"I Never Start with Nothing": Mary Lum on Collage and Constructed Geographies

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark) speaks with Mary Lum, a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts, about how her intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, constructed geographies, and her use of text as image. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study, and several MacDowell Fellowships, Lum taught at Bennington College from 2005 to 2022.  Her work has been exhibited in and commissioned by MASS MoCA,  The Drawing Center, and Oxford University, among numerous other venues.

Transcript

Caro Fowler 

Welcome to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. I am Caro Fowler, your host and Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In this series of conversations, I talk with art historians and artists about what it means to write history and make art, and the ways in which making informs how we create not only our world, but also ourselves.  

Caitlin Woolsey 

In this episode, you’ll hear from me, Caitlin Woolsey, Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program. I speak with Mary Lum, a visual artist based in North Adams, Massachusetts, about how her intricate collages, paintings, and photographs explore the margins of city life, constructed geographies, and her use of text as image.  

Mary Lum 

“What's exciting to me about making things is bringing fragments together. I always work with a collage process. […] I'm not interested in providing a linear story. I'm not interested in making someone whole through looking. What my work does mostly is it implicates the viewer as part of the story. It makes the viewer solve the problem in a way.” 

Caitlin Woolsey  

Thank you so much for joining me, Mary. It's a real pleasure to have you on the podcast. 

Mary Lum   

It's a real pleasure to talk to you, Caitlin. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

I'd love to start a little bit differently than we sometimes do, where we kind of look at tracing early influences, and instead ask you to speak a little bit about what you're thinking about in your artistic practice at this particular moment, and then we'll kind of take a more retrospective look 

Mary Lum   

Great, I appreciate you taking that approach. Because of course, what I'm working on now is always the thing that I'm most articulate about, because it's on my mind all the time. I also would say I'm just working all the time. I live in my studio and literally to get to the shower from my bed in the morning, I have to walk past my work tables. I don't want to pretend that I'm someone who's so completely, madly driven that I can't leave my work alone. But living in the studio, you also can't escape your work. So right now I'm working on an artist’s book and exhibition that surrounds the research that I did last summer at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge. I was given a prompt to find something in the archives at the Schlesinger Library to work on, through the things that I would then subsequently make. The exhibition was always a given. But it was my choice to also make an artist's book rather than an exhibition catalog.  

So in July last year, I spent my whole month absolutely freezing in the library archives. What I found were 11 boxes of papers in a big portfolio by the artist, Corita Kent, or you may know her as Sister Corita, for Sister Corita was a nun at the Immaculate Heart College. She taught at the Immaculate Heart College and was part of the Immaculate Heart community. And she was also one of the most seminal and important Pop artists who were working with word and image, with ideas about words and images together, in the 1960s. She sat alongside, though was not nearly as recognized by the art world, as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg. She was working in the same kind of revolutionary way that they were, especially Andy Warhol, in that Sister Corita used silkscreen printing to point out aspects of daily life in the 60s that we may have overlooked.  

And this brought her work very close to my practice. I work with words and images, and words as images. We also work with ideas about daily life—the everyday things that surround us all the time that we sometimes take for granted and don't even think about, or if we think about them, disregard them as unimportant. There’s a quote from Corita Kent that opens my artist book, that I'll just read: “I think I am always collecting in a way walking down the street, with my eyes open, looking through a magazine, viewing a movie, or visiting a museum or grocery store. Some of the things I collect are tangible and mount into piles of many layers. And when the time comes to use these saved images, I did like an archaeologist and sometimes I find what I want, and sometimes don't.” 

Caitlin Woolsey  

You spoke to the resonances between her interest in word and image, and using language and text as a visual element. But how is that being expressed? And what does the transition look like from the research and archival process that you were undertaking in July, to the work that you're making that's informed by the time spent with her archives?  

