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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This year's selected artists for the prestigious Harlem Studio Museum residency are presenting their work in a new show at MoMA PS1. This residency has nurtured the careers of artists now considered among some of the greats in both historical and contemporary art, like David Hammons, Kehinde Wiley, and Karen Oliver. At the end of each year, the artists present the work they've made during the program. The three artists in residency this year are diverse in their backgrounds and artistic exploration. There's Charisse Pearlina Weston, born in Houston, who works with Glass Sculptures and is inspired by her research into anti-black violence and surveillance.

There's Jeffrey Meris, born in Haiti and raised in the Bahamas, who in this show works in sculpture and performance art that explores ideas of body, our place in the universe, and Black fiction like Octavia Butler's Parable Collection. There's Devin N. Morris, born in Baltimore, who likes to wander the streets of Harlem for found objects to incorporate into his work, which include abstract sculptures and layered paintings on wood panels. And Ever an Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022-23 is on view now at MoMA PS1. With me now are two of the artists, Jeffrey Meris and Devin Morris. Welcome to both of you-

Jeffrey Meris: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: -and Studio Museum Assistant Curator, Yelena Keller. Yelena, thanks for being here as well.

Yelena Keller: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Jeffrey, why were you initially interested in applying for the program?

Jeffrey Meris: I first encountered Studio Museum when I was about 18 years old. I came to New York and I did a residency. I just so happened to wander into Harlem with a few friends, and it was the first time that I saw art that focused on people from the African diaspora, art that reflected issues I was interested in. I felt deeply connected to the program. To my surprise, I found out that Studio Museum had this amazing Artist in Residence program, and here we are some 14 years later, [chuckles] where I'm honored to say that I'm a part of that legacy. I spent a year learning, growing, and playing with this amazing cohort, Elena, and everyone at the institution.

Alison Stewart: Devin, how about for you? Why were you initially interested in applying for this program?

Devin Morris: My introduction to Studio Museum was when I started making zines back in 2014, and I was invited to the building to do a talk or something. I wasn't even aware at that time. I wasn't thinking of myself as an artist. When I got on stage, I met the current residents at that year, and they were like, "Yes, you're an artist." I was like, "What is this?" [chuckles] Whatever. [chuckles] I just paid no mind, but I to this day maintain relationships with those people, but as well, over the years, I applied once, and I remember thinking, don't apply to anything else until you feel like your work is ready.

I think about maybe five or six years later, I applied, which would be the last year in 2022, and I got it when I felt like I was telling-- having a complete sentence.

Alison Stewart: Yelena, what is the application process like?

Yelena Keller: Yes, so artists apply through a digital portal. I love talking about this because the residency itself traces the full arc of the history of the institution. In the early days, artists were mailing applications. We sift through digital applicants in a grueling, all-day process. I think it's also important to note as well that we are gathered today around the culminating exhibition, but the selection process really focuses on the artists themselves, really seeing the residency as an opportunity for deepened research and engagement, and really considering where an artist is in their career, practice, and life, and the many ways that the residency might be able to support them at that inflection point.

I think in this way, it really colors what the exhibition is, that we are, after many months together, thinking about what this moment has been.

Alison Stewart: You all are up in Harlem. Jeffrey, when you think about the energy and the culture of Harlem, how is it seeped into your practice?

Jeffrey Meris: I lived in New Haven, Connecticut from 2020 to 2021. I did this other residency program called NXTHVN. I moved to Harlem, and when I moved to Harlem, I brought an entire forest of plants with me. I didn't really think about it when I was looking for an apartment in New York, but light translates to more money. I continue to live in the same apartment. I have this apartment that doesn't have a lot of access to light, and so my plants weren't doing very well. When I started the residency at the Studio Museum, I decided to bring my plants into the studio. As the sun shifted in the sky over the year, I stopped having access to the little bit of light that I did have.

One day I was walking towards the studio and I saw the stroller on the street and I had this aha moment where I wasn't really thinking about it in the context of art. It was more a survival strategy. I decided to bring the stroller and take my plants on these walks. That became a ritual, if you will, where I walked my plants throughout Harlem. It grounded me in terms of finding my identity in the space. A lot of the local restaurants and the coffee shop and people started to pinpoint me, and eventually, that led to these spontaneous conversations about what am I doing? Where am I coming from? Who am I?

The minute I said Studio Museum, that became the verification mark, because a lot of times we think that the surrounding world have no idea what we're doing or where we're coming from. That really was the thing that validated my experience. It's interesting not behind the residency anymore because I'm still thinking about how this practice continues and how it applies to both my art practice and my life.

Alison Stewart: Devin, as part of your work, you incorporate found objects, pieces of things you find. How do you go about identifying and collecting objects around the city?

