Title: Artist Allison Janae Hamilton's New Solo Show in Chelsea.

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Alison Stewart: Allison Janae Hamilton's new show is titled Celestine. To set the stage, when you enter the gallery, visitors can watch a 12-minute time-lapse of the night sky in Hamilton's home state while Candice Hoyes voices Florida Storm. A Vogue piece set of the work, Hamilton's work in Celestine reminds us that the reverence for what came before us, for the people and land, doesn't only mean root down. In a fight for a better world, we must also look up.

Looking around, you will see sculptures, fencing masks in bronze, cast plaster sculptures of hands, and a serpentine mirror with a message. You can see pictures of all of this on our Instagram @allofitwnyc. Celestine is on display through Saturday, March 8th at the Marianne Boesky Gallery on West 24th. New York-based visual artist Allison Genae Hamilton joins me now in studio. It's nice to meet you.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Nice to meet you too, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Where did you get the title Celestine?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Well, I was really interested in a vertical landscape, as you mentioned. I wanted to take the landscapes that I've been working with for years in my work and look upward, look skyward, and consider the night sky as fodder for this exploration of land.

Alison Stewart: Now, I said you're a New York-based artist, but you were born in Kentucky and then you went to Florida. You have roots in Tennessee.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How does your Southern heritage inspire your practice?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, it's a critical part of my practice. It's really the underpinning of all of it. I consider myself a pan-Southerner because I have all of those different various routes that you mentioned there. The landscapes from each of those locations really center in my work. I consider the landscape as not this background element that's secondary, but it's a main character in my work. It's what is always at the forefront. For me, I draw upon the landscapes that I know the best, that I grew up with, that are most meaningful to me. Then I think have rich histories to tell, but also really important discussions are needed to have in a contemporary sense regarding these locations.

Alison Stewart: I think a lot of people will recognize you having seen you in The New York Times, this recent piece. In the Times, it's a picture of you and you're just surrounded by pictures of your ancestors. When did you begin collecting family pictures like that?

Allison Janae Hamilton: We've always had them. On my mother's side of the family, we are from rural western Tennessee, and my great-great-grandfather bought our family farm back in the '30s. I think when you have this family land that everyone is-- Many family members have been born there. Over the generations, you just have a lot of stuff. You've got a lot of volumes of artifacts and archival materials and photographs. We've had them. They've always been around me. I think we had maybe a family reunion or maybe my grandmother's birthday maybe a couple of decades back, and there was a concerted effort to scan everything and really digitize. I think we made a little family book for it. Since then, I piqued my curiosity to really start collecting these artifacts for myself.

Alison Stewart: What's an interesting detail that you've learned from these pictures?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, goodness. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I really felt it was important to find an image of the oldest living ancestor that we knew of, who is my great-great-great-grandmother. Her name was Piney. She was a midwife. She was born during the antebellum period, and she was the midwife for her granddaughter, who is my great-grandmother, Alice, who I was named after. She delivered most of Alice's children, including-- That's all my grandmother's sibling set, most of them.

There was always this family lore about Piney, Grandma Pine. I wanted to find an image of her, and it was just elusive for a while. Finally, I just felt the need to really go for it and try to find it. I asked my mother when she was visiting if they could please see if they could find some, and they did find one. Now, in my art studio, I have seven generations of women, of mothers and daughters in my studio space.

Alison Stewart: How is the image of your family, the women in your family, Black womanhood, how is it tied to your work, your practice of landscapes?

Allison Janae Hamilton: I think for me, part of my experience, or most of my experience, I might even say, of Black womanhood really has to do with land and the outdoors. I think that that's not something that's necessarily seen as a link. For me, my grandmother and her sisters and my aunts, they were all just outdoors women. They all hunted, fished, farmed, and they would play cards and have cigarette, crossword puzzles sitting out on the porch.

My experience of Black girlhood and then eventually Black womanhood was really tied up with land and all of its complicated meanings, whether that's respite, a refuge, a site of leisure and pleasure, or a site of labor and all the complicated concerns bound up there. It's just really broad, and I try to bring all of that into my artwork. I try to make it expansive and really explore the different cultural continuities throughout the years and throughout the generations that play out on the land, and also the contemporary realities and issues and the important conversations that I think are there to be discovered and uncovered within the landscape.

Alison Stewart: Now that you're an urban person, how do you stay in touch with the land?

Allison Janae Hamilton: I spend a lot of time at home. I love New York City. I love being here. I do spend a good amount of time in my hometown, especially during the winter. I make a lot of my films there. Pretty much all of my films are made in the South. I spend time and I stay connected. It's still very much a part of me. I don't think it ever will not be. At the same time, I love the energy of the city and being here in the art world and allowing myself to take part of conversations that are from all different parts of the globe, which is one of the beautiful things about New York City is that we all can come to this wide table with all of our experiences and all of our backgrounds and have really rich and fruitful dialogues, visual dialogues, especially.