Mary Lum   

In the archive, I took a lot of photographs. And then I would print out photographs and start cutting them up and recombining them. Mostly photographs of text, some photographs of her. What the 11 boxes contained was mostly correspondence, and she corresponded with a wide range of important artists and designers in the 1960s and 70s, including Charles and Ray Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and Anaïs Nin, and long correspondence with Daniel Barragan, the activist priest who was jailed for his antiwar efforts. So as I cut into the material and started recombining it, what happens is you start to think about the archive in new ways. You start to think, oh, I need to go back to this folder. Because, you know, Ray Eames’ handwriting is just like Sister Corita’s photograph of barbed wire. Or you start seeing relationships and resonances that you may not have seen upon a straight viewing of the archive. I'm an artist, not a scholar. And so perhaps, and likely, I missed a lot of what a scholar would have seen or gotten out of those 11 boxes. But in my visual research, then I took it back to my office, and just worked on recombining the things that I found. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

And that's characteristic of your artistic practice, in the way that you work with and through ideas and found elements and materials. That you are sort of cutting apart and layering and repositioning different elements, and looking at resonances, between things that ostensibly might be completely different, like Eames’ handwriting and the image of the barbed wire. 

Mary Lum   

That's exactly right, Caitlin. It's exactly what I do. I never start with nothing. I think that the idea of a blank piece of paper or a blank canvas is really romantic and lovely for everyone else. But for me, I need to find something, or at least think of a relationship or a color or something and start there. I only really work with fragments. So what's exciting to me about making things is bringing fragments together. I always work with a collage process.  

I'm trying to think if I'm lying here, but there's nothing that I make that's made out of a whole thing. It's always a fragmented kind of image, which is a good metaphor really, for everything about my life, that it's divided into little pieces, and they're not separate. They can't be separate at all. I'm not interested in providing a linear story. I'm not interested in making someone whole through looking. What my work does mostly is it implicates the viewer as part of the story. It makes the viewer solve the problem in a way without being tricky. When I was in college, I was often accused of being clever. And that was so important. There was nothing I wanted my work to be less than clever. And so over the years, I've tried to refine my practice, so that the work is tough rather than clever. But another writer who is a writer, who I really respect, once said to me, “What's wrong with tough and clever?” You know, does it have to be either/or?  

As I've worked over the years, I've come to understand that it's not how many bits of things you make, it's the way you put things together. I have a studio full of fragments. I have so many plastic tubs of these comics clippings or the painting fragments. But I also, without being at all sentimental about the things that I put in my work, I have a hard time throwing things away because I think that they might be useful. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

You’ve probably found through your working process that things return in ways you don't expect, in terms of how you use fragments? 

Mary Lum   

Absolutely things return. You know, I grew up with books and libraries and art supplies as my main companions. I was largely left to my own devices as a child, although my mom provided with me with as many art supplies or books as I could possibly ever want. And I had a great uncle who was a children's science book writer. And his publisher, McGraw Hill, used to send him stacks and stacks of books, children's books to review, of all sorts, not just science books. He just send those on to me. I always had piles of books, and I read everything in sight. And in fact, even into my adult years, I’m not an especially fast reader, but I do love the act of reading, and I can get really engaged. I know as a child I really didn't connect well with a lot of my classmates ever. One, because I was different, because I was Asian, and being an Asian in the 50s was practically the worst thing you could possibly be, because of World War Two and the anti-Asian sentiment. And so, you know, I really had books and drawing as ways to not only entertain myself and feel like I had a presence in the world, but also just to know that I existed. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

In the access that you had to books and art, did you see your experience or yourself reflected back? Or was it more just through the act of being in a kind of conversation with the characters, or through creating your artwork, that it felt like you had a kind of purchase on yourself and your world in a different way? 

Mary Lum   

There were no Chinese role models. When I was a girl, my father was a Chinese man who wanted desperately to be a typical American. And so he didn't teach me Chinese. We went to Hawaii often to visit my Chinese grandmother, whom I couldn't speak to. And I didn't see myself reflected at all when I was growing up in Michigan in literature, or in artwork. When I went to college, I was really lucky to have a Chinese woman as a painting teacher, who was also just a really good teacher. She was my first role model, that you could actually be an artist and be a reader and have a kind of a normal life as a just a person in the world, not a Chinese-American person in the world. It's really interesting because she was a taskmaster, and she loved Josef Albers’ color theory. And There's a big Josef Albers book of silkscreens that are the solutions to problems he gave to his students. It's called Interaction of Color. And Mrs. Chang, my Chinese painting teacher, would bring that book into the painting studio at the University of Michigan. And she would just flip open the silkscreen folders, and she would say “mix this color,” “mix this color,” “mix this color” to the whole class, and we would all complain bitterly. But we all really learned what colors were made up of.  

