Art in Public Space with Mallory Rukshana Nezam- Ep 20
This week on First Coat we have Mallory Rukhsana Nezam. Mallory is a cross-sector culture-maker who loves cities and believes that we have the tools to make them more just and joyful. She specializes in public art, creative placemaking/keeping/knowing, organizational development, strategic planning, facilitation and the public domain. Through her cross-sector practice, Justice + Joy, she engages stakeholders across sectors to de-silo the way we run cities and build new models of creative, interdisciplinary collaboration.
In this episode we talk about using play and absurdity to create connections in public space, embedding artists into the process of city making, and how to use art and culture as a tool for transportation justice and equitable development.
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LINKS
CAIR Lab with Amanda Lovelee and Johanna Taylor
Guest | Mallory Rukhsana Nezam, Cross-Sector Culture Maker
Mallory Rukhsana Nezam is a cross-sector culture-maker who loves cities and believes that we have the tools to make them more just and joyful. She specializes in public art, creative placemaking/keeping/knowing, organizational development, strategic planning, facilitation and the public domain. Through her cross-sector practice, Justice + Joy, she engages stakeholders across sectors to de-silo the way we run cities and build new models of creative, interdisciplinary collaboration. She has helped build inaugural arts & culture teams in non-arts organizations at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council of Boston, Transportation for America and PolicyLink. Raised in St. Louis, MO, she served as the Founding Director of St. Louis Improv Anywhere, and co-founder of the St. Louis Artivists. Through her art practice she disarms and disrupts public space norms using play and participatory performance. She holds a Master of Design from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and her research focuses on the racial equity impacts of artists residencies in local government. She is a 2020 Monument Lab Transnational Fellow, was a 2019-2020 inaugural Practices for Change Fellow at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute of Design & the Arts and is currently the Curator of Partnerships and Programs for FORWARD, a publication by Forecast Public Art. She seeks to be in every room she’s not supposed to be in.
Find Mallory on Instagram @nezombie, on Twitter at @activatethecity and on her website at mallorynezam.com.
Your Host | Stephanie Eche, CEO & Founder of Distill Creative
Stephanie Eche is an artist and art consultant based in Brooklyn, NYC.
Follow Stephanie on Instagram (@distillcreative or @stephanie_eche), Twitter (@stephanie_eche), YouTube (Distill Creative), LinkedIn, and check out her art website.
Support First Coat by backing us on our Patreon.
Learn more about Distill Creative’s art consulting services.
Are you an artist? Sign up for our Distill Directory and you’ll be considered for art commissions and future projects.
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Stephanie Eche 00:02
Welcome to First Coat, where we explore public art, how it's made and why it matters. I'm your host, Stephanie Eche, an artist and art consultant based in Brooklyn, New York, I interview artists, cultural producers and funders about how art in public space happens, and how to create more equitable and inclusive projects in public space. I also share my tips on how to commission art projects for your business, how I run my art consulting business, Distill Creative, and how I'm developing my own art practice. If you like what you hear, please leave a review and consider supporting this project on Patreon. I edit produce, and basically do everything myself so any support is really appreciated. If you're interested in artwork for your business or home, check out distillcreative.com I hope you enjoy this episode. This week on First Coat we have Mallory Rukshana Nezam. Mallory is a cross-sector culture maker who loves cities and believes that we have the tools to make them more just and joyful. She specializes in public art, creative placemaking, keeping, knowing, organizational development, strategic planning, facilitation, and the public domain. Through her cross-sector practice, Justice + Joy, she engages stakeholders across sectors to de-silo the way we run cities, and build new models of creative interdisciplinary collaboration. In this episode, we talk about using play and absurdity to create connections in public space, embedding artists into the process of city making, and how to use art and culture as a tool for transportation justice and equitable development. Here's our conversation.
Stephanie Eche 01:34
Welcome to First Coat. Thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to chat with you because we haven't caught up in a while and I want to hear all about all the things you're working on. Can you tell us who you are and what you do?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 01:48
Hi, I'm Mallory Rukshana Nezam. I am a cross-sector, creative consultant. That's a lot of 'C's'. Yeah, I have a creative practice and then I advise people as a consultant, sort of have two arms of what I do.
