Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann on Paper, Landscapes, and Building an Art Career - Ep 09
ON THIS EPISODE
This week on First Coat we have Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann. Katherine is based in Washington, DC and creates work in her studio and in public space. She has held various residencies and fellowships, including a Fulbright grant to Taiwan and Arts and Humanities grant in DC. She has exhibited at the Walters Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, US Consulate in Dubai, A.I.R. and many more galleries. I spoke with Katherine about how she started doing public art, the three most influential people for her, and what it’s like to be a mom and an artist.
This interview was recorded May, 2020.
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LINKS
Guest | Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Artist
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann received her BA from Brown University and MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, the AIR Gallery and Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Fellowships in New York, NY, and the Individual Artist Grant, Arts and Humanities Grant, Mayor’s Award and Hamiltonian Fellowship in Washington, DC. She has attended residencies at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Blue Sky Dayton, Vermont Studio Center, Salzburg Kunstlerhauss, Triangle Workshop, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Bemis Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Jaipur, India Carbon 12 Residency. Some of the venues where Mann has shown her work include the Walters Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Rawls Museum, the US consulate in Dubai, UAE, and the US embassy in Yaounde, Cameroon. Mann is currently an instructor at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Follow Katherine on Instagram (@ktzulan on Instagram, #ktzulan) and check out her website.
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 services for real estate developers.
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Stephanie Eche 00:02
Welcome to First Coat. Where we explore public realm art, how it's made and why it matters. I'm your host Stephanie Eche, an artist and entrepreneur based in Brooklyn, New York. I run Distill Creative, where I curate and produce site specific art projects for real estate developers. I focus on creating more equitable and inclusive projects and I want to get more exposure for the artists and developers doing this work. This week on First Coat, we have Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann. Katherine is based in Washington DC and creates work in her studio and in public space. She has held various residences and fellowships including a Fulbright grant to Taiwan, and Arts and Humanities grant in DC. She has exhibited at the Walters Art Museum, Corcoran Art Gallery, Rawls Museum, US Consulate in Dubai, A.I.R., and many more galleries. I spoke with Katherine about how she started doing public art, the three most influential people for her art career, and what it's like to be a mom and an artist. Here's our conversation.
Stephanie Eche 00:59
Welcome to First Coat. Thanks so much for being here today. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 01:06
Sure. So my name is Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann. I am a painter and installation artist in Washington, DC. I've been based in DC for a little bit more than a decade, but I grew up sort of around the area, I moved around a lot as a kid, my father was in the Foreign Service, so I moved every two or three years and that experience of constantly being an expatriate as a child has definitely informed my work. So I make very large pieces, they're usually paper based, and they're very much about transitions and dichotomies and forcing incongruous elements together in an abstract manner and then just seeing what happens.
Stephanie Eche 01:50
I was so excited when I saw your work in A.I.R. gallery.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 01:53
Oh, you saw this year?
Stephanie Eche 01:56
Yeah, I think you were out of the country, I texted you. I was like, oh my gosh, I saw your painting. Because I was at, it was earlier this, it was either earlier this year or late last year.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 02:07
It was early this year. Yes. Yeah. Oh, that's so great. I'm so glad you saw that show.
Stephanie Eche 02:11
Yeah, I was there and I looked and I was like ‘is that Katherines work?!’ And then I was telling my friend like, I'm pretty sure this is, you know, your work. And then I got closer and I was like, yeah, definitely, I mean, it's obviously your work.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 02:27
Was it large and full of little minute details? Like, yes, then it was mine.
Stephanie Eche 02:32
Yeah, I feel like you have, I don't want to say that you have a color palette, because I don't think that it's necessarily consistent at all. But there's, there's something about your work that's both random and specific.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 02:44
Dry. That’s generally the goal, randomness plus specificity, and see how those things can kind of live together?
Stephanie Eche 02:55
Yeah.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 02:57
I'm like, I literally start things, I try to incorporate random materials and random processes with specific decisions as well. So I begin every painting by pouring paint and ink on the paper as it lays on the floor, which is a random kind of chance operation. And then I build into it with a lot of much more controlled elements. So yeah, that's a pretty apt way to describe it.
Stephanie Eche 03:23
How would you define a painting or a landscape painting?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 03:27
I- so, I think that I make landscape paintings, or at least I describe my work as dealing with landscape, and the history of landscape and landscape painting. God, I don't know, I don't know how to describe what a painting is, I can do a better job with describing what a landscape painting is, I think that a landscape painting is, it's a picture that is dealing with the environment. And that environment, you can think of, in the broadest term, broadest ways that you want to. My work, it's not your traditional Western idea of what a landscape would be, which is like a real kind of vista with perspective that you're observing from one particular site. That's not what I do. They're not like mountain scapes with a river running through it. But I do think of them as at least in the family or dealing with the history of landscape painting, because they're very much about space and creating space. They actually incorporate a lot of traditional elements from various landscape painting through history. And that, for me, that is usually referencing Chinese Sumi ink painting and Buddhist painting, rather than something from the Hudson River School. Although, I'm actually influenced by the Hudson River School, as well. I just think of them as they’re paintings, they’re pieces that are about place. And they are both describing places and also creating a place and all of the conversations that go around what place is and what our environment that we live in and think about is. So that’s kind of my fodder for what I think about.
