Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With

0:03Taína H. Cruz:Ben here. This is a re-air of a favorite recent episode, my interview with the painter Taína H. Cruz. It first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and now the second major contemporary art survey where curators are highlighting Cruz, Greater New York, has just opened at MoMA PS1. If you're looking to get a sense of how emerging artists are thinking about all the many pressures on them now, I think our conversation is worth a listen.

0:39I want that experience endlessly the whole time you're looking at my work. So duration matters in that way of how can I really capture and freeze the person in that time and sit with the moods that may come up.

0:58Taína H. Cruz:I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

1:12Taína H. Cruz:The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum's big curated show, which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging Greater New York. That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taina H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both of these shows at once. For the Whitney, she is even, in a way, the face of the show. A work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District.

1:57Taína H. Cruz:This is a lot of attention for an artist who was relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from Yale's famous school of painting last year. She's worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of black female figures with a woozy, moody, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes she works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes she's played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors in New York.

2:33Taína H. Cruz:Since Cruise is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, I wanted to get a sense of the influences from art and otherwise that are shaping her approach to art and what she makes of all the attention. Taina, thank you for talking to me. Yes, I'm so happy to be here. Where are you right now? I'm currently in New Haven, Connecticut. So I wanted to talk to you, pick your brains, partly because I was going through the lists for the Whitney and Greater New York and your name comes up in both. How does that happen? Yeah, it feels really surreal that it happened simultaneously at the same time.

3:11I grew up with like thinking the city as my playground. So to be included into these institutional big art spaces is very significant and intimate in its own way. It definitely wasn't something that I was strategizing towards or was thinking about. I had just finished grad school and the work was expanding in scale and atmosphere and just like about how much space that I was taking up. So the work was already calling for a different kind of visibility. And it just so happened that timing and inlining worked out.

3:47Taína H. Cruz:Do the curators know about each other or are they like you're keeping it a secret from them? Now that the announcements of the artist list were posted, everyone just knows and has been talking. But when I first got the information over the summer, fall area, I definitely was able to keep the information to myself. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And do you know what's going to be in both of the shows? I mean, can you give people who haven't or aren't going to be able to see the shows a hint of what you're showing? Yeah. So for the Whitney, I am presenting a multi-part installation that has a site-specific wall drawing, paintings, an animation that I made, a bronze figurine on top of like a stack of drawings and writings that I made in the studio.

4:39So there's a sense of storytelling and narrative particularly involved for that space. I was given this large curved wall and architecturally created something different than however type of ways that I've been displaying my work. So I was really was challenged with this architectural curved wall and the work was responding to that.

5:01Taína H. Cruz:They threw you a curveball or a curveball. It definitely did. But I love a good challenge. I was already thinking about curved portals in general. So it just seemed like everything that has happened so far just keeps working organically and naturally. So I was already thinking about a curved exterior in general. And so now to show work on that makes so much sense. Is that a development in what you've been doing, this kind of multi-layered mixed media installation, kind of scaling up, you're saying? Yeah, I mean, it even goes back to in grad school for my thesis, the first time I made a painting that looks like it was coming out towards you.

5:42So it was definitely a mixture of my sculpture background. I studied sculpture in undergrad, so I am constantly thinking about my work within a 3D space, how art can feel embodied sensorially. historially and I want my paintings to feel that same way. And so for my thesis, particularly for that installation, it was more so like, how can I create a painting that you can feel like you can delve into? And what better way to do that than to have a painting coming out towards you? So that calls for like a different way of showing, showcasing my paintings. And I was still thinking about that for the Whitney installation specifically, different ways of just showing painting.

6:23Taína H. Cruz:And Greater New York, is that still top secret? No, not top secret. For the Greater New York, my space is in a corner, and I'm going to be doing a large-scale wall drawing within that corner. This one feels a lot more atmospheric, but a lot more architectural to the building of MoMA PS1 itself. So there is some specificity towards that as well. It's more so like, how can I make the image wrap around you? It's exciting because both of these shows are happening simultaneously and they feel so related, but also it's like behaving very differently. One is like gathering elements to create like a stage, a performance, a story, while the other one is more so dispersing into space and working across what keeps like lingering.

