labor of caregiving.

Let me go back to that first question of 1990 versus 2025. What is your view on how, both as an artist but also as a citizen of this country, of this world, what are we left with? How do we act in this world given that corporate contexts like the Mall of America are the biggest physical stages, while the radical work we do tends to be at a micro level that doesn’t reach many outside of our own lives? Now living and working in LA under an awful regime we’re trying to survive, how are you thinking now?

I think that all these modes of expression and action in the world are necessary. We need a community that engages on lots of different levels with ideas, with free thought. I don’t know what the right formula is.

I teach painting and drawing, and when thinking about private and public activities, even teaching is, in my opinion, a very public activity. One of the things I notice in studio classes is that technology, while it is really important for us all, also limits our ability to think. It’s another example of a constrained grid structure.

Students are preoccupied by what is on their phone. It’s a puzzle, figuring out how to teach interpretation of the visual world. That is what I can do, engage with students to open up their perception. Art education is a space for students to develop a voice through mark-making, and an understanding of shape and form. It’s a very human need that goes back to Paleolithic times.

A follow-up then on your reentry into intensive painting through bridging your history of hands-on care work and the painter’s canvas. Maybe the word political is too superficial. This seems like a deeper values kind of project, almost spiritual in what it’s after. You may be onto something that all of us need to grapple with in order to preserve our humanity in the age of catastrophe. Can you say something about this, considering that we sit here talking in Los Angeles, a city associated with the fetishization of bodies, of appearances, of individual wellness?

Well, that the personal is political, taught to us through the work of different movements, especially the feminist art movement, holds true. It’s a legacy that I feel is important to hold onto. Maybe a better way to think about it in the current context is that survival is political. Speaking to what is personal can be an act of survival. When artists use their experience to generate content their work has the potential to speak to people more broadly. If there is one thing that stands out in the last decade it is that identity and personal experience drive a lot of creative work. It seems to be one of the unifying features of this period of post-post- modern art. It is more than a trend, it is a manifestation of our time and born out of necessity.

For me it has become a question of how caregiving and the labor of caregiving can enter my work. I’m continuing to explore how touching and marking the canvas can contain experience, like some kind of experience of caring for the body. Can that energy be transferable? Compassion as medium, words borrowed from the title of an essay written by Clarisse Abelarde about my work, is a brilliant way to summarize not only what I think is important in my practice, but what is important in our lives as communities here in LA and around the world.

How can I put that into my work, and can I construct a figure bearing that weight and light of compassion? John Berger and Leon Kossoff wrote about these questions in their letters to each other, and in an essay in Berger’s book 

. In their discussion it came up that there was a visually impaired person whose understanding of light came through touch. This is very interesting to me, how light manifests in a painting through how one touches the painting as it is being created. I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

Justine Di Fiore is a Los Angeles-based artist. She was born in Monterey, CA and has lived in Maine, Oklahoma, Michigan, New York, and Minnesota. She holds an MFA in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis and a BA in Studio Art from Oberlin College. Her work has been included in recent group shows at the Manetti Shrem Museum, Davis, CA; Marrow Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Studio DDLA, Los Angeles, CA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA; Collar Works at Opalka Gallery, Albany, NY; and Dreamsong, Minneapolis, MN. In 2024 she participated in the Torrance Art Museum Residency Program. Justine is an adjunct instructor of painting and drawing at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Davis. Her solo show 

Website

Instagram

Justine Di Fiore

Dan S. Wang was born in Midland, Michigan in 1968. Growing up inside the contradictions of a deindustrializing Midwest supplied formative aesthetic attachments and lasting impressions of a society unraveling.

Dan landed in Chicago in 1998 with a studio practice centered around letterpress printing. He co-founded the cultural space Mess Hall and worked in various collaborative groups. In this time Dan produced many texts and lectured internationally. Relocating to Los Angeles in 2017 by way of Madison, Wisconsin, Dan turned toward drawing, sculpture, and video.