Devin Morris: I collect them everywhere around, anywhere I travel to. It's really, for me, a way of finding a way to reflect why I'm in a space and how I can be a part of it. Because I would say initially in my art making, I would struggle with meaning and to struggle with the meaning for why I'm in a space. Is it because I'm Black? Is it because all these things that are projected toward me as opposed to the being?

Then I just started to develop this deeper connection to objects where there was a shared-- a general shared thing that everyone could take part in or already has historically through just these objects existing, whether it be somatically, our bodies knowing the thing that I find, or me existing or everybody's existing within a wall that had tiles and I pick up these tiles after someone's renovating. Yes, the sensitivity toward looking, picking, I think, came from taking walks with my mom when I was a kid.

Anytime we had to go somewhere. I remember one time we went to my high school, and when we were coming out, she found a cherry tree because she was always picking with her hands. She was like, "Oh, there's cherries." I was like, "What?" We picked them and we ate it. Whenever we would walk, she would grab a leaf and break it. Then I started to grab leaves and break it and smell. That gave me a real sensitivity to space. Every time I'm walking, I'm just looking around. I'm looking for something to experience in that way. Then that became finding comfort and legacy through picking up objects that were once used by someone.

Alison Stewart: Right, because that was somebody's house, but the [unintelligible 00:08:26] of somebody's house was on some truck that some guy drove from someplace else after. There's the whole-- legacy, I think is the word you used.

Devin Morris: Yes. That's really the main cause for me. It's like this, trying to stay within legacy because I find it so hard a means to traverse as I grow, as this human that I am.

Alison Stewart: Yelena, I'm going to ask you to speak to Charisse's work because she's not here today. Her glass, it's bent, it's melded into shapes. What's impressive about the way she works with this material?

Yelena Keller: Oh, everything. I think Charisse really has a masterful engagement with this material. As you noted, she's working primarily in glass, but really explores the full capacities of the medium. In many ways, I think engaging with her work really requires yourself to engage with your own physical body. She is often balancing glass panels against these lead forms, and there is a embodied precarity to the medium.

I think she's thinking deeply about the fragility of the medium as well as the malleability of the medium as she's working with it, again, through this process of fire and heat, but also collapse and break, all of which is part of the process of the making of the work and embracing the various forms with which it takes. In many ways, it's seen as an extension of or a poetic of a Black experience. I think as both Jeffrey and Devin have just noted, there is this deep consideration around the physical body, but also what it means to move through space, to move around her work, but also to move around all of their work. As you engage in the space of the gallery, I think there is a sensitivity to space in place. One that, I think, deeply resonates with Black and brown bodies in particular, queer bodies, and what it means to navigate through space and time.

I think Harlem is a deep resonant space, as well, as related to a lot of this work. I think spending time in Harlem over several months together collectively and spending also time inside of studio spaces, and engaging in conversations, all really impacts the ways in which these artists are thinking. I think that's deeply felt inside the space of the gallery.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about, And Ever An Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence. It is at MoMA PS1 on view through April 8. I'm speaking with Yelena Keller, she's museum assistant curator, as well as to the artists featured in the show, Jeffrey Meris and Devin Morris. Jeffrey, when you work to the rising sun from far away, it looks like it could just be like this big representation of the sun, but when you get close, you realize it's crutches, it's a bunch of-- how many, like 100?

Jeffrey Meris: 180.

Alison Stewart: 180 crutches. As you get closer, it looks less like a sun and maybe more like a virus of some sort. You mentioned it's inspired from something from your personal experience. Would you feel comfortable sharing?

Jeffrey Meris: Sure, yes. 2022, I feel like since 2020, it's been, "Wow, would he see us so hard?" 2022 completely shifted my body, my biology, and I had to come to terms with that the pre-2022 Jeffrey doesn't exist anymore. I need to walk into this new dimension of myself. I had a really big health hurdle that I had to, and that I continue to overcome. I think I've approached so much--

It's interesting to even think about this moment now because even before 2022, I really thought about my practice in relationship to care. I would often talk about how care is this radical gesture. What does it mean to be a Black man in this world, and to really be conscious about the ways in which I care for myself and my community. That care became something that I have to live with for the rest of my life.

The sculpture is really coming from that positionality. The title of the work is To The Rising Sun. I was born in Haiti and I grew up in the Bahamas. The second stanza of the national anthem of the Bahamas says-- the first time it goes, "Lift up your head," and the second one is, "To the rising sun." The work also deals with this idea of place, place-making, nationality, what does it mean to be inside a space but not really feel like you belong to that space.

To me, it's about the complications of feeling big and small at the same time, thinking about universal ideas, thinking about the universe, but also thinking about the chemical and biological, the things inside our bodies and the way that reflects and refracts into this wider cosmic conversation.

