| |  | | | | September 26, 2017 | Letter No. 105 | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | Hey Lennys,
This week's issue has me wondering how many times I have curtailed my dreams because I didn't think I was qualified to do something. I'm not some shrinking violet without confidence (trust) — but I do have a strong sense of "stay in your lane" when it comes to my artistic pursuits. Both Kayla Rae Whitaker's piece about her crippling impostor syndrome and Glory Edim's inspiring essay about starting the Well-Read Black Girl movement are making me rethink what I'm "supposed" to do.
—Kayla, who is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Animators, writes a searing essay about how hard it was to come to terms with her success. She didn't come from a background where writing a novel was an expected life trajectory, and it left her unable to enjoy her own triumphs.
—Would you have the moxie to start a business because of a slogan on a T-shirt your boyfriend gave you? Glory Edim has that spirit, and now Well-Read Black Girl is a community, book club, and literary festival celebrating and increasing awareness around black women writers.
—Also in this issue, mega-best-selling historical novelist Philippa Gregory (she's behind The Other Boleyn Girl) schools us on Lady Jane Grey, whom she refers to as the loud-mouthed heretical teenager dropped from British history books.
—Finally, we have Jasmin Hernandez's fantastic interview with Genevieve Gaignard, a photographer and installation artist whose work interrogates race and gender in a completely fresh way.
There's an oft-quoted statistic that women don't apply for jobs unless they are 100 percent qualified while men apply for jobs for which they only meet about 60 percent of the qualifications. Take a note from our writers this week, and don't worry about checking all the boxes. Destroy the lanes they're trying to keep you in.
Xo
Jessica Grose, Lenny editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | My Impostor Year | | | | By Kayla Rae Whitaker | | |
Before I was a writer, I told myself stories largely because I was lonely. It was right around the time I failed my first big test, for my elementary school's gifted track. There's a part of me that never quite moved beyond that chubby, fuzzy-haired kid, scratching at her eczema and peering warily through greasy lenses at the adults talking at her. I was an easy toss: messy, bad with numbers, spottily attentive. At the heat of appraisal, my brain would — unsolicited — begin doing the dreamy, yet active, work of taking me out of the way of threat and placing me elsewhere. I recall feeling myself already sliding during the verbal section, an adult voice delivering a firm, gentle "No."
Later, when I began putting my brain's work to paper, it remained a calling, a private, beloved thing. The antithesis of the tests I learned to take and the grades I learned to make in high school in an effort to redeem my sense of value, an ugly, scrabbling hustle for something that felt, troublingly, like love.
Achievement, then, always felt a bit fraudulent, though no fraud, of course, was involved. The efforts were, for better or worse, all mine.
Fast-forward twenty years, to when I applied for MFA programs with the short stories I wrote at night after my office job. I forced myself to expect nothing and got into a grad program in New York that I was surprised accepted me. It was, I was convinced, absolutely stupid luck. I was thrown into classes with people who'd gone to amazing schools — Ivy League, private, rarified.
I was absolutely numb with intimidation. "They belong here," I thought. I did not.
It took seven years of work to finish my novel. I worked days at an office, awaiting the five o'clock punch-out for the time when I could finally write. I was at my desk when my dream agent called me. About a year after, she sold my book. I marveled: more good luck.
Two years later, the book was released. I could hold it in my hand and look at my author photo and see the back, where important people said a bunch of nice stuff about me, in a row. Lovely, surreal.
And it was perhaps here that I felt that first cool, confusing twinge of — something. All those good things said about my writing and, by extension, me. On the surface, the months to come looked thrilling: reviews, interviews. Authorship. A dream realized. It felt a little too good. It felt troublingly good. It's OK, I thought, trying to shake the weird sense that I was doing something I wasn't supposed to be doing. It's not a sin if I don't actually believe any of the things they're saying about me.
I put my own book on my bookshelf, for the first time, and tried to forget about it.
I begin to have some repetitive thoughts. At first, I brush them off as markers of standard-issue anxiety, a consequence of the nonstop work, the lack of sleep. But the itch deepens with the passing weeks. The impression solidifies, eventually, into a cogent argument: This whole thing is a goddamned fluke.
I did not deserve to get a book published. This is all happening to the wrong person. At some point, the bottom will fall out. Maybe I bungled a detail about hemorrhagic strokes, or animation production, or any other manner of things I wrote about, and it will ruin everything. There will come that definitive review that uncovers my writing as vapid, trite — the review that will convince everyone of what I secretly suspect is true about myself. I will no longer be believable, marketable, and my agent, editor, publishing team — brilliant people I still cannot quite believe agreed to work with me — will discover that I am not, in fact, creative or competent. For their kindness, I will let them down.
