[MUSIC PLAYING]
[XANDRIA PHILIPS]:: Hi, my name is Xandria Phillips.
And I am a poet and a visual artist.
I think I began writing and painting
on two different kind of trajectories.
Or at least in my mind, they felt very disparate.
I've always loved color and drawing.
I even remember one time having a really bad grade
on a final in high school because I was coloring
and because I was really stressed out
because it was finals.
And some people kept saying, shouldn't you be studying?
And I'm like, well, I should.
But I also know my mind kind of needs this right now.
And I still remember carrying that bad grade
on a poetry midterm and feeling really bad about it.
But I think that story illustrates the way
that art has existed for me alongside poetry.
I've been a poet, a writer I guess, since high school
when I felt like I didn't really have a niche.
I just created my own worlds and wrote a lot by myself,
and then went to college and studied writing and got an MFA.
So it's been a very traditional trajectory.
But I remember finishing my book, Hull,
and coming up against this feeling
to make something without an urgency of language,
or feeling really burnt out on language.
And I also remember, as I was writing the book,
I was really--
I felt this urgent need to bring shapes into the page.
If you look at the book, the forms are pretty radical.
And some of them are quite concrete in feeling.
So I think, even before I was truly painting and drawing
and stuff, I was actually reaching
towards that visual practice.
That's why a lot of the work feels a bit dizzy on the page.
I think it was busy trying to be visual art
before I knew I was a visual artist, which I think is--
I guess I think it's kind of cool.
But I started really getting into painting around--
I think it was 2018.
I was putting the final touches on my book.
I was feeling so angry about writing.
I had nothing to say to anyone.
But I had so much creative output energy.
And I remember going to see Adrian Piper at the MoMA
with my friend, Marwa, and just my head kind of exploded.
And I realized how many different ways there
were to be a visual artist and just said,
I guess that's what I'll do.
I remember being back home in Chicago.
And I went to see Otobong Nkanga at the MCA.
And then I really discovered my love of blue
and started really understanding how
people were tying their practice to global concepts
or things about identity.
So I think those were my gateways into visual art.
I ended up painting my own book cover
because I was the only artist I could afford at the time.
And it turned out OK.
So lately, they've just been poetry and painting
have been circling each other in this nice way.
I'd like to bring them or close together, more on the same page
or canvas, so to speak.
But right now, they've just been fueling each other.
I'm most interested in interrogating race
or the expressions associated with it in television.
I really like the phrase expressions associated with it
because I'm thinking of, I guess,
all kinds of concrete and abstract things
that we link to race or how we race people
when we literally dress them up to play a character.
For instance, I'm thinking of--
I don't-- I'm not actively critiquing Quentin Tarantino.
I don't think I have a dog enough in that fight.
But I'm thinking a lot about his need to put blackface
on a dark-skinned individual.
There are so many ways that race is just--
I guess I feel like it's amplified on television.
So I think, for me right now, I'm
just looking at things I've watched so often
and have obviously been able to psychologically change
me, or alarm me, or draw me in.
I'm looking at those kinds of televised, racialized moments,
A lot of HBO shows tend to have this need
to put really, really big stakes, I
would say, really mortal big stakes on Black characters.
And I'm really interested in seeing how--
or, I guess, addressing how the stakes always
become higher when someone who's racialized as Black,
has been put into this role of hyperstress
or supernatural things of some degree.
It's quite often a Negro who is expected to be exceptional,
resilient, or otherwise.
And I think I'm really tired of that.
But I also--
I'm just curious about more so the mentality
that brings that forward.
I'm really interested in the psychology of film
and how race is a social construct.
It really lives in our minds.
And it lives in our minds in different ways,
just like the color scale lives within our minds
in different ways.
So I guess what film does, is it can
mock a kind of unified experience of race
because you're living in the same person's vision or mind.
So I'm really just curious about what that does to people over
a long period of time and also just trying to give some
newfound agency to some of these characters who,
as much as everyone tells me they aren't real,
I cannot find a way to feel that they aren't real.
I'm also investigating that.
Why do they feel real to me?
Why do they feel important?
Why do I care if they're so subjugated
and they don't feel like a very good set of representations?
Why at all?
I care about all of it.
And I care a lot about the passivity of television, too,
and how we passively racialize people as we're
just not even really thinking.
I think television also pulls that in really well.
I think the role that art plays now--
I think always plays--
I think people are always going through crisis,
not to downplay what's happening now.
But I think there just are more people going
through it at this time.
I think what art and writing can do
is function beyond linear time.
I think a lot about how life would
be if we didn't have some kind of way
to tell stories to each other either through writing,
or through color, through image, what it would be like.
And I'm thinking about the fact that someone
like me would have never been able to hear something
that Audre Lorde had to say, someone who was born--
or someone who died the year I was born.
I think about that a lot and just how,
for me, writing really feels like entering
a stream of consciousness.
And it's not like a singular stream of consciousness.
But it's the kind of lineage you're writing towards, and out
of, and into the future.
It feels really great to be able to pick up
a book written in a time that was not 2020 or 2021.
I think it's really important to just
have people you can speak back to,
people who are speaking forward to you
without even truly knowing it.
And I think I'm less studied in painting, in many ways.
But I think painting also has a similar effect.
So I'm really interested in storytelling without words.
So I also think that painting is doing something
really important there.
I'm just not quite sure how to put it into words.
But I think that's the point.
Yeah.
I think what's surprised me about my career path
or trajectory is literally everything.
I grew up in a 5,000 person town in rural Ohio.
I grew up without any other Black people
there, except for the ones in my immediate family.
I feel so lucky to be able to have Black and BIPOC
communities to be a part of, and talk about art,
and talk about race, and talk about things
you weren't supposed to talk about.
I just feel like my everything about my trajectory shocks
me a little bit, the fact that people
want to hear what I have to say about anything.
I feel people that I grew up with--
the wealthiest ones were in agriculture.
So it just feels like I had to have a lot of faith
that what I wanted to do actually existed.
And I feel lucky that, in some way, it's panning out.
And I get to just invent all day and play make believe,
which is what I really liked doing as a child.
I was big into escapism.
And I was big into just pretending
to be someone else with my sister and just playing games.
So every day feels like that a little bit.
I just get to try on different hats.
And so I feel just really lucky.
In some ways, I get to never grow up or hopefully
keep fostering my inner child in a way that feels really
important to my current self.
If I was stranded on a desert Island, I think this is--
I don't know.
This is going to sound so rigid.
But I think I would most need a ruler and a compass
of some kind because I think the island would
provide a lot of invented shapes that I could use to--
I'm thinking of using rocks to make stamps.
I'm thinking of making ink from anything and just--
I don't know why I'm enjoying this fantasy
of being on a desert island.
But I'm just imagining doing a lot of experimentation
with what is there.
But I think I would also be like, well, I do need a square.
I am Xandria.
I need a square.
And I need a circle.
So I think I would lean on those things.
I'm also imagining making my own compass out
of rope and a stick.
My wish for the world is a world beyond greed and capitalism,
a world where need is met, a world where
competition is with oneself.
I just wish for a world beyond money,
a world where I don't even have to think about selling art--
I just get to make it--
a world beyond applications, a world beyond fear.