Stephanie Eche 02:12
And how would you define art in public space?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 02:15
Yeah, I mean, most of my work is in public space, and has historically been as an, like a public artists, social practice artists, and also as a consultant who works in urban planning and policy, so I'm really always thinking about public space. And I would say that, when I, when I think of art and culture in the context of public space, a lot of that is about the meaning making that can happen in public space. So you know, otherwise, like public spaces are just these physical entities, their infrastructure, their materials, their points on a map, but what makes them meaningful? It's the culture of these spaces. It's, it's the creative expression of the folks who spend time they're the folks who are invited in and then people who have like, historically had relationships to those spaces, and maybe even future in the future that people who, who want to have relationships to those spaces, but don't yet.
Stephanie Eche 03:29
Do you have a specific memory of first experiencing art in public space?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 03:35
Yes, I do. It was music. How old was I, I was probably, maybe as young as seven. And an aunt of mine, played hand drums, and she would go every Sunday to this drumming circle. And I started going with her. And it was just kind of an informal gathering of folks who played the drums played hand drums, and it was a consistent group of people that I got to know and I was the only kid was all adults, and then a bit of an audience that would circle around. And if you know St. Louis, which is my hometown, it was in the loop. And if you know, Nelly, I think he sings about the loop. So this is, this is where it was, like a heavily foot trafficked area of the city, and there aren't a ton of those in St. Louis. So it was a really activated space. And you know, I guess that impression of just the in- like informal kind of gathering spaces around art. And in this case, music was really seemed really normal to me. And that I would imagine to a lot of children, that's a very natural way to be, but there were not a ton of those opportunities, you know, in like a mid sized city in the 80s and 90s.
Stephanie Eche 05:11
Yeah, especially as a child, like, it's awesome that your aunt took you.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 05:17
Yeah, yeah, she introduced me to- she also introduced me to poetry, I wrote my first poems with her, I have an, I have an uncle who introduced me to painting and drawing, when I was young, and I really took to all I took to all of those art forms a lot, and I, you know, it's like public schools offered technique, I think, but then having experiences that kind of, like, took the technique and recontextualized it, and some were kind of surprising, like, you know, a street and my uncle used to do like, like nature scenes, so we would go out in the woods, my grandparents house. And I mean, I guess it's kind of a public, it's kind of a private space, but it was a different context, you know, like, outside of, you know, in like an art and a studio or something. And I was interacting with the world and understanding it through drawing and painting. And he would teach me about plants and medicinal properties in different uses of plants. And then I would learn to paint and draw them in detail with them. Don't do as much of painting and drawing now. But I, that was a big part of my life. When I was a kid.
Stephanie Eche 06:43
That's awesome. Good job, aunt and uncle.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 06:47
Now I'm an aunt and I'm like really into making music with my nephew. That was his one of his birthday presents. For his first birthday, I got him like a few wooden instruments, I play my ukulele and sing with him. And he, like, I can see, I can almost see like his whole body is is reacting and connecting to music and the physical vibrations of it. And I think kids take really naturally to rhythm. And yeah, it's really fun to kind of like notice these ways that young people respond in some intuitive way to a creative a practice. And then, not forcefully, but just kind of exposing them to more of it and seeing where they want to go with it. So I guess I'm continuing that tradition in some way with my nephew.