This, I realize, is for people who'd been born into worlds in which getting books published happens regularly. For those gifted since grade school, who photographed and networked with ease, who didn't sound like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel when they talked. I imagine that gifted-track test and feel the sting of that delivered no, and I imagine that all those now-faceless adults knew something about what I lacked, what I lack, that I did not.
I cannot rationalize this feeling, but it is with me all the time. I could attribute it to growing up in the Bible Belt — even for those not raised evangelical, there permeates throughout that culture a religiously tinged fear of getting "too big for your britches," an unspoken belief and perhaps secret satisfaction in a corresponding comeuppance to any good fortune. Particularly for women; there is a special glee reserved for women who stumble. I am secretly convinced a universal force will punish me, in one way or another, not only for aspiring to be something I am not but for feeling such paralyzing sadness at an event I know I am lucky to experience, one that might not happen again.
I sit down to write, and those voices crowd out the part of my brain that I treasure — that pipeline to the subconscious dream work that has sustained me all my life. It was, to date, one of the best feelings I had ever experienced, writing, one of those sensations that made me glad to be alive, a feeling that, when I attempt to describe it, always elicits in my mind the image of a clear tube with a ribbon of water moving through it. But those voices — I'd kept them at bay for a long time, but 2017 is their year.
The first time I read a description of impostor syndrome, it is knowledge gained in desperation — a late-night Google search for "guilt over success." And then — gut instinct at work — "guilt over success women."
I freeze. I am reading about myself. My every justification, my every fear of retribution or punishment, the leaden feelings of guilt. My knowledge of my own fraudulence. My terror of exposure. This is, I read, a common malady in women, whose implicit training in subservience makes success on the most basic level seem an aberration, a transgression against a core tenet of how a woman is supposed to live.
I am surprised that impostor syndrome is not cataloged in the DSM-5, so powerful is its sway over this time of my life. It is a force as formidable and uncontrollable as any other mental illness I've encountered, the self-loathing holding my brain hostage for days, weeks, months. A year. These values were coiled inside me, fostered when I was likely too young to do much about it, waiting for their day to surface and spark ruin. And now that these values have defined themselves, I wonder if they will ever subside.
The discovery is a relief, in that it peoples a time that feels deeply, personally isolating. Yet the syndrome's description offers the unsettling feel of the chronic; it is hard to know where you stop and where the beast begins, it seems. It is not baggage sheddable via self-actualization. As in alcoholism, or clinical depression, you are the sickness's home.
By late spring, I am desperate to feel something that is not this —the crying jags, the feelings of worthlessness, the inability to write. It is after my 33rd birthday, after my book is released, that I look in the mirror to find myself older, the seams around my eyes that used to go slack when I stopped smiling now permanently there. My stomach pulses with acid. A new constellation of acne appears around my jawline and forehead. I begin to lose hair on one, weirdly placed spot on the right side of my head from stress.
I get a therapist and a psychiatrist and a prescription for Wellbutrin. There's an energy uptick, there's weight loss. There are less pleasing side effects: a constipation that jives weirdly with the jitters. The exceedingly fucked-up Wellbutrin dreams, marked by a disquieting vividness in sensory detail — dreams in which you kill someone and can feel the oiliness of their blood on your hands, for instance.
It is an unsettling revelation of my own limitations — not of what I can do, but of who I am. I had not before known my true capacity for dealing harm to myself, a capacity that, frighteningly, I can see in others. A whole generation of women, falling on their own stakes.
Then, something I did not expect happens. I get art from people who have read my book. My main characters, a pair of animated cartoonists, Mel and Sharon. Envisioned.
It felt like I had been speaking in a foreign language for the better part of my life, a barrier of true understanding between myself and everyone I encountered. That private language was funneled into my book, into Sharon and Mel, and now they were finding people who spoke that same language, and this golden lifeline, the oxygen of kinship, was spinning warm and rich out into the world. These sketches are the most beautiful things I have ever seen. When they make me cry, it is the first time in months I am not crying from quiet terror at who I have become.
It was that need to be understood but also the hidden hope that I would come to understand others. It had something to do with the blunted desire with which we all live and slowly becoming accustomed to this deprivation until the deprivation becomes something else, slow-burning and forgiving. Someone's voice coming out of the darkness; someone else's, answering.