I also had this surrealist teacher named Gerome Kamrowski. And he was really part of the New York art scene in the 1950s and 60s. He's known as a compatriot of Jackson Pollock and William Baziotes. There's all sorts of anecdotes, if you look up Gerome Kamrowski, about the three of them flipping paint onto a canvas, and that being Jackson Pollock's introduction to action painting. But what Kamrowski gave me was he taught me about automatic writing. He taught me about the surrealists, where you pay attention to what's coming from you, rather than what you're looking at on the outside. That was in combination with a course that I took in lettering; it was a graphic design course, but it was just called lettering, which I loved, because you just had to sit there with a pen and graph paper and draw diagonal lines and then draw curved lines all over, days’ worth of diagnosing curves, and then all of a sudden, you put them together into letter forms. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

It's so interesting that that those early moments studying art in college, mixing these different pigments to make a color, it's like the fragment being combined and recombined, or the different arcs or curves being combined into letters, were in some way priming you to think or to create in ways that resonate with the collage work that you make now. But at that time, were you making collages? Or were you really focused on painting primarily? 

Mary Lum   

No, I was making collages. Mrs. Chang, my Chinese teacher, was a collage maker. I just deeply admired her work and her collages. So of course, I had to make collages too. And then I carried that through graduate school. And it's very interesting to work with collages, torn paper collages. I spoke about sentiment before, that can get sentimental really fast if you love the materials too much. And it's the same with painting, if you might paint an area of your painting that you just love. And the thing that you have to do is get rid of it, then. You try and try to finish the painting, to preserve that thing that looks so good, and combines the colors in exactly that way. But that's exactly what you have to do, you have to create and destroy. I can just remember Mrs. Chang going “create and destroy,” “create and destroy.” It’s exactly what I do right now in my practice, in which I make something and then I often just cut it in half. If I can't make it work, I cut it in half. Or if I can't see how it could possibly be finished, I know that I have to put a big thing on top of it and then rip away that thing, or something. I know that it's a process. Rather, it's not an intellectual process. It's a visual and physical process. The intellectual work comes before and after. But the physical making of things is just that. It's just a matter of putting things down and taking them away.  

Caitlin Woolsey  

It makes sense in relation to you speaking about automatic writing and this effort to both tap into what's happening within oneself, rather than being outwardly focused, but also releasing yourself from the habituated modes, to see what strange things occur or what uncanny connections arise. 

Mary Lum   

I think that's exactly right, Caitlin. And, you know, when I was in graduate school, I sort of sleepwalked through graduate school. I'm not sure I learned anything. We were stuck in downtown Rochester in a studio and left completely by ourselves. But what I did in graduate school is a lot of research on Japanese prints. Graduate school was the last time I really painted with oil paint; I researched Japanese prints from the Edo period, and I appropriated the imagery. I would put details of their prints scattered around the surface of a large painting. And then I would write the title of the print right into the painting, in very fancy letters that I had learned to make in lettering class. The titles of Japanese prints are very descriptive: “the woman sitting on a cake box,” or “the poem of the pillow.” And of course, normal viewer could really see those elements in the painting. There was no woman or no cake box. There were just all of these little random fragments of the Japanese print scattered across the surface. So it was sort of like a more controlled form of automatic writing, I guess it was taking the idea of automatic writing one step further, in an appropriation way. 