Stephanie Eche 07:45
Definitely. How did you first start doing work in public space?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 07:51
Well, maybe I've been doing it since I was around that six or seven year age. I did. I used to write, and cast and direct plays in the neighborhood for the neighborhood. So I was doing that when I was like, six or seven. It had to be six or seven, because I'm thinking of Yeah, where I was at that time, and I was around that age. So I've been doing it since then, I would say and I used to, I also used to sell my artworks door to door. I still have some of them. It's like in the corner, it says 25 cents for a drawing, and that would just take them door to door and see if people wanted to buy them. Sometimes they did. I made some like films, but those weren't necessarily public public space. But yeah, I did like Public Theater, I would say pretty young. And then when I came into my adulthood, I really made like a conscious, I consciously moved into what I understood to be like a public art practice, formally, when I moved back to the States after living in Spain, and I was really like, experiencing a reverse culture shock of the differences in how people used public space here. And for for folks who are not super familiar with those differences, speaking really, really broadly. If I felt like in the city that I was living in in Spain, that there was a much more a lot, just more life happened in public space. Like I interacted with strangers a lot more frequently than I would here. People were more willing to talk to me if they didn't know me. There was a lot of music. There were a lot of artisans selling wares informally, there are a lot of festivals. There were it was just like a lot of formal and informal art and culture in public space and interaction as a result of it. And when I came back to the States, I, I was just like, wait, this isn't happening here, like people are, I seriously felt like people were just like constantly anxious and fearful in public space, they were afraid to interact with anybody. It was, I remember how quiet it was on the bus. It was so quiet. And granted, this was in St. Louis, I came back. So in other cities is probably not quite the same. But there's still I think some cultural differences between the US and Europe or Spain in particular, even if you're in New York, on the bus. But I digress. It was so quiet. I was like what, this is such an amazing opportunity to interact with people that I maybe wouldn't see in another context, like this is a rich social opportunity. And as a social practice artist, I just started to think like, this is what I need. This is really like, what I'm curious about and what I want to push us to shift. So then I created a really formal public art practice, to disrupt that kind of fear and isolation in public spaces. And to catalyze interactions between strangers I used play. And absurdity, which isn't necessarily a artistic form, but sort of like a maybe a nod to surrealism or surrealist performance, because my work is performance oriented, in a way to really like bring people to kind of horizontally to a common place where everything is not what you expect it to be all the rules kind of break down in these settings of play and absurdity. It forces people to be a lot more present and disarmed with each other. And I saw some really amazing, like little transformations in people in some of the performance work that my collective and I were doing, right after I got back from Spain.
Stephanie Eche 12:44
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Stephanie Eche 12:58
And how did you start doing consulting in this type of like, how did you move from doing more of like being the performer in this in social art practice? And in doing all kinds of different projects in this realm?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 13:13
Yeah, I guess, okay, I'm thinking there are two, two ways that happened. One is that I actually think that a lot of my skills as a, in performance training helped me to function as a facilitator. And, in a lot of community practice, in collaborative spaces there's often a need for someone who can, like bring different parties together to talk about difficult things. And I have a lot of training that I could pull from actually in, like my creative practice, to offer different opportunities for people to tap in to, like express themselves, to share things that might be difficult to get out of their comfort zone. Even just like improv training, helps people really be present in the moment and kind of like stop holding back from political niceties, or, you know, doubting yourself. And so I started to bring some of those tools into rooms and it really, really started to lead me into a role of facilitating difficult conversations, especially in community contexts. And often like between community members, or between the institutions, doing projects with local communities where there's distrust, so I would say like those tool, those artistic tools of performance of have brought me into a consulting practice where I can work as a facilitator. And then also, I would say, I made this movement from focusing on my creative practice to working as a creative problem solver, and a creative strategist, around the time that Mike Brown was murdered in St. Louis, or in Ferguson, I was living in St. Louis at the time and it was a, it was a big part of my world as, as an activist, as a person of color as an artist, and as just a community member living in the same area. And what shifted for me is, I was doing what I thought was really powerful artwork, I personally felt that my work was meaningful. And the messages that were being conveyed were powerful. The artistic quality was high, and then, you know, I was also getting a stamp of approval saying yes, this work is good from, you know, entities that were granting, granting me, you know, funding or collectors that were collecting the work. So the work was good, right? Okay, it was powerful work. But I was really frustrated with the fact that my work, wants to advance social good to advance justice. And I just didn't feel like the work was doing that. I was looking at data and seeing like, okay, same number of people are dying from being killed by police, like the same number of people are being stopped unnecessarily by police. So specifically, looking at those measurements of policing in my community, it's like, okay, the artwork is great, but what's changing, you know? So then I started to think, okay, how can I actually get involved in really in that tangible change, I want to see policy change, I want to, I want to be at the table where we're designing some of the ways our cities are structured and set up and I come from a city that's very geographically segregated. So for me, that like design of space really reinforces inequity. So I was thinking also very, like, physically and in infrastructurally, about justice. And yeah, so then I started to become more involved in urban planning and community development work, I moved to DC, which is where we met, was working with Smart Growth America and transportation for America, and got invited to join a new arts and culture teams to integrate arts and culture as a tool to integrate my already said, integrate, integrate arts and culture as a tool to further transportation justice, and equitable community development. Historically, mean artists have kind of been invited into those spaces, but not necessarily as like central problem solving partners. They they've been invited in kind of at the end of a project, but I really was working to bring them in at the beginning. And that's what I get really excited about is integrating artists, embedding them into processes, because I think they bring a very different perspective, that's usually at its best, quite curious, and quite humble. Like, I think that there's a power that artists can bring of assuming that they don't really know and that they're, they're on a journey to try to understand. I think that is, maybe another way that we can talk about art is it's, it's that meaning making. It's like, what's going on here, what am I noticing and sensing about this place? What are the dynamics? What happened before? What do people want? It's like the, those are all questions. And I guess that's also central to what artists are bringing into these non art spaces is, like, just not being afraid to ask questions to do things differently. Yeah.