Stephanie Eche 05:18
So on that line of thought, how do you create work that is, on a particular site physically, or is site specific, or both.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 05:27
So I started making site specific work a little bit later than when I first started painting. Originally, I just thought of myself as a pretty traditional painter, I made rectilinear paintings that could be like hung up above somebody's couch. I have always been really interested in creating immersive spaces, I want my pieces to feel like you could step into them and get lost in them. For that reason, I work really large, and then populate these large pieces with a lot of detailed minutiae. And I realized that if I started to work site-specifically, and if I dealt with the architecture of this space, that just adds to the feeling of immersion. Because I do a lot of maximalist kind of pieces, and I do a lot of repetition, I often want the pieces to feel like they're a little bit cancerous and kind of can take over a space and engulf you. So if it is, if a piece is literally moving over floors and around corners, and onto the ceiling and up columns, then it's going to feel more immersive, it starts to have a conversation with the place that it is in and that conversation is sometimes something of a taking over the place. I really enjoy that kind of experience that I can give the viewer.
Stephanie Eche 06:53
Yeah, I think that's something that you get a sense of just going into your studio, just seeing works in progress, I think you can really tell that they're not supposed to just be like in a frame above a couch, they're really meant to be within the space itself.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 07:07
I do sometimes make things that are within frames for couches, actually. Those are cool, too. But I like being able to have, I think that was, it was actually one of your questions is being able to have two sides to my practice. So, I do make pieces that are rectilinear and that are like the, your understanding of where it begins and ends pretty clear and relatively traditional. But I want to kind of balance that with my installation practice or my public art practice. And generally, the public art pieces are not rectilinear and are able to take over spaces in a more interesting way, because I've provided spaces to kind of riff off of.
Stephanie Eche 07:51
How did you first start making art?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 07:54
So I am one of those annoying people who always knew what I wanted to do. Ever since I was a child, I always knew I wanted to be an artist and I, I mean, I guess I was making art as a kid. Every art, every kid makes art to some extent. And when I look back at the type of things that I was making when I was a kid, they're very directly correlated with what I do now. And it's kind of nice to see that these kind of instincts or impulses are, have always been within me and I think that's the case for a lot of artists, like if you look at what they were interested in. How they played as children, they're still playing the same way as grownups and now they just have a fancy title to go along with it. So I made long kind of vertical, I'm sorry, long horizontal scroll-like drawings as a child that I would populate with, like characters that were landscapes with things in them. And I would make my brother help me do it as well, when I was, you know, seven or eight or something like that. I guess the question is, is always I really focused on becoming a serious painter. I actually originally started painting as, I was trained as a traditional Sumi ink painter. I'm half Taiwanese, so, and I'm American. And I did live in Taiwan a little bit as a child, but I also would come back to Taiwan in the summers as a teenager to visit my family and would spend months at a time there and study under a Sumi ink master. So that's how I originally started painting was learning traditional Sumi painting, so that would be like copying this teachers technique of making bamboo or cherry blossoms or orchids. So, that's how I first learned to paint.
Stephanie Eche 09:51
Wow, that's really interesting that it's from the very beginning, there's really obvious influences in your work.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 09:58
I don't think that's unique or, I think that's actually kind of, it's kind of, I think that almost every artist would be able to trace something back to, because you, what's the great thing about being an artist is you're able to shape an entire career around investigating the things that are personally interesting to you. So those personal interests existed when I was a child, I'm just lucky enough to be able to continue exploring those same things.
Stephanie Eche 10:23
Do you do things that either don't feel like your work or are just experiments and then edit them out, or, in developing my own work in my own style, which I feel like I'm very much at the beginning of as an artist, I really enjoy trying out a lot of different things. And part of that is developing new skill sets, right, like taking a portrait oil class to learn how to paint portraits, or whatever. But, I really admire when an artist has gotten to the point when they, no matter what they do, it feels like them. And I think that's a matter of just being more experienced, obviously, as an artist, but to your point of the things that you were doing as a kid you're still doing and still exploring. Yeah, I just wonder if any of that resonates or like how...
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 11:13
I feel it might have something to do more with quantity than quality. You know, it's not so much that you get to a certain place as an artist, and then everything fits into your life, if that's how you pronounce it, is that how you pronounce it? Anyway. You know, it's more that you make so many things, that they all feel like you because they are all coming from you and I am, I'm not intelligent enough to to expand my work to encompass something beyond myself. I bet if I looked at a bunch of pieces of yours all together, I would feel like they were you.
Stephanie Eche 11:56
Yeah.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 11:58
I think that it's, you're able to, you should be able to do both right, you should be able to constantly be exploring, but then have it also feel like it's you, it's coming from who you are. And I think that in terms of like different artists, and how they do that, you can see some artists are more like tinkerers. And so any explorations are just kind of moving off the path slightly and slowly, and it's a slow evolution of change in terms of how their work is able to mutate and develop over time. And then other people are much more revolutionary, or at least it feels revolutionary to an outsider. And you know, one year they're working with steel sculpture and then suddenly, the next year, they're doing dance performances. I am more of the tinkerer type, I hope that I'm able to change my work and have exploration, but I am not like suddenly working in portraiture with oils, oil pastels, like I've been working in paper with waterbase media and Sumi ink for the past decade. But that's because I feel like there's still enough room within those three materials to have a lot of exploration.