I can't wrestle an affirmation out of this experience. Along with the realization that this has stolen from me a year of my life I will never get back, there is the knowledge that I will never be shed of this sense of my own fraudulence, this waxing and waning urge to experience hurt in order to pay, in some sense, for goodness. It's a thread tying my life together, good striped with sour. There is, however, the hope that this is not all that waits for me. I savor the days when I am bigger than my own sense of shame. And the day I sit in front of my keyboard at long last and begin to write and it feels the way it should — water moving through a clear channel. It, too, feels like oxygen.
Kayla Rae Whitaker's novel The Animators is out in paperback now. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | | | | How I Built a Community From an Idea I Found on a T-Shirt | | | | By Glory Edim | | | | | | |
For my 31st birthday, my partner planned a bunch of tiny surprises for me. One of them was a custom-designed T-shirt. It was chocolate brown, and it had a logo on it that said "Well-Read Black Girl." Right in the middle was an emblem with my birthdate and a couple of my favorite authors, including Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker. Between him and me, it was an inside joke. I read a lot and I always had a book with me in bed; the idea was that I was the well-read black girl.
Every time I wore this shirt to the gym or running errands, I would constantly have people coming up to me, asking me questions and starting conversations. "Oh, what are you reading?" "Where'd you get your shirt?" It would lead to these wonderful discussions about who our favorite author was and what books inspired us.
The following spring, I decided to host a book club with a couple of my good friends. But first, I started the Well-Read Black Girl Instagram account; I wanted a place to have a larger conversation beyond the organic ones my T-shirt had started. When creating the Instagram account, I was inspired by archival photos from the Black Arts movement, a literary movement that included novelists and poets like Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Rosa Guy. Their photos have always asserted a sense of pride and collective empowerment. My hope was to share their sense of optimism online. I also shared quotes from authors like Jamaica Kincaid, Zora Neale Hurston, and Zadie Smith. I was surprised by the incredible response, online and off. Readers were hungry for book suggestions and inspiration from writers.
Around the time I started the Instagram account, I ended up meeting author Naomi Jackson at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. I told her about the idea I had for the book club. I mentioned how moved I was by her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill, which is about two Brooklyn-born sisters who are sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados. Then I asked if she would join us for the first club meeting.
I was nervous about approaching Naomi, but in my experience, the worst thing a person can say is no. And a lot of the time, if you value your work, people will say yes. I believe that when you feel afraid or nervous to do something, that's probably an inkling that you should do it.
Naomi was gracious, and she agreed to host our first meeting. We had a small gathering at a bar in Brooklyn. Naomi read from the book and answered our questions about her creative process. She told us how she came to write such a rich story about black girlhood, homesickness, and displacement. We listened to her story of being a young black girl in search of love and acceptance in a foreign land — how that can feel both alien and familiar — and saw ourselves on the page. Jackson noted that the best gift you can give another writer is the gift of intelligent attention. We strive for that attention and commitment in every book-club experience.
Between Naomi's and my partner's support, I decided to go full throttle in making Well-Read Black Girl a virtual community. Sometimes it takes another person to tap you on the shoulder and help you realize your potential: It wasn't just me reading under the covers anymore. Other people wanted to connect over these books.
Well-Read Black Girl isn't the first time I've sought out a close-knit group; I've always served as a supporter and advocate of different communities. In high school, I was a cheerleader and was elected Student Government Association president. I was also subconsciously seeking the sense of community and empowerment I had felt in college at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, D.C., and a space where black women's individuality and resistance to conformity is embraced. With Well-Read Black Girl, I was seeking a place to have conversations and make connections beyond my workday routine, to leave room for the unexpected to happen.
I contemplated volunteering or engaging with people online in some way. I started a blog called "I Hate My Nine to Five." At the time, I worked as an arts administrator at a theater, but I had a lot of friends who worked in finance or at law firms who had these horrendous experiences. I wanted to see if I could find a space to share these funny stories. I ended up going to meme conferences and trying to connect with people through social media. The idea didn't pan out, but it was a valuable learning experience.
One thing that I took away from it was how important it is to understand the language of the communities you want to be a part of. By engaging on Twitter, Facebook, or Tumblr, you can easily find other people who are just as passionate. Now, with a background in strategy, I do public outreach for startups as my day job.
My primary focus with Well-Read Black Girl is novels by black women. The reason it's had such great success is that we're all connecting around our support of these authors' works. While discussing these books, we also ask ourselves, "How can we challenge stereotypes? How can we really expand our narratives?" It goes beyond reading books together — we're talking about our lives. The organization exemplifies the need for black women to uplift, support, and nurture one another.