Alison Stewart: It's a line in the Black national anthem as well, in Lift Every Voice.

[crosstalk]

Devin Morris: Yes. Facing the rising sun

Alison Stewart: There you go. I'm glad you're singing now. That was Devin, by the way. Speaking about space in your rooms arrangement, the walls are painted dark blue, and the sculptures are placed in the center of the room, surrounded by different collage-style pieces. What was the process like for deciding how you wanted your pieces placed? Where you wanted your pieces placed? What color you wanted the room to be?

Devin Morris: I think it started with the color because that was a big experience of just centering myself at Harlem. I would take these walks for about six months before I ever created anything. The blue was from a night where I was at Randalls Island. It was just such a wonderful blue sky, so I took a video of it and I didn't know that subconsciously that would become a conscious reasoning for the color for the wall, which I want it to be a specific feeling of dusk, of light but darkness.

As far as the way that the sculptures are placed, I think that it just all started building toward a landscape, which at first I wasn't thinking about that. I just knew that I wanted to make sculptures that were titled 'High grasses'. I knew that this tiny object, poor that I compiled, I knew that in my head I was calling this 'stream'. I wasn't relating that I was interested in the sky, but I knew that I was interested in this juxtaposition of outside, interior and exterior, and that was showing up in the work a lot. That's always something that I'm conscious of when I work, is creating these impossible spaces. I think that is well translated through how the sculpture and collage is arranged in a room.

Alison Stewart: Yelena, both these artists have talked about walking around, and how walking around was important to them in their practice. When you think about the environment around the Studio Museum, when artists experience that, what is its role? What is the neighborhood's role? what is the location's role?

Yelena Keller: Harlem is such a vibrant and beautiful place in so many ways, and has such a rich history. It's also a complicated place. I think so many artists come into the residency with a real sense of self and practice and work. It's really incredible to watch the ways in which Harlem finds its way into the work that they're making while in residence, the presence of Harlem for all of us, I think. Some of the artists end up moving to Harlem, some artists don't. I think the through line of Harlem as a site and space is always there. Harlem is a historically Black neighborhood.

Harlem is a place where I think so much of the beauty of Black culture is alive and well and present in the streets, as well as the challenges of what it means to be Black in America. All of that seems to play out and really unfold in real time. I think spending time in Harlem, it's impossible to ignore the many ways in which these disparate paths cross and fold, and so there's so much rich texture that is present there.

I also think in this moment when the culminating exhibition is happening at MoMA PS1, it's a really special opportunity in some ways to bring a piece of Harlem to Long Island City, to think about different audiences, what it means to be of the diaspora. There's so many communities that are resonant in Long Island City as well to this work. I think Harlem is at the heart, in many ways, of this museum, and in many ways at the heart of this work.

Alison Stewart: Jeffrey, we love books on the show. While texting your section--

Jeffrey Meris: I love books, too.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: It's you're inspired by Octavia Butler, how so?

Jeffrey Meris: I have to call in my dear friend into the space, Tomashi Jackson, who's an artist who I deeply admire as well. In the summer of 2020, Tomashi started reading club. I met Tomashi at another residency that I did, and every Sunday was like going to church. We had homework throughout the week where we had to read a specific amount of texts from the Parable Series, Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents. Every Sunday, there would be a group leader who would lead the discussion. I've since gone on to read both of those books three times since that summer, and I was very inspired by Octavia Butler's the powerful series and thinking through this Afro-futurist lens.

For me, the work is deeply political. It's about a lived experience. It's about anti-Black violence, but it also, for me, proposes a future where we can escape from this violence, where we can live our wildest dreams, where we don't have to live on the violence of the hegemonic gaze. Sorry, I'm getting a little bit choked up. For me, I typically always ground my art with research that often comes from Black authors.

Alison Stewart: Devin, people go see the show, what is one thing you'd love for them to notice? Some piece that you worked really hard on or a moment in the show or a part of one of your works that you just want them to spend extra 10 seconds with?

Devin Morris: I don't think there's one thing. I think if anything, is I'm always trying to get to an emotion that might be a little impossible to realize. I think if anything, I hope that there's a culmination of feelings that are based in traces and refractions that then become something that they can feel, because I know that's how I make it.

Alison Stewart: The name of the show is, And Ever An Edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–'23. It's on view through April 8 at MoMA PS1. I've been speaking with artists Jeffrey Meris and Devin Morris, as well as Yelena Keller, Studio Museum assistant curator. Thank you for coming to studio and congratulations on your year of work.

Devin Morris: Thank you.

Jeffrey Meris: Thank you.

Yelena Keller: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That's All Of It for today. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here tomorrow.

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