Stephanie Eche 13:13
Yeah, definitely. How do you approach materiality and form in your work? And specifically, how is it different from when you're creating a piece that you know is going to hang somewhere, within some kind of rectangle somewhere and a piece that's going to be installed in a public space? You talked about it a little bit, but how do you both from an aesthetic perspective and then also, physically, how do you, how do you approach those two things?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 13:43
Well, I'm, I'm like very wedded to paper. I am only interested in paper almost completely, it's not 100%. Sometimes I'm forced to do stuff on other things, other substrates, but I am pretty wedded to paper as material. And that actually causes it’s own types of problems when you are also a public artist, because paper is a really terrible material for public art, so it doesn't last. So I generally will, I find now that, well, first of all, my public art career is not that long and I'm still kind of starting out in the public sphere, but most of the pieces that I have done for public spaces have been indoor, interior site-specific pieces, where I am able to still use some amount of paper. The biggest difference between the sphere of the you know, just making work for myself versus public stuff and my avowed interest in paper is people don't want paper for public art pieces because they don’t want their expensive piece to disintegrate over time. I've been able to find a lot of workarounds for that, I sometimes will work on yupo paper, which can be back mounted to sintra, or wood. And then the entire thing can be laminated, I have a contractor who helps me do that, so that the final piece may be on paper, but it doesn't look like paper at all. So it's as if it's a painting on wood, or aluminum, you can actually back mount it on aluminum as well. So that's one way. Another method that I use is essentially decoupaging paper, pasting it to the wall, sometimes working on vinyl, or wall, wallpaper material, and then pasting it and then combining that collage on paper, that collage directly to a site, with direct to wall mural painting, so that it doesn't, so that it has this kind of back and forth between the immediacy of the mural painting and the fact that something has actually been pasted and collaged on there. And I have also done work thats not on paper for public pieces. Those are the only, the only time I work on a substrate that is not paper, it's for a public piece that has required me to do that. So I've done some murals on stripped directly on the wall, some on wood, some on aluminum as well.
Stephanie Eche 16:17
Do you enjoy working that way?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 16:19
It's okay. I mean, I like the challenge of doing something different. I'm not, I'm not completely, I am able to do something if it's not on paper, but all of my interests, in terms of what the reasons why I paint, are very related to paper, because I'm interested in Sumi ink painting, which is only done on paper and creating a place for myself that is somewhere between the canon of Western painting and the canon of Sumi ink painting, that's really connected to paper for me. So, I'm happy to have explorations outside of that and if I'm going to make an exterior piece, it can't be on paper, I understand that. So, I'm a flexible person who can exercise common sense, but I still love paper the most.
Stephanie Eche 17:11
Have you ever pitched a project where you, like where the piece is supposed to disintegrate outside?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 17:17
No, I haven't. I don't, who would want that? I don't know, maybe, maybe somebody, I could imagine that being pretty exciting, actually. That's a really wonderful idea. I'm gonna have to do that. I'll just have to find some sort of a temporary public art call. I feel like any of the difficulties I have, like creatively, with making public art, it's because of the necessity of making this thing last.
Stephanie Eche 17:47
Hmm.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 17:49
Like, at least for me, that feels like a burden. And something like this difficult issue that I have to deal with that takes my choices and narrows them. So what if, if time is taken out of the equation and longevity, then you suddenly have so much more freedom. It's just way more fun and interesting. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, I- one of your questions was, which was your first ever public art piece and I was about to, I had it all ready to go what was my first like, commissioned art piece, which was this big interior mural for the MGM casino. But, now that you actually described temporary art, I can think back and realize that actually, my first public piece was a temporary piece that I didn't even have on my radar. I wasn't even thinking of it as a public art piece, because it was temporary, it was performance oriented and nobody ever saw it again after a few performances that we did. Right after grad school. I spent the summer in Dayton, Ohio, with a residency there that doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately. But it was this beautiful residency called Blue Sky Dayton and it paired artists with groups of middle schoolers in Dayton and I lived there for two months and I created my own work in collaboration with these middle schoolers. So usually, if you hear about like artists plus students, you would think it's sort of like a teaching program, but it was actually not it was an artist-centric program rather than a student-centric program. So it was about artists making their own work, and then just having these kids around who could incorporate themselves into the process in any way the artists thought made sense. So, the people who did that program all used these kids or worked with these kids in different ways. For me, it turned out to be extraordinarily collaborative, and I made work that I never believed I would have made. Because to me, it sounded so corny, but it ended up being like the best thing I've ever done. So one of them was a, we found this empty warehouse in downtown Dayton or an empty building, unused and it had this large pit in the center of the space, it went about 15 feet down, and then the entire square of the pit was about 30 by 60. So a relatively large pit, with no banisters, or anything, I don't really know why it was there. But, I mentioned earlier that I start all of my paintings by pouring paint. So, I thought at the time, well I have this, I have a budget and I have a bunch of kids, middle school kids, we can pour paint into the pit, and we can use super soakers and we can, and there was a dancer who was doing the program as well. And he said, well, I can have my kids dance, as you pour paint on them. Which I was, you know, like, if I were, if this was just something that I was the only person putting input into a project, that is not an idea I would have come up with because it’s very cheesy. Like, oh, we’ll pour paint, and then we'll pour paint on people and they'll dance. It sounds a little bit ridiculous, right? But it turned out to be one of the best projects I've ever done in my entire career. Just all of these middle school and high school kids, we choreographed it, so they all poured paint at certain points during the song and other students danced and we essentially made this small ocean of latex paint in the bottom of this unused building. And then we let all that dry, and then came back into it and painted into it so that it became this kind of encompassing installation. And that piece certainly doesn't exist anymore, I'm sure the building has been turned into condos or something at this point. But I just think that it's really wonderful that I and the dancers and the middle school students who are now all like probably, you know, they all have graduated college, will always have this memory of this happening that existed in this place.