Well-Read Black Girl is a side hustle for me. I still have a full-time job that I'm very dedicated to, and it can be challenging to manage my time. I've learned to make time for myself by meditating and practicing yoga, but I also find support by sharing my story with others. The more open and candid you are with your life, the more people will resonate with that authenticity and that vulnerability. I tell people all the time, "Disclaimer: There may be errors in this message because I am a human." And I think it's really important for people to realize that behind every business, every idea, there is a real person.
After Naomi hosted our first meeting, we gradually grew, from a group of eight, to having 100 followers, to 600. Now we have more than 36,000. Beyond the Instagram and book club, I started a newsletter to share book recommendations and essays I've read online by women of color who inspire me. The newsletters resemble a text I might send to a friend — "This made me laugh" or "This made me cry."
We've hosted literary events and panels with several authors including Jacqueline Woodson, Tayari Jones, Rebecca Carroll, and Roxane Gay. This September, I hosted my first literary festival. We had over 500 attendees — the event completely sold out. We welcomed Naomi Jackson back as our keynote speaker, and award-winning author Marita Golden led a writing workshop. Other writers including Ashley C. Ford, Jenna Wortham, Kaitlyn Greenidge, and Morgan Jerkins also spoke. These are all women who have played a role in growing the vision of the organization and through their support have become true friends. It feels amazing to have their insight and encouragement, and it makes me want to do that for other people.
I never anticipated that Well-Read Black Girl would grow to be this significant. This whole movement has grown organically out of my mantra to always be authentic. I want the people in my community to feel uplifted by others and empowered to pursue their goals. I want them to feel inspired to be positive examples in the world. I think books really encourage that: they allow people to have perspective and be kind to one another.
Glory Edim is the founder of Well-Read Black Girl. You can follow her on Twitter here. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | The Loud-Mouthed Heretical Teenager Dropped From British History Books | | | | By Philippa Gregory | | |
I've spent most of my working life looking into a void — staring into the gap where I would expect to find a well-researched biography of an interesting woman. Over and over again, I have come across a woman who has played a large part in a historical event and asked the question "Oh! Who's this?" to be met with a resounding silence. The history of her father or brother or husband or son is usually there, sometimes in rich detail with vainglorious claims to greatness. The woman — absent.
Women are "hidden from history" for a number of different reasons, but the Grey family — the martyr Lady Jane Grey and her sisters, the subjects of my latest novel — are concealed in plain sight in three completely different ways.
Lady Jane Grey usurped the throne of England on the death of her cousin, the son of Henry VIII. Half of England was Protestant and feared a Roman Catholic monarch, and so Lady Jane's supporters named her as queen in preference to the rightful Roman Catholic heir, Mary I.
The uprising collapsed within nine days. Mary marched on London to an ecstatic welcome, and Jane was imprisoned in the tower and disappeared from history into myth. This interesting, argumentative, loud-mouthed heretical teenager took the courageous choice to die for her faith — just as much a martyr as Sir Thomas More — and within days of her death, she was transformed from the real young woman she was into a Protestant icon.
Saint-making went into overdrive, as the very few references to her childhood were exaggerated or imagined into the hagiography of a saint. The process was crowned by a work by French painter Paul Delaroche, whose acclaimed portrait of Lady Jane Grey has set an image of her in our minds, an image far from reality. Here is Jane Grey, not in the black Tudor gown trimmed with black jet that we knew she wore, but in the silvery white robe of the virgin sacrifice. Beside her is the lieutenant of the tower Sir John Brydges, guiding her toward the block. Behind her, collapsing as if to signify what women usually do under stress, are her useless ladies in waiting, and before her, posed so that all eyes are drawn to his codpiece, emphasized by a dagger, is the executioner. The tiny block where she is to die contrasts with the huge ax that will behead her. The girl herself is blindfolded and her imploring hands outstretched — she is both blind and lost.
| (Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, 1833 © The National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by the Second Lord Cheylesmore, 1902) |
But the truth is far more interesting. The real-life Jane walked to the scaffold and climbed the steps. She did this willingly, despite being offered a pardon, because she chose to die rather than to surrender her faith. She was escorted by the Roman Catholic priest that she had bested in his attempts to convert her. Well aware of its importance, she carried a prayer book, probably translated from the Latin by her mentor and teacher Kateryn Parr, Henry VIII's final wife and the first woman to publish in English.