Stephanie Eche 19:25
I think also what you were talking about earlier, to, to be okay with being uncomfortable, and to make people feel uncomfortable, but in a respectful way, and in a way that actually brings people together and crosses sectors as opposed to, you know, pissing someone off and dividing segments because I think right now we're seeing like the overlapping of so many different things. And it's it's hard to deal with if you're just stuck in your lane, and you're not able to have those conversations or even communicate with another person in a meaningful way.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 20:20
You know, you just hit on something I, the other day I was I was kind of coming back to this feeling that actually one of the one of the things that can fuel artists is discord and discomfort, like it's actually a point of creative departure, instead of something to shy away from which I think other professions have been trained that that's like, that's a bad thing. We don't want to go there, if that comes up, we're doing a bad job. But I would say that artists are actually trained to lean into it. And that that can really fuel what you're doing. And if you apply that principle, so that maybe that's an example of a lot of how I work, I take that principle of artistic practice. And I'll say, okay, engineers working on this project, or, you know, designers and architects, what if we lean into the discomfort of the community asking for something that we think is ugly? Why do we think it's ugly? What are our cultural assumptions of beauty? You know, what are we bringing in to the project without even knowing and then leaning into that discomfort allows you to open up to all sorts of things, the project's probably going to be totally different than you expected, but also actually serve better serve the people who are in the place that are going to use it, or who have some stake in it?
Stephanie Eche 21:39
How do you define cultural equity?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 21:43
That's a really big question. I, there's so many different components that I would consider because I, when I think about cultural equity, I'm like, my brains already starting to think of it in terms of how do I document and kind of show progress on moving from inequity to equity, some might call that measurement. I'm going to say document progress, instead of measurement, because I don't know sometimes that word can bring up feelings for me. But in cultural equity and public art, I would, I would hope that that means that there is accurate representation in who the artists are, that are that are being displayed in public spaces that are invited to to work or have their work protected, and funded in public space. And when I say accurate representation, I mean, like, I want to know who actually lives there. And I want to look at the census track. And I want to know, who has historically lived there. So it's not just about the present. And I would say like, a lot of my I went to, nod to the friends of mine who have indigenous roots that are really pushed for me to learn my own relationship to time and to like history, because if we just stick to census data, right, we're only looking at like, Who's there right now. But there are a lot of people who have relationship to places that don't live there right now, for whatever reason, displacement, or, you know, just need financial need or climate change. Lots of different reasons, opportunities elsewhere. But so yeah, who, who is represented as an artist, and we have to look at kind of a whole timescale past to present. And then I also think about part of equity is what kind of work is being shared. So not just who's there but like, are we really representing artistic disciplines well? Are we representing different kinds of narratives, perspectives and stories? Because if we have you know, we're like, okay, we have this great array of like different races of artists that are that are really reflect the community, but everybody is practicing in one particular medium, you know, you're missing out on folks who are trained in maybe like, not as commonly practiced mediums or mediums that are handed down through a cultural lineage that are not recognized through mainstream public art frameworks. I also think about placement of public art as part of the cultural equity framework. So to simply put it like it, the artwork shouldn't always go in wealthy areas, and there have been problems with that in many cities, and many public art plans. And also they shouldn't go in places that people don't want them. There are also lots of stories of public art being in spaces that really just don't work for people. But somebody wanted to put it there who had the power to do so. And some of those get removed. So you also might be wasting your time. Also, who selects artworks, you know, who gets to serve on juries? Is that a real representation of who's there? Are you accounting for historic and equity when you're choosing people for a jury process or a panel? And then lastly, I would say the process itself of that whole process of finding spaces, finding artists, even curators, selection panels, and the way that community is engaged throughout the process, that the whole process itself needs to be done through equitable practice and have that as a North Star throughout the whole run.