Stephanie Eche 22:33
Yeah, I think when people think about public art, they often think about a wall that is painted. And it's a one time thing and that's, and that's that, and I think, really investigating what the need is in that community or in that place, and how art can actually develop connections and, and create memories. I think that's what actually makes it more successful than this one time thing that, you know, you spend a lot of time just figuring out, especially in the work that I do in consulting for real estate developers, there's so much lead up time of like contracts and budgets, and all this insurance, and then the piece is done and that's it. And I think what I'm really trying to push my clients to do is to think about it as more of a holistic process and that when you're collaborating with artists in the community, there's so many opportunities to create something that's much, much more than just the piece itself, and not to discredit the work because I always want a really amazing mural to be done or a really amazing site-specific piece, but a lot of people just, they don't want to pay for a one time thing that disintegrates or is done or that you don't, you know, gets built over or whatever. Or, on the flip side, some artists don't want to put their time into that, because that's not interesting to them either, right? Murals were for, first created as something that is going to be on a wall to like, tell a story or, or communicate a message and last for as long as it can. But yeah, I think that's interesting that that was the first thing you did in public space. And that's part of why I'm calling, when I'm talking about projects, public realm projects, because sometimes they're not in a actual public space, they're kind of in a space that could be public or that public, that anyone could maybe come across, you know? Maybe it's a lobby in a building, for example, like the project you're working on and, or I don't know a lot of businesses and restaurants and retailers now are using art in their designs even from the very beginning. Sometimes that's a mural, sometimes that's a site specific piece, sometimes that's an activity that happens. I think one thing that when working on a temporary piece, having documentation is so key. I think I've seen a photo of that, of that project you were talking about, and that was so amazing. And that's, that gave me other ideas of other types of work that I could see you doing that otherwise, we wouldn't know, right? So there's still, there's value in the doing, I think, and then there's also, it is helpful to have documentation in some way. But, like you said, the memories they're going to have forever, everybody involved.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 25:25
Yeah. And I also, I mean, I think back to what I thought art was when I was in middle school, and my idea of what art was, and especially what art was that I could create, was strictly two dimensional, and relatively small scale, and, you know, it just was not a very exploratory or wide ranging idea of what was possible for myself. So that project was really special because it opened up everybody's, including myself, idea of what was possible, just, I mean, simply in terms of scale, for one thing. It also was just a blast.
Stephanie Eche 26:01
That's awesome.
Stephanie Eche 26:05
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Stephanie Eche 26:18
How do you balance your fine art practice with your public practice? Or do you consider them- do you approach them separately? Do you work on different things different days? Or can you tell me a little bit about just how you, how you work?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 26:33
So, I used to, I went through a couple of different periods in my career. Before I had my kids, I mostly focused on the rectilinear paintings. And I also taught, so I would make my money by teaching, and then I'd make these paintings and I had some galleries that represented me that would sell them. And that was, that was a pretty traditional way of making your way in the world as an artist. And around the time that I had my son in that period of like 18 months around that period, I started out with, I think I had five galleries that represented me. And by the time that period was over, all but one of them had gone out of business.
Stephanie Eche 27:22
Really? Wow.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 27:27
I mean, I guess that's just normal. But at the time, it just felt, especially because it was around the period where I was transitioning to being a mother and how scary that can be, it really felt like the end of my career. Like I wasn't going to be an artist anymore. Like how, I mean I don't have any galleries to sell my paintings, what am I going to do, financially? And it was around the time that I first started looking into public art as a way of financially taking things into my own hands. And it made sense for me, because I am interested in working large, anyway and I am never going to be able to get a bigger canvas than what a public art piece can provide. So I started doing, applying to calls and I also really liked how public art you can have a little bit, I mean, as an artist, how much control of your destiny do you ever really have, but at least I didn't have to like work only with a middleman and just hope that a gallery might show me favor. I can apply to as many public art calls as I want to and I don't have to be charming at a gallery opening or anything, or know the right people for me to get a call back. So yeah, I started doing public art, it's been about five years for me of doing public work. I do both at the same time, I continue to do both. I think I split my time about 50/50 between the public art pieces and the standalone pieces for myself, which feels like the right balance. I don't think that my public art work is really that different than what I do for myself. If a person is going to, or an institution, is going to hire me to make something public, they know what I do, they know that I cannot provide a perfect rendering of what the finished piece is going to look like beforehand. I can make a digital mock up and have a sense of the style and the themes that I'm going to go for in a finished piece but I never know what my finished work will look like. And that includes for commissions and public works, so the only people who have ever hired me have understood that. So I haven't felt like I've had to like dumb down my work or make it more palatable. I don't have particularly racy or overtly political work in the first place, so it's not that difficult for me to do that. To me, why do I make public work? It's because the canvas of a public space is always something new and challenging to deal with, it gives me opportunities to collaborate with interesting people, and it's a really great moneymaker. Or it can be.
Stephanie Eche 30:22
Right. Yeah, there's definitely a range.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 30:29
Yes.