7:09It just depends on where the art is living at the moment.

7:12Taína H. Cruz:But it's interesting to me, in both cases, it sounds like the curators kind of more picked you than works of art. They're actually inviting you to respond to the space in both cases. I really like that you mentioned that because, I mean, outside of me and the work itself, I think they're giving me these opportunities for me to just control or just have full-on manipulation of the space given to me. Manipulation may not be the right word, but I have to submit proposals and project ideas. So it's not really like work that I've made in the past. It's all like what is currently I'm feeling and inhabiting at the current moment.

7:49And they're totally like willing for me to like let my ideas just like splurge all over the space. That's essentially me as an artist. I think like it's necessary for me to constantly create something that feels now and present. So I'm grateful that it's not like work I've made in the past and it's just done in that, but it's something that is actively moving and feels energetically towards something.

8:13Taína H. Cruz:Well, let's talk about you. Maybe that'll give people a sense of the content of some of this new work. So you already said you're from New York originally. Tell me about your background. Yeah, I grew up between Harlem and the Bronx. My mom lives in Morningside Heights near Columbia, and my dad is in the Bronx near the Bronx Zoo. He was born in El Barrio in Spanish Harlem. So New York really runs deep in my family through different generations and cultures. I went to school on the Upper West Side and school in Brooklyn Heights. And a lot of my afterschool activities really took me all over the city.

8:50So again, I think about the city as this like playground of discovery. I was in different neighborhoods. I was uptown, downtown, and I was constantly like thinking about the movement between these like different communities and the energies that was felt because each block held something so different. I was just, I was feeling all of that from child to when I went to college. And so I think like I'm still reliving those memories. I'm still feeling how sensorial and heightened that experience was. And I think the work is inspired by that.

9:23Taína H. Cruz:You mentioned in an interview I read with you, the punk goth scene as an influence. Yeah, I feel like the punk-ish scene was also at a time where the internet was also creating spaces for communities. So I found that there was community reflected on the internet, but then people were finding inspiration in the communities in New York. I was witnessing this overlap of internet culture influencing also New York being two steps ahead of what is the next trend or something in that way. New York is very gothic. It's very solitude. Gotham City. Yeah. And I think that is just part of me to really admire the nitty grittiness of the essence of what it means to be punk rock.

10:10Taína H. Cruz:What was the first thing that inspired you to think about being an artist? It's hard to like name a first moment because I feel like every little like strand was like braided from childhood up. I had a very active imagination. I was always playing pretend, inventing worlds, speaking to the stuffed animals. And, you know, I felt really embodied by my imagination it felt more like it was in my body and not just something outside of me but then like more literal my mom gave me a portable dryer race board something that like I would use all the time on subways or on the bus and you know going back into the city I like I see how much children need like stimulation while they're in these like public spaces because in these public spaces there's people themselves like going to and from work dealing with so much My mom was like carrying myself and my younger sister around the city along with her to run errands.

11:09And she gave me a dry erase board. And that was kind of like my way of finding peace and sanctuary between like me feeling the energies of like all these other adults. And so I recognized that as like an early memory of like when I found art making to be a source of like, okay, this is peace. This is sanctuary. This is my survival of how I can navigate this bustling world. It's interesting.

11:33Taína H. Cruz:Working in public, you know, like as you are doing now, you know, site responsive and in a way mobile. You went to art school, though. You went to MICA, yeah, the Maryland Institute College of Art and Studied Sculpture, you said? Yes, I think that was really like a transformative experience studying sculpture. It combined my interest in the digital and internet art within something that felt installation wise, creating environments. And so that was really a transformative experience, like recognize the type of art that I wanted to make. I did not always feel like I was so tied down to being labeled as like a sculptor or a painter or an illustrator.