Stephanie Eche 26:13
I think that was a really good list. It sounds exhausting, but it's like, you can't really not do any of those things and consider it equitable.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 26:25
And it is a long list. But I'd like more we do it, the more it won't feel like a long list.
Stephanie Eche 26:32
Right. And so many of these things, like seem like no-brainers but when you look at projects, usually none of them are followed like, it's, it's, it's insane. Especially if you start looking at privately funded projects, which sure they're privately funded, but how do people get so much money, you know, like, tax breaks, and the city, bringing them into the space to begin with? And, you know, wealth is inequitable. So when you start thinking about it that way, it's like, every everything that's funded should be equitable. Whether or not it's in public space. And can you talk about your work with the Brookline Greenway?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 27:15
Yeah, I was on a design team that got selected to, to set the design for the Greenway. And it was, I think it's relatively uncommon for artists to be on to be informing the design, like I, in other models that I have seen artists are brought in like specifically to do art things for for Greenways, or Urban Trails. And we did also do did that, but there were three of us. And we we also were invited to actually like, inform the design, like, where is the Greenway going to go? How do we decide where it goes first? Second, third, what are those dynamics? What does even the pavement look like? You know, real design questions. And I respect the difference between designers and artists. And I think, you know, that's something I don't want to suggest that, like, artists are, should be doing what designers are doing. But I do think, because they are different disciplines, that there's a lot, there's an important crossover that can happen, especially in the early part of a process, for example, to consider, like, even if we just talk about pavement, because I, as I mentioned earlier, thinking about like art public art as meaning making in the spaces, how do we use that lens of meaning making to think about what the pavement looks like? So like, are there opportunities to, for, for us to kind of uncover story and history through the choice of material? Are there symbols and emblems embedded in on the ground? Are there do people get to submit things that are integrated into the ground work itself? So these, this is kind of the way that we start to blend art and design where the designers might be saying like this, really, this works, really this material works really well for the climate we have here. And you know, it emulates the natural landscape, the the color tones in the landscape, the geometry, landscape, etc. And then we might the artist team might come in and say, yeah, and then what if we recognize that like the video neighborhood we're going through here was redlined. And how do we bring that into the way that we're thinking about actually even designing the pavement, or where the trail goes. So that's, I guess, like a little snapshot into how the artists team worked with the, on a design team to create a Greenway. And and then there are some other projects. There's a memorial, or a monument that, Damon Davis, who's honored on our team is really leading. And that's to commemorate Mill Creek Valley, which is a historic, really thriving black neighborhood in St. Louis, that was just decimated by the imposition of a highway build, which is not an uncommon story. But maybe what's uncommon is to talk about it and to spend like a lot of time, energy and money to create artworks that allow people to engage in that history. And especially for I mean, we are, this is such a racially divided city, I don't have the statistics, but like the, there's this Stark line called the Delmar Divide that divides the north side of the city, south side of the city. And the like the median home incomes are just so dramatically different on across that line. The racial makeup is so dramatically different, the median income is so dramatically different. And then you can look at the history of disinvestment in the north side, and the history of redlining and see how, like, very clearly policy racist policy has perpetuated the racial inequities and racial injustice in this city. So with that context, to have a Greenway project that goes through, I don't even I think it's like 20, something neighborhoods, I don't know what number we're at now. But a lot of neighborhoods that goes across this dividing line, and that is now incorporating into it, a monument to a redlined neighborhood is a big deal for the city. Because we are a city that doesn't want to talk about racism. Again, we're not alone in that. But we're a city that doesn't want to talk about racism that was on a world stage that featured how violent our racism is, and we still don't want to deal with it. So these artistic interventions, this Greenway, the Memorial Project, is one of the ways that we hope to create a site in a space to, to say, like this, this is our true, true history or true identity, we want you to engage with it. And we want to create a space where we think a lot of different people can come together and be with this history. And I think it's also it requires a certain level of skillfulness, to be able to create sites that allow for people to interact in a lot of different ways with something that might be challenging. I was just talking about this, that I really don't enjoy prescriptive public space, where it's like, you come here and you like, it's everything is designed for you to be in one way to interact with the world with artwork and with people in one way. That still feels like oppression to me. I want a public space that offers me options that recognizes that like, we live in a dynamic multicultural, multiracial democracy. And people are going to use this space in a lot of different ways. And when I create the space and when I bring in the artworks, I am thinking of that, and I am building from that up to the actual project. And I guess the Greenway is at its best trying to do that. I'm less involved in it right now than I was in the past. But I think when I was involved in it in the past, that was the aspiration.