Alison Stewart: My guest is artist Allison Janae Hamilton. Her new show at the Marianne Boesky Gallery is Celestine. It's through Saturday, March 8th. When you sat down to make this show, what was your go-to top line? Sometimes ever you have a top line, it just really keeps you on point. What was your top line for Celestine?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, what a wonderful question. I think the top line would be the idea of the stars also as respite. My first museum solo was back in 2018 at MASS MoCA. In that show, I really became fascinated with the turpentining industry, which had its last heyday in northern Florida. I read this quote by a turpentine worker that said, "We work from can't to can't," which is can't see in the morning to can't see at night. They would begin their day before the sun came up and would work all day and would finish the day after the sun went down.

The only moment of pleasure or leisure or time with your family or time to make art or music or anything was under the COVID of the night sky. The celestial has been a part of my work ever since discovering that history and really wanting to sink into it. For this show, I wanted to, again, bring that to the forefront and play around with and explore the meaning of the celestial in all different ways. There's a film using astrophotography. My team and I did a deep dive into learning all the tech and all the nerdy, wonderful things about getting into astrophotography. There's paintings with celestial scenes. I really wanted to bring that idea to the forefront of the meaning of these respite moments within otherwise very arduous forms of labor.

Alison Stewart: The first thing you see, or it can be the last thing. It was the last thing I saw. I didn't go in the room the first time. I went and I saw the art and then I went into the video room, but I saw people do the opposite, is Celestine is this 12-minute time-lapse, and we hear the voice repeating Florida Storm. It was a hymn. It was composed in 1928. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Absolutely. Florida Storm, it was written, as you said, in 1928 by a gentleman called Judge Jackson. The song is about the great Miami Hurricane of 1926. As many of the listeners may know, 1928, when that song came out, that's also when the Okeechobee Hurricane hit the state of Florida. That hurricane is the backdrop for Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. That hurricane, both storms just really devastated the state. The second hurricane, the Okeechobee, that killed thousands of Black migrant workers. They were buried in these mass, unmarked graves.

Since learning that history, I have incorporated that hymn into many different artworks. It's been titles of sculptures and installation works. I worked with musicians to do different arrangements and having had processions around sculptural materials. When I was working on this film, I wanted there to be a dialogue between this gorgeous celestial landscape and these dramatic scenes, and also speak towards the meaning of these natural disasters and these complexities of land and the issues of today regarding climate, our environment, and what is the relationship between these precarious elements of landscape, like these storms that are getting stronger and the seasons are getting long.

What does that mean for us in relationship to these other histories of land? Candace Hoyes, a wonderful soprano singer also from Florida, is singing an arrangement of that Judge Jackson song.

Alison Stewart: She's been on our show.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, wonderful.

Alison Stewart: She's a wonderful person.

Allison Janae Hamilton: She's amazing.

Alison Stewart: How did you get into filmmaking as part of your practice?

Allison Janae Hamilton: I've just always loved film and filmmaking. I've made experimental-type installations for many, many years, really just the whole time, but as of my life as an artist. One thing I'll say is that I've really enjoyed doing multi-channel installations, these rooms-based dramatic-- you meander through it. As an audience member, your body is sort of amongst the screens and amongst the visuals. Recently, I've also been working in a crossover way where the films are situated in a museum context but also can be screened in a theater context as well. That's been enjoyable recently having that shift. That's something that's a little bit more of a newer part of my practice, even though I've been working in film for a very long time.

Alison Stewart: Artist Allison Janae Hamilton is in studio with us. We're talking about her show Celestine, which is on display at the Marianne Boesky Gallery through Saturday, March 8th. I want to talk about these masks. They're so great.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: They're fencing masks. You've worked on this before. I understand they have African American history to them, which I didn't know until researching you, I'm going to say that. Would you tell me a little more about the history?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Sure. I saw this beautiful image, this really striking image of these Black American soldiers that were fencing. I believe they were World War II soldier soldiers. I just began to think about these soldiers who went off to fight in these world wars and they would come back to their country and to the same conditions that were there when they left. I just began to collect these masks, these fencing masks. I didn't really have an agenda for them at the time. I didn't have a home for them or a place for them.

Alison Stewart: You just had them.

Allison Janae Hamilton: They were just piling up.

Alison Stewart: Oh, that's interesting.

Allison Janae Hamilton: I would get them in thrift stores and eBay and anywhere you could think of one could find a fencing mask, but I did. Eventually, I started photographing them in interesting ways and bringing them into the exhibition space as sculptural objects. Finally, I began to embellish them. They now exist as part of my practice, almost as a formal or material experiment. That original photo is kind of a launch pad for them, but now they've taken on a life of their own.

They are embellished with anything from upholstery tacks to wood flowers to alabaster grapes, feathers, all kinds of things. For this show, Celestine, at Marianne Boesky, I decided that I wanted to try my hand at doing them in bronze. We cast the original masks and we 3D-scanned them and cast them and went through that whole process that I really loved. Now they are in bronze form at the gallery.