Stephanie Eche 30:30
Yeah. What advice would you give someone who wants to pursue a career similar to yours.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 30:36
So, I didn't start out like in, I got my MFA not thinking that I would ever do any public art. I actually thought public art was generally lame, or, you know, or just kind of pedestrian and all of the hard edges have been kind of softened. And you know, now having had done it for a little while and seeing the bureaucracies that you have to deal with, I can see that there isn't an element of truth to that. But it certainly is not lame, I don't think that public art, I think public art can be really rich and fascinating and my experience with my public art pieces I'm just as proud of, I'm more proud of many of them than I am of the work that I've just done for myself in the studio, and shown in a gallery. In terms of, like if you want to start in the public art realm, it's difficult, if you want to apply for call, it's hard to apply if you have not had any experience doing anything, you don't have a portfolio. So one of the first things that I did when I thought that I should start trying to apply for these calls is I did a few pieces for free for family and friends. I, my father in law has a little farm store, where he sells local produce in western Massachusetts. So I offered to make a mural for his store for free. And I made, I think the piece was 20 feet by nine feet, something like that, a relatively large mural on the side of the store, I suddenly have something for my portfolio that shows that I can do murals, and I know what I'm doing, I've done it at least once in the past. So I think that that's, that's one good first step.
Stephanie Eche 32:30
What's one thing you wish you had known 10 years ago?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 32:33
I think that I've made a lot of mistakes in my career, both in terms of just general attitudes and understanding of the art world and also really specific mistakes with dealing with specific people and entities. I think I worked with too many galleries without really vetting them and standing up for myself in, in working with them. I had one gallery go out of business while owing me a significant amount of money, but they went bankrupt, so I had no recourse.
Stephanie Eche 33:03
Oh, geez.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 33:05
But they had owed me that money for months and months before they went bankrupt. So what's the mistake, I should have been more aggressive in getting what was due to me. I think that I have, in general been too passive and not aggressive in standing up for myself in both the gallery realm and also in the public art realm. I have one experience that is, it's not a failure, but it could have been a failure, where I was a finalist for a public art piece in a lobby. And I was a finalist with a good number of other DC and Baltimore area artists, so I really wanted the job. I put together a proposal with a budget that I then turned into the curator who could have just accepted my budget as it was, but because she was a good person, she came back to me and said, ‘you need to add at least 10k to this budget, you're underselling yourself, something I see all the time, I generally see it with female artists, women identifying artists will undersell themselves, and male identifying artists will either be right at the budget that I think is appropriate, or they will massively oversell themselves’. And it was a really helpful thing to learn that about myself and also about society, that I had been under budgeting for this project and therefore also for all of the previous projects that I had been putting proposals together for. What my idea of how much I was worth was too small, too limited. I should have been charging a lot more.
Stephanie Eche 34:54
That's really interesting because I have totally said that to people before on projects. I remember an instance where I was reaching out to an artist who was a finalist for a project, and I always ask for a budget before, same thing before I give the actual budget or the, I mean, there's a lot of different factors that might be involved. Like, sometimes the client that I'm working with, they don't have a budget. So there's that weird chicken egg thing. But, anyway, this particular artist, I was interested in for this project, their budget for the, for the mural, it was like, $5,000. And I was like, ‘so their budget’s 25,000, so can you just give me something a little bit closer to that?’ And I'm always trying to advocate, and it was a female artist.
Stephanie Eche 35:38
Yeah, I do see it more, well, okay. A few things. One, I am very women and people of color first in my proposals. That's something I am extremely conscious of and honestly, is sometimes hard, because of just a lot of factors that, you know, would take too long to go into. But, one of the things I struggle with is, yeah, then kind of coaching them on the budgeting price, because I might not always know for a particular type of work what the range is, you know, so I don't, but I also, it's like, the artist should have some idea of what range they're in, I think, to some degree, but then there's also that other weird world of a public art, like a government commissioned piece is going to have a different budget, then a real estate developer commission, you know, there's different types of clients that have different types of budgets.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 35:40
I was going to ask that.
Stephanie Eche 36:00
But I mean, this is completely confusing.
Stephanie Eche 36:36
It's so confusing. And so you have to price yourself differently for different people, maybe I don't know, but men don't. I think is the thing, men don't. They just, or it seems like they just have their price per square. And this is particular to murals, I would say it's a whole nother thing with other, like sculpture or different, different types of mediums, or a one time activation or a site, a temporary site-specific piece, or a performance, you know, there's lots of different things, but artists should be able to value themselves however they want, really. And it's like, what you're getting out of it and if it's reaching the goals that, if it's being commissioned, or if it's just a project you're getting funding for, then it should just be whatever it costs, you know, and I think that's something that is hard both to know, what your work is worth, but then also being aware of just like the institutional factors that have made women artists, and also people of color artists, I think, just devalue their work before they even put a budget in front of anyone.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 37:40
Yeah, it's really scary. And it's, it was shocking to me to see how it was something that I had personally internalized. And it's hard, because it's like, you're right, especially with murals, because there are so few tangible budgetary elements to really hold onto, it's like paints, and a coating, and some paintbrushes, and some spray paint. It's like, so much of it is, the, how much it costs is because of the labor and your personal time that's going into it and then that is something that can feel very subjective and so you're up against, and you're up against other people, and you want the job and it's really scary to think about how much you are personally worth and then think that you might get somebody else might like be on sale compared to you.
Stephanie Eche 38:34
Right.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 38:35
So it's definitely not something that I figured out at all. But at least it was very helpful to get that one interaction to realize where I was kind of leaning, which was towards underselling myself by massive amounts. So knowing that about myself was really helpful, and I have a feeling that most female identifying artists are in that same boat.
