In Conversation: Tavarus Blackmon with Natani Notah

In Conversation: Conversation:

Tavarus Blackmon Natani Notah

Tavarus I’m here with Natani Notah, an artist and curator practicing in the Bay Area and nationally as well. I have a few questions about your practice, both as an artist and a curator. The first one is: what has exhibiting been like for you during the last year?

Natani Well, in the beginning of 2020 I had a few exhibitions and I was really excited about those exhibitions and to work with those curators. So, everything was good in the beginning of the year, and then things quickly escalated. So things started to shut down and exhibitions were being canceled altogether. The first few months of the pandemic, it was definitely challenging to say the least, to feel motivated and to keep making art. There were so many other things that were going on too. COVID scares, looking at the news with the daily death tolls, rising mass unemployment, civil unrest, and in my opinion, criminal political leadership at the time. These things were all at play and were affecting my ability to make work, as well as made me rethink what it means to be an artist, and what is my work track? What am I trying to do with my art practice? How am I trying to communicate messages or inspire others? So I took the first few months, I think, like a lot of people, just sheltering in place, kind of rethinking everything. Then I was able to turn to my art practice and start processing some of the things, and I was able to make one sculpture in particular.

Then I shifted, because the news came in that I had been asked to guest curate an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Center. It had been paused because of the COVID pandemic. And then they reached out and said, “Hey, we’re gonna push forward. Here are the new dates for the exhibition, and we’re excited to work with you.” So I then kind of switched gears and focused less on my practice and more on the artists that I was interested in putting into conversation together. That turned into an exhibition titled, We Have Teeth Too, which was up for a few months, and it featured work by Natalie Ball, Jordan Ann Craig, Emma Robbins, and Amanda Roy. They’re located all over the States, as well as up in Canada, and back to the Montréal area.

This was a really nice way to think about the current times and connect with people and bring them all together to have a discussion about representation in the arts. It became a deeper conversation about our place as BIPOC in the art world and outwards, so that was how it went. It was kind of up and down to be honest, but I feel like I also was able to do some really important work as well.

Tavarus And did your curatorial practice kind of evolve with the changes due to social and physical distancing?

Natani I definitely think the way that I was approaching it changed. I was doing virtual studio visits rather than going in person or having seen the work in person. I was basing it off of images as well as conversations. And I think that

allowed me to actually connect really well with those artists. In general, I started to think more deeply about the way that the work was going to be interacted with. So there’s the in-person exhibition, that physical closeness to the work being installed if you’re a viewer going and seeing it in person, but then now there’s this other component that has always somewhat been there: images, documentation, PR, interviews—all those things have been at play for a while. But I think now with curatorial projects, as well as exhibition programming, I have really thought about the way that it translates across these different media. This also opens up accessibility too. And it still doesn’t necessarily replace that in-person experience, but I also think that it’s a tool that I’ve been able to really think about, and it was prompted by the pandemic.

Tavarus In your very active practice, you are the recipient of various fellowships and residencies. What has it been like navigating that activity during this time?

Natani Yeah. I guess like everything, it’s been somewhat challenging. There were some residencies I was planning to do in 2020 that were canceled and/or postponed, so I primarily worked from home. Then towards the end of 2020, I applied to a local residency in Oakland, with the support of This Will Take Time. And it was a one month or five week residency, where I had access to a studio space that was part of the MacArthur Building in Oakland, and an old shipping container that had been converted into a studio space. What was really nice about that was that I was the only one using this space at the time, so I could safely go there and work on my art and feel like I was having this studio practice that I was missing very much.

So yeah, residency-wise, I haven’t been able to travel, so some of these residences that might be out of state or are a bit harder to get to were the ones that were postponed. I’m staying local. I am doing a fellowship at Kala and that’s been nice as well. It’s located in Berkeley. You’re also doing the fellowship. So for me, it’s been really nice to also have that access to really state of the art facilities and the support from them. We do these checkins online, and then they have a lot of amazing programming as well. Definitely keeping my foot in the residencies and fellowships but also trying to stay local and be safe.

Tavarus Your practice is very interdisciplinary. You work in various visual languages and mediums. One of that being beadwork. I’m curious, did you make your earrings?

Natani I did not, but these were a graduation gift from my brothers when I graduated with my MFA. Actually, they gifted me these earrings as well as a matching necklace that I’m not wearing at the moment. But yeah, I can bead similarly. I work with seed beads. There are different sizes of seed beads. I tend to work with 12 or 15. And I’ve been beading ever since I was little. I learned from my sister and grew up kind of making things around the kitchen table. That’s how I always connected to it. It first started out as just this way to be all together and doing something productive and creative and expressive. And I was not thinking about it in this art capacity. But now I am definitely engaged in those conversations and invested in it. And yeah, beadwork, I love it. I love everything about it.