Stephanie Eche 34:40
Can you talk a little bit about how you think artists and cultural producers can work with government?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 34:59
Sure. I believe that the simplest way to put it is that artists are really adept creative problem solvers, government solves problems. What if they saw problems more creatively? And with a bit more soul? That's the core of it for me, I often hear and also believe that artists are, okay, let me let me just say government clearly has a fractured relationship with community. Pretty much all communities. But there's a spectrum, like, you know, the more marginalized the community is, typically the more fractured the relationship is, there's distrust, and there's a lot of reason to have that distrust. There have been some successful collaborations where artists have been embedded inside of government and kind of been like, at the helm of work, and been able to start to heal some other relationships in the bonds with community. Again, I was just talking about this with someone. And while I do believe that that's possible, like there is the the skillfulness of some kinds of artistic practitioners that have this ability to offer, like the social intelligence and cultural awareness that I unfortunately find uncommon in government work, yet, I also get quite, there's a yellow light for me, that comes up when we think that artists can heal government, or that artists can be a surrogate, the good the good surrogate of government, that, I think that the what I want to see is that deeper work that artists can do to help government from the inside out, actually help with a cultural shift inside of the institution, that then should result in better community relationships and a different way, a different practice of engaging with community. So it's, it's sort of similar to me is the same approaches like bottom up, community work, it's kind of bottom up. It's almost like an organizational change methodology, where it's like you really change the folks on the team, and the culture of the team to change how the team works outside of itself and engages with any other entity outside of government. And I have seen that happen. I will say like, the artists in residence, Marcus young, who's based in the Twin Cities area, he was in residence with the city of St. Paul for a number of years. And then more recently was the was the creative vitality fellow, something like that. He was in residence with the Minnesota Department of Transportation. So it's at the state level, it was the first of two state level artists and residents programs inside of state government. And he will like he talks a lot about how the most profound change that he has seen in all of his residencies inside of government bodies, has been seeing staff shift and seeing culture shift. And that's really what he's most focused on as an artist in residence. And I think that that is the long slower, it takes a lot more time. But I think that's also where some of the most profound results can be from bringing artists and cultural producers into government. I would like to see it at every level, the local to the federal, and I would like to see an artist in every department and every agency and I appreciate those that are taking the risk to prototype these.I believe that we need to be thinking of them not as one off, but as the new normal. We need to be funding them as such. We need to be budgeting them as such. And we need to be bringing people onto teams to support building them. That's one of the projects I'm working on right now with Amanda Lovelee who was the city artists and residents of the city of St Paul for seven or so years, and now work some for parks department for the county, I think. And then Johanna Taylor, who's a researcher and academic at ASU. And the three of us are working to create what we're calling care lab, ci, our lab, which stands for civic artists and residents, that is a project that will allow us to support governments that are curious about setting these programs up, we'll provide them with training with coaching. And we'll also be doing public speaking if, if it's helpful for us to sing the praises of these programs and share the research that we've been doing. So this is a big passion area of mine. And one of the one of the ways that I think this is different from a lot of the other things that I touch is I think, like there's art, there's art, that there's powerful art that points to a thing. So it's like, I would say a lot of my work that came out of Ferguson was work that was pointing at something, it was saying this thing needs to change, this thing over here is wrong, this thing over here is right, this thing over here is beautiful, this thing over here is ugly, it's pointing to the thing. And then there is a way of approaching art that it really is the thing. So the so the artist saying artists can reform government, well, I'm not going to create a thing that points to that I'm going to, I'm going to do that. The artwork is the reform of government. And it's kind of like a weird brain thing to get there. But that's really what I'm excited about right now.