This was no blindfolded victim but a woman who knew her own mind, who had studied and given her faith to her own brand of religion and who wrote to her younger sister "Learn you to die," to teach her the contempt for life that a true believer should feel. Her last words on the scaffold repeated her defiant claim that there was no such place as purgatory and that salvation came through faith — not by paid prayers in a chantry.
This Jane Grey — the young woman I see when I read the documents of her short life — is hidden by the image of the sacrificial victim. Painting women as saints and sinners is one of the ways of obscuring their complex reality.
Jane's sister Katherine is also hidden, but she is concealed by Tudor propaganda. Katherine posed a major threat to Elizabeth I as a royal blood heir to the throne, untainted by any whisper of bastardy. She secretly married a Seymour (another royal connection) and gave birth to two half-Tudor boys — both potential heirs to the throne — while Elizabeth remained unmarried and childless.
On discovering Katherine's marriage, Elizabeth bundled her into the Tower of London and then into house arrest, parting her forever from her husband and oldest son. She died in captivity and is barely recorded because none of the many conspiracies that swirled around her were successful. Elizabeth's magnificent secret service suppressed the plots and silenced their discussion. I believe that they stole her papers so that almost everything that we know about Katherine was given in evidence against her at Elizabeth's inquiry into her secret marriage. The record is designed to convict her, and she barely enters the loyal histories of the reign. Katherine's history as sister to one queen, cousin to another, and granddaughter to another has come down to us as a footnote.
The youngest Grey girl, Mary, is hidden from history by two powerful eclipses. One is that her rebellion against Elizabeth was private, secret, and unsuccessful. She married a poor man, the queen's sergeant porter, and there were no great relations to take up his cause. They were separated and imprisoned, and her husband died before he could reunite with his beloved wife. Without powerful friends, she was concealed by the queen's enmity. Mary did not even enter the gossip sheets of the day, let alone the later histories.
And there is another reason for Mary's absence from history: she was a little person, of less than four feet, and she was described — in the prejudiced language of the time — as "ugly." Mary was neither tall enough nor important enough to make it into the record. Even worse (for me as a historian!), she does not appear in those few histories of little people that have so far been written. She is so slightly mentioned in the mainstream histories that historians of disability and of little people have not yet noticed her.
The three Grey girls read together are a fascinating story of a family out of favor in Elizabethan England, but they are also three powerful examples of how historians obscure and deny women's place in history. Jane is too good to be true, Katherine is too private, and Mary is too little. I am glad that I have researched and written about all three, with equal interest, and done something toward bringing them out of the shadows.
Philippa Gregory is a recognized authority on women's history and the author of many best-selling novels, including The Other Boleyn Girl and, most recently, The Last Tudor. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | Playing Dress-Up, Playing With Racial Perceptions | | | | By Jasmin Hernandez | | | |
| (Genevieve Gaignard, Drive-By, Side-Eye, 2016. Chromogenic print.) |
The women in Genevieve Gaignard's photographs are hoodrats who wear large hoop earrings and sport long, auburn-colored, box braids. They are vampy divas who wear turbans, silk robes, blue eyeshadow, and a rock a killer red lip. They are suburban housewives dressed in pastel floral blouses and mom jeans on their way to pick up groceries. They are black women and they are white women, but they are all Genevieve Gaignard. The Los Angeles–based, Yale-educated photographer and installation artist dissects her biracial identity through her character-created portraits. American women of different ages, social classes, and income brackets are presented to the viewer, but you have to pay close attention to what you are seeing. Gaignard plays with racial binaries both cleverly and carefully, and her environmental photographs are filled with comic relief, glamour, and irony. Her installations, brimming with an abundance of pop-culture references like Cabbage Patch dolls, vintage photo frames, and other chintzy ephemera sourced from thrift shops and consignment boutiques, provide a bridge for the viewer to enter her world.
Born in the early '80s to a white mother from Baltimore and a black father from New Orleans, Gaignard was raised in Orange, Massachusetts, a rural town with a population of 8,000 that's almost exclusively white. Her mother would tell her stories of her youth in Baltimore, where she had lived upstairs from Edith Massey, one of John Waters's kooky muses, who appeared in five of his films. Gaignard's mother would recount tales of going to Waters's screenings and hanging out with Massey in her thrift shop, with all kinds of colorful characters popping in. Waters's references run fluidly in Gaignard photographs; you can see it in the beehive hairstyles, pin-up-style dresses, garish makeup, and that fabulous drag-queen aesthetic.