Stephanie Eche 38:59
I think one thing that's really hard too, is that, again, it's different on the type, particularly talking about public art and commissions, government entities have a whole different way of doing thing, but with real estate developers, what I have found is if they really want that artist, and they really love whatever the proposal is, they will get to that number. It's like, it's not really a question of how much, there's not, often they say they don't have a budget because they have lots of money, it's just like a weird world and they're always pulling it from different budgets, so they always can find the money, but it's so hard to know what, what that amount might be.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 39:36
Yeah and I also think that it's hard because you're a individual and as an artist, you probably are not rich, and you're working with, if you're working in the commercial sphere, you're working with corporations or with entities that have so much more, the meaning of money to them is so much different than the meaning of money to you. Like that job that I was referring to, I initially came to the curator with a 15k budget, and then it got bumped up to 25k, to me 25k is so much money. But, to this organization, it was nothing, it was pennies.
Stephanie Eche 40:18
Yeah, it might have been like a quarter of their full budget and they had a few other projects and they could have added 20 here or there. I would say I'm often working with full, it really depends on the project, but usually when I'm working with clients, they're doing a couple projects, and so there's a bigger bucket of money that you can kind of move around and be like, oh, well if this person or, yeah, it's really weird. The budgeting aspects are really weird. But one thing that I think that I wish particularly, specifically real estate developers would do is actually set a budget, because if they had a budget, then you could say okay, their full budget is this and for, so you can have this many projects for this much or this many for this much, but because it's always like ‘we don't know, see what you can find’ it's like, okay.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 40:20
It’s inconvenient.
Stephanie Eche 41:02
Yeah. I'm really curious if there's anything you've read or listened to that's inspired you recently.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 41:08
So, I am constantly listening to audiobooks while I paint. I have a lot of repetitive detail work, so I listen to, the most recent book that I listened to was Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Have you heard of that book?
Stephanie Eche 41:29
I've heard of it, but I haven’t read it.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 41:29
She also wrote Little Fires Everywhere. I did not love Little Fires Everywhere. I thought that the, I have a chip on my shoulder about stereotypical artist characters. But Little Fires Everywhere is about the experience of being a half white, half Taiwanese girl in high school, which is, which and like how difficult it is to be a biracial person and be the first of your kind, kind of, have no one else around you like you other than your siblings and that is an experience that I had, and I had a very hard time in high school, so that was a really compelling book, because it felt like it was about myself. I also listen to a lot of sci-fi. I'm interested in world building, so that's, you know, world building. That's my favorite thing.
Stephanie Eche 42:18
What are some sci-fi authors you listen- you're saying you listen to the books of them?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 42:24
Yes. Listen to the books of them. Yes. So, I think Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin is my favorite sci-fi novel. I also recently listened to the His Dark Materials series, which was amazing. I don't really have high tastes, but anything that's going to like, especially series or trilogies, anything that takes up a seriously long amount of time in the studio and can kind of transport you to another world, I’m there for it.
Stephanie Eche 42:57
Have you read The Word for World is Forest?
Stephanie Eche 42:59
By Ursula K. Le Guin.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 42:59
No.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 43:02
I need to.
Stephanie Eche 43:03
It's amazing. It's very short, so it doesn't really fit your long, long book requirement. But, it's really amazing and I loved it, I kind of more recently started reading sci-fi and I didn't realize how relevant it was, I guess. Who are three people who have been most influential to you?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 43:24
My director in graduate school. I went to MFA at MICA and my director was Grace Hartigan, who founded the MICA painting program MFA. She was this force of nature abstract expressionist. And she was a very difficult person and difficult teacher, she definitely made me and every other student cry many times, she was not a fan of my work. She, I had come out of, I had a small stint of being a graphic designer, I had done some illustrations. My work was pretty, it was not gestural, it was relatively graphic. There was a lot of black outlines around things, I was still very maximalist and interested in detail and large spaces, but there was very little room for experiment or chance and that's something that she as an abstract expressionist hated, so it's because of her and some of her like snippy critiques of me that I started pouring paint. So, if it was up to her, I would have just only poured paint and just stopped and then exactly like Morris Louis or something, but I thought it could be really interesting to use this language of abstract expressionism pouring paint and then incorporate a pattern and detail and design which are all things that she hated. She used to say that pattern would tickle the eye but leave the soul untouched. Which is, now that I think about it, was actually a very Eurocentric way to think about art. So that's terrible, I totally disagree, but I thought it would be, I liked the idea of incorporating, bringing in highly detailed pattern, repetition, silkscreen controlled elements, and then also having, yeah, having this one abstract expressionist moment. Well, so that's one, the second person, Grace Hartigan actually died while I was a student.