Stephanie Eche 41:57
Yeah, I really resonate with that, because that's kind of how I feel like I'm working with the private sector, like, part of my art is trying to get them to understand their responsibilities and being equitable, and how they fund projects. And just because it's private funding, just because it might be in a private space doesn't mean they can skirt away from that. And they have really large budgets, often. And so figuring that out of like, we have to be doing that work, otherwise, it just won't change, it'll still be the same people getting the same funding, doing maybe different work that points at the problem, or the solution, but isn't actually changing. It's like, it's like preaching to the choir work like, and the people who like it, like it. And I think I see that a lot with all of the Black Lives Matter protests to like, and I'm sure you've seen it, too, it's like the Instagram post about the thing, by like, a white woman artist in Canada, it's just like, it's not that they can't, you know, it's not that they can't support the movement, it's not that they can't even you know, make money off of their artwork about it necessarily, it's just that all the attention still goes to the same people. And that isn't really solving the problems. Like even changing who the attention goes to isn't necessarily solving, solving the problem. So even just having people of color artists isn't necessarily solving the problems too. And so it's like, there's like baby steps. And then like the larger infrastructure change, and it's really exciting that you and others are like, working like we're all like little crickets, like trying to do the work while also like getting paid. Because because I feel like people don't want to do the work to it's like not, you know, they say they do or they might want to and then like when it comes down to it, it is long and hard and-
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 43:51
Very tiring.
Stephanie Eche 43:53
Yeah, it's tiring.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 43:54
It's yeah, it's a lot of work. And I and I, the crickets metaphor, I am like, everyone has a different entry point, you know, into this whole ecosystem of change. And I just want to affirm that the way that I'm working is just where I think I'm called to be. and I see other people call to other places, and we need them there. We need people to be just leaning into what they're called to do as as part of this whole constellation of a better world.
Stephanie Eche 44:29
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Stephanie Eche 44:42
I wonder how you thought about basically training government workers to think like artists or to just be more creative as opposed to bringing in someone else all the time because that was something I saw when I worked at Vornado and real estate, it's like, if you actually can inspire a different way of thinking among all of the people. And it you know, it starts with individuals, then you don't need another entity to come in, whether that's a consultant or a single person or whatever, you can just create this. And obviously, I want more artists to get paid to do things. So that's always good. But how have you thought about the actual, like, inspiring change among people who already work in government?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 43:54
That is so key. There's this organizing principle in like, community organizing, political organizing, that's about you kind of you work yourself out of a job, that's really the goal, you're creating the capacity for people to do the thing that they don't quite yet have the capacity to do. So if you work in the realm of creativity, then your work is to cultivate the creative capacity of whomever you're working with. And ultimately, work yourself out of needing to be there. Asterisk artists do have specialty in their artistic craft, right, that will always be you know, unique to artists, I will say I have seen that transformation in some of the teams that I've worked with, with individual people, that it's almost This is going to be really abstract, but it's almost like I see a loosening in within them. Like, if they were solid form, they're like, the molecules have just sort of loosened up a little bit. And there may be more like a gas or a liquid or something like they're just the rigidity is lessened. And so that offers that offers them like a window into their own curiosity, and into quite questioning the way that they're doing things. One really literal thing I've seen be successful is to actually transform physically the workspace to have creative to have things that just engender creativity, and spark ideas and make you like, feel alive in the physical space. So like, I've been in some workspaces, where there's a rotating exhibition in the hallway, where they bring, the whole team gets to contribute ideas to like a new mural that's going to be in the office that everyone feels that they like, had a say in and they feel this this pride over. I have you even done like, little like poetry things in offices, and especially if people