He was supported as a Local Artist-in-Residence at 18th Street Arts Center of Santa Monica from 2019 to 2024. In recent years he’s presented new and commissioned work at Station Museum (Houston), Asian Arts Initiative (Philadelphia), and solo projects at Compound Yellow (Oak Park), Fonderie Darling (Montreal), Tiger Strikes Asteroid Los Angeles, and the Jaffe-Friede Gallery at Dartmouth College.

Dan now splits time between Los Angeles and Chicago.

Dan S. Wang

I work to bring that energy and muscle memory from caregiving into my practice in the hopes that the compassion will rub off onto the surface of the painting, if that sounds possible. That’s what I'm striving for. And maybe this is what I mean when thinking about the personal as political—caregiving as resistance.

No Privacy, No Public

Care on Canvas

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public 

The final contribution to this edition of 

 comes in the form of a letter of appreciation and advice. Informed by a Gen X past and addressed to the Gen Z present, it concerns our shared future and the future belonging to those not yet born. Janet Sarbanes sends this edition of 

 into the books by reaching for the Castoriadis's third space where the public meets the private, where the brute power of government meets the immanent energy of the governed, and where individuals own their singularity in a context of collectivism.



Dear Z,

I’ve always thought generational differences were the least interesting and meaningful ones, popularly attributed as they are to technological innovations or parenting techniques, but now it feels urgent to say something to those who will be alive long after we are gone. For the record, I am Gen X, caricatured on social media as the fierce products of latchkey childhoods, casualties of the Great Divorce brought on by the sexual revolution. As with all caricatures, it contains a kernel of truth. But we were also the smallest generation (relative to Baby Boomers and Millennials, and now Gen Z and Gen Alpha), the “alt” generation (holding onto the notion that it was still possible to sell out—and still possible to criticize those who did), and the last analog/first digital generation. That means, while we have lived most of our lives under similar political and social dynamics as you, we remember a time when things were different.

For starters, things were funkier. Literally. Bodies took over in the seventies. When we were kids there was no taming of the hair, polishing of the skin, continuous eliminating of odors. Sweaters were knobby. Denim was cool. Kids ran in rainbow packs. Our everyday lives were gritty, but that grit had meaning. Post-Nixon, it was all about truth content. Post–Great Society, there was still a sense of a public interest, though that would soon be eradicated by Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberalism. And of course, there was no social media. There weren’t even personal computers. There were corded wall phones, and there was TV, but you spent a lot of time just hanging around other people, taking them in.

Fast forward through the dawn of the internet, Web 2.0, and the COVID pandemic to the current moment, and being with other people, without filters or “likes” or stories or followers, has become a 

. This technology was sold to us as radically democratic, with no gatekeepers and nothing to get in the way of us broadcasting our lives and thoughts to the world, no barriers to communication with one another—or with the powerful. But of course, the public sphere is only as democratic as you make it. The era of neoliberalism is often associated with the collapse of the public sphere into the private sphere—with “private” defined as the market economy. And certainly, transnational corporations exert enormous control today, but the public sphere—the state—has not gone away. It still exists, only now it is wholly concerned with regulating to protect business, rather than (at least occasionally) regulating business to protect the common good. It is the distinction between public 

 that has collapsed, no more so than with Trump’s crony capitalism, which shamelessly manipulates the levers of government to enhance the fortunes of the nation’s top billionaires.

How to counteract this, as ordinary people? Cornelius Castoriadis provides us with a different formulation, dividing society into three rather than two spheres: the private (or intimate) sphere, the public (or governmental) sphere, and the private/public sphere. All three are independent of each other—or should be, in a free society—though still interrelated. To Castoriadis, the private/public sphere exists wherever and whenever people emerge from their homes into community, potentially in places of business—at the store, in a restaurant—but also in schools, universities, organizations, unions, community groups, clubs, leagues, etc. It is where we 

where we discuss the society we want to live in,

but it is not where political decisions are made.

