The act of creation takes on infinite forms. In our ongoing artist interview series, we illuminate the distinctive artistic practices, influences, and creative challenges of our Pew Fellows, who represent a diversity of perspectives and creative disciplines.

In this installment, three artists—filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford, visual artist Karyn Olivier, and theater artist Brett Ashley Robinson—discuss the works that catalyzed their own creative pursuits, how audience considerations shape their practices, and the possibilities that lie in their chosen disciplines.   

About the Artists

Ford experiments with narrative structure and uses of music and color in films that examine class, power, identity, and memory. Their 2019 feature film Test Pattern has been nominated for multiple Gotham and Independent Spirit Awards and has been lauded by publications such as Variety and The Los Angeles Times.

Olivier creates monuments, memorials, and visual art installations that intersect and collapse multiple histories and memories with present-day narratives. Her work has earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, among other accolades.

Robinson’s work blends physical ensemble performance, drag burlesque culture, documentary theater, and clowning. She is a company member of The Wilma Theater’s HotHouse ensemble and Applied Mechanics.

What was the first work of art that really mattered to you? Did it influence your approach to your work?

Ford
Adrian Piper's Decide Who You Are # 21: Phantom Limbs, 1992. I remember seeing this and feeling very moved, as it confronts a very direct and real dichotomy of reality and perception when it comes to existing as a Black person and a woman. In her work, Piper explores the psychological and social dynamics of race, identity, and perception conceptually, and it was the first time I was exposed to how that work could exist in the public. It was very transformative for me as an artist.

Robinson
I have the distinct memory of watching the show Frasier with my father when I was 7 or 8. There is one cold open where Niles is trying get ready for a date. He notices his pants are wrinkled and decides to iron them. What happens next is like a five-minute lazzi where David Hyde Pierce ends up cutting his finger, burning his pants with the iron, fainting repeatedly from the sight of his own blood, and throwing a pot of soup all over the sofa. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen and still is. When people used to ask me what I wanted to do when I was a kid, I would tell them that I wanted to be like the guys on Frasier. My parents thought I wanted to be a therapist, but I really wanted to be a clown.

The next work that really mattered didn't come until I was 25 years old. I saw Method Gun created by Rude Mechs at the Humana Festival. I was an apprentice at the time and really thought I knew what a play was. Method Gun transformed what I thought theater could be. Seeing that piece gave me permission to do what I was afraid to do, but now is the core of my practice: take what I can from my mentors but be rigorous in using the tools I have been given to speak to my experience.

Olivier
It is difficult to choose only one, but I have been incredibly moved, and continue to be affected by, the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The iconic Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) still resonates. It still feels revolutionary as a monument and memorial. The artist offers up to each of us a piece of candy—a fleeting gesture, made eternal by its limitlessness, an endless supply to fill our collective and individual needs, longings and desires. Embedded always in his work is the political: Here the weight of the candy is equal to that of his lover, who died of AIDS. Another Gonzalez-Torres work, Perfect Lovers, in which a pair of clocks slowly fall out of sync, is perhaps the most poetic rumination on our complicated relationship to time, mortality and to each other.

Before I decided to study art in my late twenties, I remember passing by Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (billboard of an empty bed) for weeks in downtown Brooklyn. Each day, as I descended the subway stairs to my management job, it confounded me. Was it an ad for linens? Was it art? It was arresting in its familiarity and simplicity, and it kept entering my consciousness. Its inherent layers continued to unfold—it was both direct and elusive, hyper-present, but filled with absence. The personal and the intimate had collided with the public, rendering the work a political act, announcing itself as a public whisper. These are qualities I strive for in my artwork.

For whom do you make your work, and what questions do you hope your audiences take away after experiencing it?

Olivier
During my first few years out of grad school, I received several exciting opportunities to create public art, large sculptures, and installations (Socrates Sculpture Park, SculptureCenter, Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria). I had young nephews and a niece at the time who were always dragged to these openings. I think unconsciously I wanted to make work that they could enjoy, (which led to a playground series), in addition to a more sophisticated art-loving audience. This impulse I think also stems from my interest in Trinidad Carnival, where the masses participate in this “social sculpture,” the ultimate public artwork.