are really directly engaged in it. And it's not just like, plop it, and not, you know, just plop it down there, that doesn't work the best. But I do think that that is one very specific way that you can start to bring more creativity into a team. And yeah, I guess I can just say that, like, I saw it happen in actually all of the non arts teams that I've been a part of, and I've also seen people connect to their own creative practice, like if someone is in more of an office job situation, but has a like, plays a saxophone or something. I've seen that bringing, like constantly being in an environment where you have someone asking them about arts and culture in their housing project, that they started to talk to me more about playing saxophone, and why the saxophone is meaningful to them. And when they started playing it, and like, hey, do you want to check out this, this album I made when I was 16. And like most people are creative and I think just like having that, that another creative practitioner around, you can also just ignite that that you probably already have in yourself. And if you don't have it, then I do think that some of these really simple tools like placing art inside of working environments. It's probably not super measurable, but I definitely see it changing the way people are just curious and creative. I think you can also infuse it into meetings, totally rethinking meetings, is a whole nother thing that we don't have time to talk about. But there's another like really tangible way.
Stephanie Eche 49:40
We could do so many more follow up conversations about these things. Because these are like this is like my, what I think about all the time and it's it's like you've seen so many of these things happen also in in real time, like it's not imaginary, it actually works. So, yeah. Is there anything that's in inspiring you right now any books you're reading anything you're listening to?
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 50:06
Hmm, this is very simple, but just so much of my creativity comes from just public space and being in community and the fact that we've opened back up in a lot of places due to vaccinations, that is igniting my creativity again. So just like vaccinations are making are inspiring me. I was watching the Small Axe series for a while. And that was I think it's Alexander McQueen. My saying that right? Or is that a different McQueen? No, that's the fashion designer Steve McQueen. Alexander McQueen is inspiring, too, I guess. But, um, McQueen, the filmmakers Small Axe series has been such a beautiful blend of like, music and cinematography, and storytelling, and it features like different corners of the black community in London. And it and it's, to me, it's one of the ways that artists reveal that the ways in which we tend to approach minority communities is monolithic. And this series is telling all of these dynamic stories from all these different like, curves and corners and crevices of a very dynamic community of people of African descent in London. So that's been really cool. I've been reading a lot of poetry Ada Limon inspires me, women of color poets, and specifically her work. Yeah, I'll leave those.
Stephanie Eche 52:10
Well, I'll share links to everything that we talked about, and everything that's inspiring you in the show notes so people can take a look, thank you so much for sharing and thank you for doing this interview. It was so nice to talk to you more about this. I feel like we've had so many conversations about these things. But it's so nice to hear, especially about the government work and how your practice has shifted, but is still very much an art practice. And I'm excited for people to hear this because I think people think of artists and they think of like one very specific thing, even when they're funding it. And so just understanding that, it's, it's not like always paint on canvas. It can be lots of different things.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 52:54
Yeah. It can be so many things. And I think we're going to keep refining and redefining that forever. I have one, there's one artist David Davis that I mentioned that I just really look up to, and I've had the privilege of working with that he calls himself a post disciplinary artist. I'm like, there's like interdisciplinary, there's multidisciplinary, there's transdisciplinary there's post disciplinary, I mean we're just gonna keep refining and yeah, just like redefining what the artistic practice is, and then what that means to collaborate in different spaces. I mean, it's just kind of a forever changing thing, which is a lot of what's fun about it.
Stephanie Eche 53:41
Thank you so much.
Mallory Rukshana Nezam 53:53
Yeah, go team yellow.
Stephanie Eche 53:46
Thanks for listening to this episode of First Coat. If you liked this podcast, please leave a review. Make sure to subscribe to the First Coat podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and follow us on Instagram @firstcoatpodcast or @distillcreative. First Coat is a production of my company, Distill Creative. Check us out at distillcreative.com.