Alison Stewart: The next thing I want to ask you about is the mirror. It's this beautiful mirror. It is a serpentine frame. I try to see how many snakes are around the side and who-- It's pretty cool.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: They all folded into one another. On it, it says brilliant sky five times. On the gallery sheet, when you take it over, it says brilliant sky, and it says it's for Mary Ann Carroll. Who's Mary Ann Carroll?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Mary Ann Carroll was the only woman artist who was part of the Florida Highwaymen. The Florida Highwaymen, they were a group of Black American traveling landscape painters throughout the state of Florida. They would travel around the mid-century and they would sell their paintings, their landscape paintings. They were all just gorgeous, this beautiful, just community and cohort of painters.

Mary Ann Carroll was the only woman highwayman. She passed away only a few years ago. Her work has always been inspiring to me, also as a Black woman who has a key interest in the land and the meanings of it and the beauty of it and all the complicated things bound up with the land and the landscape. I wanted to just have a piece that was an homage to her. The serpents that you see, the snakes there, many of them are in this Ouroboros fashion, which is--

Alison Stewart: The tail is the head?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Yes, exactly. This folkloric or epic dragon or serpent that eats its own tail. I have had that theme in my work for many years as well. I've done them with alligators, which people who have been on this long journey with me, they will recognize the alligator Ouroboros that I've done in the past. I really wanted to bring in another Floridian staple. There are snakes around that mirror. Yes, it's an homage to Mary Annd Carol and all the other Black women who have really been deeply invested in land, whether that's through art or literature or music or academic work. Just a nod to the fact that there are many of us with these interests and with producing this work that has to do with the history and the contemporary realities of land.

Alison Stewart: As you're looking in the mirror, you realize I can see the piece of artwork on the wall behind me, a little piece of it. These three plastered hands, they're really amazing.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: Whose hands are they?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Friends and family have featured in my work for many, many years.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Likewise with these new plaster hand sculptures, I have recruited friends to participate. Two of them are a friend of mine, Schwanda Rountree, Deb Willis, who's a wonderful photographer and scholar. Another friend, filmmaker Amhalise Morgan, has also been part of this project so far. Thinking about the art world and the art community, and so I'm bringing in women from this art world to also participate in. It's an expression of thinking through, again, labor and creation and craft in this other type of a way. They're also with us in the gallery space.

Alison Stewart: Then you get to the back of the gallery and there are these three large paintings. They look like-- You could actually have any thoughts about the paintings. They could be little crosses. They could be a graveyard. They could be stars in the sky. They could be almost anything you want them to be. First of all, how intentional was that design?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Of leaving it quite open for interpretation?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, I love that. I love that. Because I don't ever want to be too specific or too practical with my viewer. I like them to be able to explore and see what they're seeing in a certain piece and certainly in the paintings. For those, I originally thought of them as stars, as I mentioned, that exhibition where I was really thinking about the turpentine industry and that night sky. For me, the original intention or impulse was to make these constellations or these nebula-like forms. I have been told by people that they see everything, religious crosses, emergency crosses. I've heard bird murmuration, schools--

Alison Stewart: Of course. I saw birds.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Yes, you saw birds, schools of fish. I've heard all kinds of interpretations and meanings. I love it all. I love talking to people about what they're seeing in the artwork.

Alison Stewart: I was looking at the artwork and we were talking about it. We discussed the colors, red, white, and blue, as among the different paintings. We're thinking about how red, white, and blue has been seen in the past few weeks between Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé. What do the colors represent to you?

Allison Janae Hamilton: Oh, I love that question. Part of the impulse, I think, in that is to situate this work as it's a very American project, it's a very American story. I think coming from part of the United States that people don't know as much about. I think people have an idea of what Florida is, but I think it's so complex and there's so much to it.

I grew up partly in South Florida, and then when I was a teenager, my family moved to Northern Florida, the Big Bend area, also known as the Red Hills, Forgotten Coast region. It's right right across the Georgia border. It's the part of Florida that "is the South." It's a different type of Florida than what comes to mind in many folks' imagination.

I'm situating this as a personal story, but also a very squarely American story. All these complexities, again, of the landscape, it's really another way to explore today's conversations and the history of the country from the perspective of the environment and the land.

Alison Stewart: What's a question you hope someone will have after seeing your show?

Allison Janae Hamilton: That's a great one. I would hope that they would ask what might I do or contribute or what might I have to say or do in the areas of the environment, land, climate. I would hope that they would walk away with maybe a new nugget of interest of something to explore more of their relationship to the natural world.

Alison Stewart: You should go see Allison Janae Hamilton's work at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. The show is called Celestine. It is through March 8th. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Allison Janae Hamilton: Thank you so much, Alison. I had a great time.