12:13It was just like within the sculpture department, you were given a lot of concepts and theories to like help you amplify what you're searching for. And I think the sculpture department really allowed that to really flourish.

12:25Taína H. Cruz:Were you a pandemic era student? I graduated in 2020. So like when it was like kicking off. Yeah, you graduated into the pandemic. Yeah. So that was super strange. So my like last semester of undergrad was online and did it shift anything? I don't know. I think like if anything. I mean, how do you how do you show your art to your peers in that situation? How did you? Well, I was really working a lot with like creating 3D modeling videos and 3D animation. So I was like a perfect opportunity to just like keep making video work even before like the pandemic happened. I think when I was studying sculpture, video installation was front and center of like the work that I was interested in.

13:05So now that I have everyone's full divided attention on Zoom, everyone was able to like see like my videos and like have to feel something from the videos themselves. That was kind of like the work that I was doing. But also I think like I was also interested in creating video games a lot more. I have a lot of like extensive background with just like playing with technology. So it just allowed me to make video games related to my video. It was all just different ways of exploring.

13:36Taína H. Cruz:Well, but then you went on to go to the Yale Painting and Printmaking Department, which is a very famous department. A lot of very famous artists have come out of it. Yeah. Kande Wiley and John Curran and Mikalene Thomas. You have a multimedia background, but decided to go in for painting. Why? When I was applying to grad school, I had a studio in Chicago and I was just making a lot of paintings. painting is something that feels natural to me as well as my video and sculpture work and that's where I feel like I don't have like a hierarchy on what matters most to me which medium matters most to me and that's why right now I need to combine them all both if it's necessary but when I was applying to grad school I was making a lot of paintings because I think painting is fun and my portfolio had a lot more of the 2D drawings and paintings than like my sculpture so it was simply like, this is the one moment I'm going to apply to grad school.

14:30Let me like take what I have. And it just fits the painting category.

14:36Taína H. Cruz:I'm interested in what the mood is in art school right now. You know, you're talking about how you have a background in multimedia stuff, doing video games and stuff. And I feel like a lot of image makers are really freaked out because of all the AI stuff and the way the digital world is. Is that a conversation that you're having in school that people are talking about in relationship to painting? In a sense, I think the relationship that people are talking about painting, at least what I saw was kind of like, are you abstract or are you figurative? And I was like... Oh, really? Old school. Old school.

15:12Taína H. Cruz:That's a no. The answer is no. They're not having a conversation. That conversation. Yeah, I think like that wasn't really the forefront. And so I think I strategized my two years of grad school as like, okay, this is a container. During these two years, I'm just going to figure out the type of artist I want to be or that I already am. And of course, that is always going to be fluctuating. But I was able to like really garner those two years as like, I don't have to put my survival on the line and that I had this freedom to experiment, to play with scale, to play with tone, to play with if I want to include a figure or an animal.

15:46And so I guess like within that discussion, the idea of the digital kind of was back end to me. I can go on forever about the internet and the digital sphere and what that means to me but I was more interested in like what my paintings were already doing for people and how I can like really push them into thinking about it completely differently and that's two years of studio space where I was just having fun and experimenting I think really like solidified what time and pressure means to my work and what that means to others.

