SARAH GREEN (VOICEOVER): This episode
is supported by Prudential.
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Today we're meeting up with Tschabalala Self, who's
originally from New York and now lives here
in New Haven, Connecticut.
Her work combines drawn, painted, and printed elements
with sewing and binding techniques
to explore the iconographic significance
of the black female body in contemporary culture.
She offers us a panoply of subjects
who are aware and yet seemingly unmoved by the fact
that we are looking at them.
Through these depictions, we begin
to consider the attitudes and fantasies that
have surrounded the black female body
in history and in the present.
Her work masterfully manipulates, amplifies,
and distorts these ideas while also
rendering multi-dimensional subjects that
have agency and power.
Tschabalala is going to talk with us today about her work
and also give us an assignment that asks us to consider
our own bodies as symbols.
I'm Tschabalala Self and this is your Art Assignment.
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The images all start from a drawing.
And from that drawing, I try to build a body
or build the features of the subject I'm creating.
So I'll usually have a simple line drawing of how
I want my characters to look.
And from there, I build the faces
through sewing and grabbing various materials.
And all the materials are materials
that I've collected or have just accumulated in my studio.
So fabric, old paintings, paper, debris from my family home,
old clothing, just all different objects
that come into my life that have the ability
to go through the sewing machine can end up
in one of the characters or one of the figures.
I think that they are really, sincerely built bit by bit.
And little objects, little parts that kind of make a whole.
Well, I was more basing things on my imagination,
or I guess basing my reference point
as how I imagine something might feel,
rather than how it actually looks.
So I'm drawing something.
I guess I put priority on objects
I think might be noticed for first,
or objects that have a certain kind
of psychological or physical weight to them.
So that kind of determines the scale of things.
How abstract that something is, or how realistically drawn
it is, how recognizable it is in how it's rendered,
or how strange it is, how personal
or how generic it is as an object or an icon.
A lot of the portraits are made from making basically
accumulating different shapes and building
a person through shapes and that's
kind of how I see people.
Big Red is one of my cutout sculptures.
So those are made of sheets of wood
that I cut out with jigsaw.
Those are just an extension of my shapes.
The first group of those that I made,
I made them to flank a group of paintings I created.
An idea was to give legs to the work,
to this idea that we have this painting on the wall,
but I wanted an aspect of the painting
to be in the space with the viewer,
to interact with the viewer in a way that corrupted
this implied power dynamic of someone standing
in a space looking at an object.
So I wanted the idea that maybe the object's in your space,
and maybe this object is animated.
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If you were a shape, what shape would you be?
Make a line drawing of a shape you think represents yourself.
Try to avoid known shapes.
Fill this object with a color or pattern or some combination
thereof.
So Sarah, I love this assignment,
because in contemporary life, we are constantly
being asked to come up with avatars of ourselves,
some kind of image that will represent us.
But this is asking us to do it in a very
different and interesting way.
That's right.
Because as so much of what we see online
is people either obviously drawing from a picture
that they already have of themselves,
or something that they like, or a symbol of an existing
movement, but this asks you to start from scratch,
and to think about how you might represent yourself without any
of those fallbacks and to think about what is the shape,
what is the icon that is truly you?
This is a hard one for me, though, because it's
really difficult to think so abstractly about myself,
you know?
Yeah.
I think this is one where you have to just sit down and start
sketching, or sit down at your computer
and start playing around.
You don't necessarily have to have an idea from the start.
I think you can sort of build it just like Tschabalala
builds her figures.
But Sarah is going to help give you
some ideas, hopefully, in her history of the silhouette.
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SARAH GREEN (VOICEOVER): When Pliny the Elder
wrote his natural history around 79 CE,
he shared a popular legend about the origin of painting.
So the story goes, the daughter of Butades of Corinth
was so in love with a man about to head off
into battle that she traced around his shadow
as it was cast on the wall by a lamp.
Butades was a potter, and when he saw this,
he filled in the profile with clay
and fired it, making it into a relief.
The profile portrait persisted and became mega popular
in the 18th century in book illustration
and as a pre-photography alternative to the painted
portrait for the non-wealthy.
The cheaply produced images came to be called silhouettes,
after French finance minister Etienne de Silhouette,
infamous for his austerity.
The silhouette is cheap in other ways, of course, leaving out
a tremendous amount of information
in its depiction of an individual.
Tschabalala is challenging you to create
a shape that shrugs off the burden of realism,
to make a form that can represent you
more accurately and intriguingly than what
your mere shadow dictates.
You then fill it with color, pattern, material, texture,
more information, and more opportunity
to extend and explore the shape of yourself.
For some people, I think it's going
to embody how they feel that people see them.
And for other people, it can be an object that embodies
how they wish they were seen.
So I think either experience could be cathartic.
Even claiming something about yourself,
or dispelling something you feel like is projected onto you.
So I think this is an important exercise
to just do like a mental exercise.
And also, you know yourself better than anyone else.
So if you were to make a shape of anyone,
I think you'd probably have the most success
at making a shape of yourself.
I'm just going to grab a piece of paper, use the floor,
and just draw a shape I think represents myself.
And I might just add some solid color blocks to it.
But other people can add patterns, colors,
bright colors, watercolors, any kind of medium they want.
But the most important thing is that it's a consistent shape,
a closed shape.
And it cannot be-- it should not be a realistic depiction
of yourself.
It should be something that's somewhat
like an icon or a symbol.
Maybe they should think about what they associate most
with themselves, if that's a part of their body, that's
something outside themselves, an activity, a passion.
I first thought people should lean away
from other cultural signs, but then I watched a documentary
the other day about Prince, and his symbol
is actually a perfect example.
And that's kind of a mixture of already existing cultural signs
that he subverted to make one that spoke to him specifically.
So I think that you can use other-- maybe some kind
of take on other symbols that already exist.
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This episode was supported by Prudential.
The time between when people think
they should start saving for retirement
and when they actually do is known as the action gap.
And according to a recent survey conducted by Prudential,
the average Americans start saving for retirement
seven years later than they think
is best, which can cost over $410,000 in a lifetime.
Prudential also found that 80% of Americans
have never estimated how much retirement may cost.
One in three Americans is not saving enough
for their retirement, and over half
are not on track to maintain their current standard
of living when they retire.
SARAH GREEN (VOICEOVER): Go to RaceForRetirement.com
and see how the action gap affects you.
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