Political decisions are formulated and carried out in the public sphere—ideally with the meaningful participation of all (and this extends to economic participation as well—in a free society we would decide how we work, and to what end).

Castoriadis was a believer in direct democracy, which is not our (current) system of government; nonetheless, his foregrounding of these three spheres helps us understand how far we are from direct democracy and how we can get closer to something like it. The fact that the public sphere today is controlled by the economic and political elite has rendered it in large part private: “decisions are made behind closed doors, [and] the little that is brought onto the public stage is masked, prefabricated, and belated to the point of irrelevancy.”

 Meanwhile, as the private/public sphere becomes more and more dominated by consumerism and the dictates of the market, it, too, is depoliticized. Even the private (intimate) sphere is mediatized and commodified by companies like Meta and X to generate profits for those aforementioned billionaires (on their way to becoming trillionaires).

Was anything more heartbreaking than when we withdrew into our houses? In the hours before the official COVID lockdown was declared in LA, I remember hearing my ten-year-old tell her best friend: “My parents won’t let me come over because they say there’s a virus,” as if we were just being weird and mean. COVID had dramatic social effects: it made the public sphere public again, with the government (for a time) acting on behalf not of the market but of the common good—life itself. And when everyone eventually emerged from their homes, it was not to go shopping or eat out but to engage in a newly politicized private/public sphere: the George Floyd rebellion that put not just police brutality but the entire edifice of white supremacy under immense pressure. That was you, Gen Z. And it was you who restored evacuated university campuses to the private/public sphere with the student movement for Palestine.

Another term people often use to describe the private/public sphere is 

, but that’s a slightly different concept. The private/public sphere not only abuts the public sphere, it can 

, demanding transparency, action, justice, power. The toppling of monuments, the occupation of quads—those were manifestations of the private/public sphere, powered by the “eros effect,” which is how George Katsiaficas describes “moments when the basic assumptions of a society—patriotic nationalism and the authority of the government; hierarchy, the division of labor, and specialization—vanish overnight” and there arises a “spontaneous cathexis between human beings.”

 This is not mob mentality, but a state where individual and collective freedom become mutually reinforcing and transformative of society.

Other manifestations of the private/public sphere don’t have that mass dimension but are equally powerful. Take today’s community defense patrols against ICE kidnappings—literally just neighbors coming out of their houses to help neighbors, but they’re the primary bulwark we have right now against fascism. And then there are the usual civil society formations—no harm in adopting those and making them your own. Or better yet, create new ones. Small solidarities give life meaning—they fend off loneliness and bring joy. Under the right conditions, they can grow exponentially into something resembling another world (that eros effect).

So hold onto this private/public sphere. Find each other again IRL, analog-style. There’s a reason we’re attracted to that old technology. Don’t accept their substitute social reality. It’s impoverished, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it addictive. Hold onto your privacy, too, or at least try not to participate in its wholesale commodification and algorithmic manipulation. Surveillance is everywhere, yes, but self-surveillance we can do something about—self-surveillance we can limit. Use your socials to organize, as you did in Nepal, but remember that except under unusual circumstances, whatever you say in that space is swiftly buried under piles of cats, celebrity interviews, and novelty dessert recipes. To really connect with other people, you need to brave their physical presence—the grit, the funk.

Through this revitalized private/public sphere you will pressure governments to do the one thing you need them to do so that your life on this planet can continue, the one thing that, in their deeply privatized state, they will not or cannot do: end fossil fuel production. But I don’t need to tell you that, Z. You have looked into the face of climate catastrophe, and as a result you already have the planetary as your horizon, a world beyond nations, beyond profit and extraction, beyond domination and exploitation. You’re good.

With gratitude and admiration,
X

Janet Sarbanes

And then there are the usual civil society formations—no harm in adopting those and making them your own. Or better yet, create new ones. Small solidarities give life meaning—they fend off loneliness and bring joy.