Gaignard is currently riding a momentous wave that has included two solo shows with the Los Angeles gallery Shulamit Nazarian; her recent first solo museum exhibit, Smell the Roses; and a group show at the California African American Museum. Next up is her inclusion in Prospect.4, New Orleans's top art biennial, and an upcoming solo exhibit, In Passing, at the Houston Center for Photography in early September. On a summer afternoon in mid-July, Gaignard and I talked on the phone about black pop culture, finding inspiration from everyday life, and her rock-star art career.
| (Genevieve Gaignard, Smell the Roses, 2017. California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Installation view.) |
Jasmin Hernandez: There is this really strong thread of wigs, drag-queen culture, exaggerated beauty, and performance that plays out in your work. How did you put all these elements together?
Genevieve Gaignard: I think it's a mix of several things: me feeling like I didn't fit in, and not fitting the ideal of what beauty is, in terms of my racial identity. At one point, I was just like, I'm going to embrace this and play off those things in the work. It's popular culture, all of these things, what everyone is looking at. I'm just taking my stab at it, and hopefully people can relate or connect to it.
JH: Your installations are always so richly detailed, packed with nostalgia and witty innuendos. How do they add to the story line you're telling in the portraits?
GG: With the installations, I'm able to inform the viewer of the more personal story and about the person who makes these characters. So you're seeing things that I surround myself with in my own home, or things that I grew up with. Then my sense of humor or my wit is in there to pull you in, because you're excited or you feel comfortable in the space, because it feels familiar. Then there are these clues to something else, like a bigger message, or just more questions to ask yourself as you're experiencing the installation.
JH: In the series "The Line-Up," you portray black women in church showcasing several moods: vanity, mourning, optimism, etc. Can you tell me more about that?
GG: I actually just wanted to have something that was a nod to church culture, or black church culture. The fact that you're saying that you see all those different things, I don't know if I was actually trying to say a specific thing in each one. I'm in that character, and I'm in the moment. But when they all came together, it was this nice experience to walk past them all as if they're all standing in line or they're at different events.
JH: How does black pop culture shape your work? Names like "Hidden Fences," Get Out, and The Color Purple all appear as titles of your works.
GG: I think I use that as an extra layer to hit the viewer. They experience the photograph and then they read the title and they have a new way of thinking about it. And often I think I'm read as white, so I'm thinking they are seeing the white characters, and then I'll use these titles to inform them that there is more to the story.
| (Genevieve Gaignard, Hidden Fences, 2017. Chromogenic print.) |
JH: So now, after two gallery exhibits and a museum show at CAAM, do you think your characters have evolved somehow?
GG: When I got the show at CAAM, I was able to really address the audience. I knew my audience was mostly from the black community, and that was a really amazing moment to have. With my second show at Shulamit Nazarian, I've kind of gotten this platform to speak about the complexities of a range of black identities, and I don't want to cancel that out. In my mind, I was saying, How can I talk about blackness through these seemingly white characters?
JH: You're included in the artist line-up for the upcoming Prospect 4, a major biennial in New Orleans. You have family ties in New Orleans; can you talk about the significance of showing work there?
GG: It's really huge and incredible. I actually haven't spent a lot of time there. I went a handful of times to visit relatives as I was growing up. I've been yearning to have more of a connection to that place. My plan is to photograph all of the characters in New Orleans. So I've been going to the neighborhood where my dad grew up, where he went to school, where he went to church. Just really getting a sense of the place. I also went to the Whitney Plantation Museum, which I found out is the only plantation that honors and tells the stories of slaves. Where other plantations will refer to slaves as "workers" and don't acknowledge the severity of things that happened there, the Whitney Plantation Museum does. They have monuments with the slaves' names to honor them.
JH: Besides pulling from your personal life, how else do you research your characters?
GG: I do a lot of people-watching; I spend a lot of time driving around Los Angeles. I feel that's when I'm really experiencing a mix of types, so just pulling from that. I just recently did a shoot, and I saw this girl walking down the street in her Adidas flip-flops with socks up to her shins and eating a bowl of cereal. I was like, I want to try and re-create that.
JH: So basically just observations from everyday life.
GG: Yes, that and watching TV, which is pop culture.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jasmin Hernandez is the founder of Gallery Gurls, a feminist-focused art blog, and a freelance arts writer for Cultured, Vice, and Elle, among others. She is a native New Yorker and a graduate of Parsons School of Design. | | | | | | | | | | | | Advertisement | | |  | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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