Stephanie Eche 45:28
Oh my gosh, yeah, I was wondering.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 45:30
She passed away and we had a couple semesters where Joyce Kozloff came in and worked with the remaining students in that program. So she is an artist based in New York, she was a big figure in the, IS a big figure in the pattern and decoration movement in the 70s. So she's exactly the opposite of abstract expressionism, it's a lot of very busy, full pieces with tons of pattern and detail and decoration that are drawn from all cultures, all these various textile patterns and tile patterns that are kind of brought into these very full paintings. So that was kind of like the other side, like I have this one woman who really kind of brought me around to gesture, and movement and physicality in painting and then another who brought me around to detail and pattern and high levels of control. And then the last person is I'd say, Mequitta Ahuja, who was based in Baltimore, and recently moved to Connecticut, she does these figure paintings that are generally self portraiture, but they are, she calls it auto mythography. It's creating mythology around herself and putting herself into the canon of the history of portraiture. So she is actually the founder of that Blue Sky Dayton program that I described, that's how I first met her and she's just another force of nature, this person that I'm constantly looking to and learning from. Especially when it comes to how do you place yourself in history as a woman of color, making work in a relatively traditional medium, which is definitely what I'm doing. So she's been this kind of beacon that I've been following for some time. So three really amazing women.
Stephanie Eche 47:29
We'll definitely link to those artists in the show notes. I'm wondering, since you brought that up, have you read The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 47:37
No. Apparently, I need to read a lot more or something.
Stephanie Eche 47:41
It's an essay. I just read it. I'm part of this dystopian short story club right now, during this time.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 47:49
Really, is it fun?
Stephanie Eche 47:50
Yeah, no, it's shockingly therapeutic. But it talks about just in history, we're told that the hero or the warrior or the combat is what changed things and moved things forward, but her theory is maybe the first thing that we actually had wasn’t a sword, or like a, a tool of some sort. Maybe it was actually a container and the concept of holding and carrying and more of that other side of just thinking about it differently, and that kind of made me think about just all the ways in which I personally feel like women and people of color have been obviously underrepresented in art history and history in general, when you grow up in America, but also how hard it is to fit yourself within the canon or having to do double work of knowing all these other histories and then what is known in the art world, or the Western art world, and that's something I'm personally struggling with. I'm doing research on women, Mexican artists from like the 1920s and it's all these amazing people that I didn't know about, this whole world that I just even though I'm Mexican American, and even though my parents, you know, did the best they could and taught me a lot about my own culture, you don't grow up learning, you learn about like Frida Kahlo, and that's and Diego Rivera and the male muralists, maybe, but not about all the women doing amazing work and not just as visual artists, but also as writers or dancers, or researchers, you know?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 49:16
I love what you said about having to do double work, too. Because when you only learn that one history, then it changes not only your understanding of the canon, but also your entire vocabulary and how, how you even come to art in the first place. Like your question about landscape painting and that canon of landscape painting. If you're only, I am also fighting against this doctrine that I've kind of been brought up with that landscape painting has to come from one perspective, and that perspective is singular, individualistic and godlike. Which is obviously coming from white males, like that's, that's the idea, that's the one way that landscape has been understood in the western canon for centuries and centuries and that's not actually the only way that you can think about a place or about living in a place, but it is something that we're constantly fighting against, and I am constantly fighting against. And I actually think that that was one of the reasons why I really loved Everything I Never Told You, because it's so much about never feeling like you belong, like you can fit yourself in to a, into a trajectory where other people are also fitting in with you, and always feeling like you're on the outside and I think that that's the way that women and people of color when you look, it's like you're trying to insert yourself into the space, but also having to relearn everything about the cannon around you. It's really hard.
Stephanie Eche 50:49
Yeah.
Stephanie Eche 50:51
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Stephanie Eche 51:05
What's something you wished I had asked you?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 51:07
Maybe one thing that I'd love to talk about, just like if we're nearing the end is motherhood and parenting and a career in the arts.
Stephanie Eche 51:17
It's funny because I definitely had that on my list. In an interview you did with Friend of The Artist you say, ‘don't relegate your artmaking to stolen moments. Having a family is totally possible’. I don't have a family, but I am developing a business and I still find that maintaining my studio time, like this week, for example, I haven't had any studio time and it's really bothering me, and so yeah, I can't even, I would like to have a family at some point and I think for a while I was terrified, like, oh my god, I have to do like my whole art career before I have kids, which obviously is not what you should need to do or have to do or whatever. But yeah, can you elaborate a little bit more?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 51:59
Oh, I forgot about that particular quote, that quote seems really rosy right now. Now that I'm homeschooling, but actually, I think that I can still stand behind it because it's the problem of it is the concept or the vocabulary of the the term ‘stolen moments’, as if you're stealing something away from what really matters, right? So we grow up in this society where women are taught to believe that any time that is taken away from your family is you're stealing it, you're stealing the moments from your family, like your own time. Like I'm stealing my own time from the people who really, it really belongs to which is my children, which is horrible, but like, even if we don't think that we believe that, that term ‘stolen moments’ is a term that everybody understands and that's actually what's the underpinning of that term. So I, before I had kids, I also felt like, I would have to finish my whole career first and then have kids, which is not realistic, you shouldn't do that. And that's not a thing, like that, I mean, that's not possible to at least it wasn't to me to get to any place in my career that I'd be satisfied and then just stop everything. I actually feel like I have had, I've been, I've come into a better place in my career since having kids. I think part of it is because of that transition away from solely making work for gallery spaces that I was describing, so that moment of upheaval, when a bunch of those galleries, all went out of business was actually in the end turned out to be a good thing for me, but I have a really supportive partner. He's currently taking care of the kids right now, so that I can take care, I can be on a phone call. That is definitely not something to ignore, or pretend is not a part of the equation. But if you are able to have some level of support, it makes all of the difference. I think the problem with our society is, is that asking for support seems like it should, it's some sort of favor that you don't really deserve, because you ought to be doing everything on your own. And so if you come up in this society where you believe that all of the work has to be done by you alone, then of course, you're not gonna have time to have an art career and also a day job and also raise your kids. But that isn't the only way to raise children. You know, it should be a more communal experience than that and it can be, it's just that you're fighting against the tide when it comes to American expectations in society.