I believe there are multiple publics, and part of what I do as an artist is to instigate a reaction from—or incite—these publics. I want the work to serve as a catalyst or a tool, a proposition that engages the question, “What if?” My hope is to offer a site for discourse, where disparate questions and musings can arise.

Robinson
The other day, I was in a staged reading, and a young woman was reading stage directions for the show. She told me she had seen me in Dance Nation and thought if I could be an actor, so could she. I know this is a story that people have often heard, but it has never happened to me before. That is the person that I make my work for. As an actor, it has been hard for me as a Black woman to figure out who I am making work for in these primarily white-led institutions. And the older I get, the more I realize what I have had to metabolize to stay in these spaces—to be seen and to be considered valuable. I am working on that. I feel moved to tears when I see young Black performers.

I saw Choir Boy at Philadelphia Theatre Company and felt the click of “This is what theater can be.” Whether out of necessity or assumption, for a long time I didn't think I was allowed to be seen in my completeness. I felt like I had to squeeze a lot of my Blackness into a small white hole, like Coke in a straw. This is a long detour to say I am making my work for Black people. I am making work in the practice of being seen unapologetically. I am trying to show myself and my viewpoint of the world with my own lens. Even in my work as Patricia!, I am trying to use my body in whiteface to be seen and to speak with truth and authenticity. My hope is that truth resonates with other people.

Ford
I make my work for Americans and anyone engaging with or trying to understand the American Project. My goal is to highlight contradictions in our narrative, the stories we tell about ourselves, that do not square with the very real and lived realities of the marginalized and alienated. I also make my work for Black women and femmes, creating space for the exploration of our interiority.

What does your specific artistic discipline allow you to do?

Robinson
Storytelling is how we teach each other about who we are. When we are children, we are always making up stories and creating worlds with possibilities. Although it’s made-up, it’s about processing, trying to make sense of the huge amounts of information we take in. Theater is just telling stories. Really good theater shows us the truth of what we are processing and rips us open. Theater is dangerous because there are fewer tricks and fewer places to hide when you feel something deeply. You can’t change the channel. There is this idea of the poison cookie, something that is beautiful and tempting, very seductive. But once you consume it, it infects you—changes you. You leave after eating the poison cookie, and an hour later you are crying in the subway station. It’s the cookie. It’s the little drop of poison that reveals something to you about the world or yourself. You cry because you have been opened up and you can never go back to who you were. I think good theater is dangerous.

Ford
Film chose me. I swear, if I could do something cheaper, with fewer moving parts, I absolutely would. But I like collaborating with other humans, and working in film, communicating through cinema, helps me understand humans better, too.

Olivier
I believe my specific discipline allows for varying modes of engagement. With public art, my work can cross paths with the incidental viewer, the passerby who is not seeking an art experience but nonetheless can be moved deeply by such an encounter. I am interested in what can happen in a gallery or museum space. Can I create a temporary community in those spaces comprised of the time shared by other visitors and staff with the works? I hope so.

I believe in the enormous potentiality of objects (and ultimately sculptures). This might hearken back to my roots in the Caribbean, where objects seem infinitely mutable. Though each has a history and purpose, its use and value can always change—and I can have agency in that shift. I think, How can I expand, reinterpret, and reimagine these objects—keeping them unfixed, but tilting toward a new possibility? These are my empathic attempts to confront, wrestle, expand, and feel my way through the complexity of living in America and the world today.

Where to See the Artists' Work

Ford’s feature-length film Test Pattern is available to stream on Hulu with a Starz subscription or on Kanopy and available to rent on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube, and other platforms.

Olivier has work on view in the Parrish Art Museum exhibition Set It Off, running May 22 to July 24 at the Long Island museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston exhibition Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms, running May 26 to September 5 at the seasonal ICA Watershed space. This year and next, she will unveil two new memorials in Philadelphia, one honoring a former slave at Stenton and another commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground.

Robinson is performing in The Wilma Theater’s Center-supported adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, which is available to stream through May 15. She will perform in the Wilma’s Fairview, directed by Pew Fellow James Ijames, which runs May 31–June 18.