16:18Taína H. Cruz:What sort of artists do you look to historically? Or contemporary peers you think are doing relevant work? An artist that I look to historically always, I would say Francisco Goya. I think there's a type of existential loneliness that doesn't feel performative. It's atmospheric. The feeling really sits in the space rather than being announced. And I think about that a lot. How tone can carry something heavier than narrative. something I think about Goya is something I can see in your paintings that he's an old master but there's something always a little odd in his figuration yeah so odd and I love that it's odd because it just shows that it's more real I don't know that's like it really sits with me it sits with me for a very very long time and I think he's that one artist that I I'm always finding something new towards and um for the contemporary I would say like I look towards like modding communities like people who are taking apart devices and putting them back together yeah i think like because i'm already coming from this background of art making as embodied that i look towards like other references of embodied men and i think like the modding community the hackers that are still striving along really like solidifies that these systems aren't fixed and so i really admire just like going back physically hacking together machines yeah physically like a maker community yeah maker community but also like different scripts online that can like easily be not easily but now that is like again with the internet things have been constantly changing but there is i feel like there is an essence of like going against this fixed idea of how we can use the internet and these devices and they're still holding strong to a lot of what is being able to change today so i really like to be reminded that there's other communities outside of this art world that is actively building a part, building something together and seeing what comes of it.

18:18And I think that's where discovery, you know, as artists is really important to keep that main frame alive.

18:25Taína H. Cruz:Yeah. Pre-Yale, you made some digital work. Like you have the work that's, it's a sort of a digital avatar of Halle Berry, I think. Walks you through a breathing exercise. It's sort of creepy, sort of sincere. What were you trying to get out with that? I made that during undergrad. So again, like undergrad, I was really like, let me combine my love of computer science and the tech world and the glitch art, digital art community into like something that could feel like I could project that. Kind of hacked together, hacking together. Absolutely. And so I was interested in spirituality always. My mom was a trained hypnotist and is a very religious person.

19:05I'm coming at these worlds, I would call them from like a deeply religious perspective, a folklore perspective, but then also like a computer science, Lego robotics, kinetic machinery, like putting like motors and machines together to create like a sort of animated being. And all of that sometimes works well in the language of video. So I was inspired to just like create a 3D avatar, Polly Berry, kind of enacting like this influencer trope of can you achieve spirituality through a YouTube video? And it's fun to create something that is direct and straight to the point that doesn't always have to like be blurred or layered or a little bit more advanced to get to a reaching point.

19:49I felt like sometimes, you know, the video is doing what it's doing and we can leave it at that.

20:14Taína H. Cruz:your art now even though it's not necessarily working with digital stuff has been shown in the context of digital stuff, like at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit in the Code Switch, Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art show, right? They're showing your paintings in the context of a show about Black artists relating to data and art. How do those pieces fit together? I think it fits together because I think it fits together. Sure, sure, sure, sure. But as opposed for the curator. I think particularly for that, it was wonderful. You managed to convince someone, I guess is what I'm saying.

20:56Yeah, well, it's also like those paintings were also kind of like a collaboration between the curator, Legacy. So Legacy Russell, I really enjoyed when I'm showing in these spaces that there is some sort of like connection beyond myself, the art. What else can we like pull from there? So like having like a coffee time with Legacy and we're discussing like where she's coming from and where I'm coming from. It just like ended up having it being the right moment to create a painting to like really talk about this moment.

21:27Taína H. Cruz:That makes a lot of sense because Legacy Russell wrote Glitch Feminism. She's also from New York and she talks in that book exactly like you do about discovering the Internet in a time in New York when it becomes a place where you're finding subculture and the city is changing. so there's a horror vibe I mean you talked about folklore and spirituality I wouldn't say that the paintings read as digital but they read as kind of images you're finding and processing maybe out of like digital archives perhaps and then transforming is that how you work more or less not anymore so again that was kind of like pre-grad school pre like um like right off the bat from pandemic vibes and it's like still in pandemic vibes.

22:12And that was like a source of like processing for me.

22:16Taína H. Cruz:You mean because everybody was online? It's like that's the only reference you could have? I was always already online. If there was like a pandemic or not, I was like online. I grew up online. So for me, it was more so like, again, I was going back into like drawing and painting and I found different images that I was still like interested in from like a teenager. And I would just think about why I was interested in those images and display it back to me. For example, like one of my paintings prior to grad school was like, again, thinking about these like caricatures. So I had Holly Berry. I thought about Tyra Banks.

22:52And so I formulated Tyra Banks as she was like -