Stephanie Eche 54:51
I remember the last, maybe the last time I saw you, actually, when I happened to be at stable randomly and you were there because you have a studio there.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 55:01
Yeah, that was great!
Stephanie Eche 55:02
How often do you bring your kids to the studio? How does that change how your studio works?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 55:08
Before the pandemic I brought, I may have brought my daughter to the studio every day. It was just as much her space as it is mine. I actually split it into a corner of it, a relatively large corner was all toys and a play mat and she spent the same amount of time there every day that I did. A lot of time I would make work while she was sleeping, but a lot of the time, she actually was one of those kids that it's possible to just put her in a corner and she'd do her own thing and I could paint. That was, that also is partially luck of the draw, I think, like my son, I never would have been able to do that. So I have a home studio as well. Now I kind of split my time between the two studios and I no longer feel comfortable bringing my kids to the studio because there are some shared spaces, so I end up now doing my studio work after they go to bed, I kind of do a handoff with my husband, where I take care of them during the mornings and then up to their nap time around three and then I go to the studio and stay at the studio until like two in the morning. So, I actually get much more time in the studio now than I did pre-pandemic, which is a weird little silver lining, I suppose to this awful situation.
Stephanie Eche 56:30
Yeah, it's weird how it's, it's changed my sleep schedule, and at first I was like, I'm so annoyed, I'm going to bed really late and I'm not waking up super late, but I am waking up later than I used to. But then it's like, what difference does it make?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 56:44
I feel like I’m in college again.
Stephanie Eche 56:45
Yeah, it's like you just do what you feel like doing and then it's more fun. Yeah, we're definitely learning.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 56:52
The pandemic that I've seen has, I think that if you are in a heterosexual relationship with kids, sexism is going to enter into your relationship when the kids come. And that's, I don't know anybody that that hasn't been the case for, and it's really, really hard, and especially as an artist, because I do have a more flexible schedule, I found that I was doing the bulk of the childcare, even though with public arts and my career, I was bringing in more money than my partner, and yet doing all the childcare. So there was definitely a level of resentment around that and now, because of those stay at home orders and everything, suddenly our domestic relationship and labor has become a lot more egalitarian. I'd be curious to know if that's a universal trend. It seems like it might be, if men are being forced to come home more, then they're probably doing more cleaning. I don't know.
Stephanie Eche 57:58
I hope so, anecdotally, though, okay, from one person, I heard that they're still doing all the cooking and cleaning of the dishes and things and meal prep. And then another person, this was actually in my NYC crit Club, which is we meet and do a critique of each other every week, the guest crit- critique, she's an artist, and also a mom and she was saying how, I don't want to misquote her, but, it sounded like what she was saying is that her husband, because he made more money, or because he had like a normal job, he had to work during normal job hours and she had to watch the kids because she's an artist, and has more of a flexible schedule, so to speak. Right? And so I am a little bit nervous that for for women, yeah, it's like a weird, maybe in some cases it actually becomes more terrible for people.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 58:55
Actually, yeah, now that you say it, I totally take it back. What I was saying before sounds way too rosy. It's definitely a problem that we are not escaping.
Stephanie Eche 59:09
Well, and it comes down to like whose work is more important, whether or not it earns or maybe it's who's, who, like how do you determine the importance of the work, whose time or like, who can have morning time free and who can have evening time free, you know, just the whole, even if you get some time during the day, is that your preferred time to work? Yeah, I've been kind of wondering about that. But I had to make a calendar with Jeremy because at first it was like, I'm not saying he would be like ‘what's for dinner’, but it just felt, it's sometimes, some of it is self imposed things, you know, no one's expecting me to do anything, but I feel like I need to figure out what to eat because I'm starving. So I just made a calendar and I'm like, this is my day, this is your day, on your day, I don't care what you do, you can order out for every meal, but you figure out what we're eating. And then on my day, I'll figure out what we're eating because it's the figuring out part that also takes time and effort. And money.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:00:00
Yeah, well, that’s also really smart because that’s also fighting against the unconscious triggers in your brain that are like gendered and that are, you are going to end up doing more domestic labor, if you only just rely on these instincts that have been trained into you from years and years of living in America.
Stephanie Eche 1:00:20
Right. And even like the, again, I'm not saying he didn't do this before, but he'll like, do the dishes and it's, because even the having to ask right like, ‘could you do it’, that's a whole other thing.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:00:31
Yeah.
Stephanie Eche 1:00:32
Yeah. Sexism.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:00:35
Is hard.
Stephanie Eche 1:00:36
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I'm really excited.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:00:42
It was fun.
Stephanie Eche 1:00:42
Yeah. Where can our listeners connect with you online?
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:00:46
I am on Instagram, it's the only social media platform that I'm really on. My handle is @ktzulan, which is spelled k-t-z-u-l-a-n and I'm also at katherinemann.net.
Stephanie Eche 1:01:00
Awesome. Well, I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes and to everything you've referenced on this chat and yeah, thank you so much for taking time. I hope, I hope I can see you soon.
Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann 1:01:14
Later.
Stephanie Eche 1:01:14
Bye. Thank you. 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.
Stephanie Eche 1:01:42
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