In between undergraduate school and graduate school, I had one of the most highly formative experiences of my life, in that I moved to California, and I had never been to California. I moved to Los Angeles and looked for any job; I had this idea that I could be a nanny in Beverly Hills. But fortunately, I got a job in a store in Beverly Hills instead. And the store just happened to be Design Research, which was the epitome of elegance and good design in the 1960s and 70s. What Design Research did was it brought Finnish design and modernist furniture to the American public, a kind of idea of the lifestyle. It was probably the first lifestyle type retail venture, it was the precursor to Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, all of those kinds of stores. All of the people working in the store were in their 20s, like I was, and wanting to be artists, but having to have you know, a job, because the art world wasn't like it is now, or maybe it was, but I wasn't connected to it in the way that I am now. But at Design Research, I was the display person, meaning that every Thursday night I did the windows. I would have to think of an idea, getting feedback from various department managers, about what needed to be in the window. I would have to invent an installation. And so every Thursday night, I worked late into the night trying to put together various elements to make as a seductive composition. And Design Research very large glass windows that went from the top of the store to the ground to the sidewalk. So the sidewalk was brought into the store, and the store spilled out onto the sidewalk through this pane of transparent glass. And so I would make the window from the inside and then I would go outside, and I would see not only the things that I had arranged on the inside, but also the reflection of the big sculpture at the bank behind me, and the passing of daily life happening around. As if the window were a curtain. And you could almost walk through it 

Caitlin Woolsey  

At the time did you think about that work as a kind of extension or continuation of the art-making you'd been doing from childhood up through undergrad?  

Mary Lum   

I wish I wish I had been that sophisticated then. But I was just trying to do the job and somehow assert my identity as an artist through it. I didn't make the connection between that and making installations, and putting together bits of things. I think it really has something to do also with my interest in archives right now. Although I'm not interested in archives as a researcher, I'm interested in archives because of what they look like. I do love researching people that I feel a kindred spirit with, like I went to the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, and did a lot of looking at the papers of Ray Yoshida, who was a Japanese American artists taught for a long time at the Chicago Art Institute. He also made collections, like I make comics, and I looked at his notebooks and scrapbooks. And I felt a real kinship there. I think it’s never the shock of the new, it's the shock of the familiar. It's in how you are drawn to things. So I think that my interest in archives stems from the idea of being able to find things to look at that relate to what I think about.  

Caitlin Woolsey  

I also can see the ways in which I imagine at Design Research, they weren't getting an entirely new inventory every week, so it's also a matter of recombining, and rethinking the way that you're relating different colors or patterns or materials. Those practices of assembly and seeing relationships, I can completely see how it's like a mode of thinking that is transferable, whether you're looking at archival materials, or whether you're making a collage work in your studio, or whether you're creating a window installation…. Was there a particular moment or experience where you feel like language and text became more obvious as a visual element that you could mine? 

Mary Lum   

I can tell you a story that sounds a little bit unbelievable about when exactly text became a viable material for me. In the 1980s, I started going to Paris regularly, after I graduated from graduate school, after I taught at Oberlin. I got the courage to just pick up. I had been to Europe to the Olympics in 1973, but I hadn't really been to Europe on my own before, and never to Paris, which since I was a child, I was just obsessed with. I have found collections that I had as a child of the Paris subway map. I was in Paris and I was taking a lot of photographs. And where I stay in Paris is very near one of the bridges over the Seine and I would just stand on that bridge and look at the water for hours, the way the sun glints on it, in a Monet sort of way. And it's such a cliché, but I started trying to make paintings of that, with dots of paint, just little dots. And somehow I jumped over to thinking, that actually looks like text, what I'm making looks like text. So I would go to the bookstore in Paris and buy some cheap used books, old used books, and I started slicing the text up and trying to make them look like those water paintings by lining up the text, but slightly askew, in strips. That's really where it started. Through the 90s I would just show up in Paris with nothing to make. I mean, nothing. No materials. I brought an exacto knife and some paint brushes and things that would cost a lot of money in Paris at that time to buy. I would go to the flea market. There are several great flea markets in Paris on the weekends and I would look for something to start with.  

One year I found a pile of comic books, French comic books, and that started my whole engagement with comics, which that is another thing that I'm doing right now, is I've been drawing comics, abstract comics, or linear tales, but I'm really interested both in the relationship between word and image in comics. And also the words in the original Batman. They actually portrayed words, they animated words on the screen, they would say “bam,” and “pow,” and all that. Language to me has always been a natural kind of thing—language writ large. The idea that words could be material. But I didn't really realize that the way text looks is super interesting until that time in Paris. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

You also developed a kind of ritual or practice of walking through the city and taking photographs of things that you saw, and then using those images, reconfigured, or cut apart. Could you speak a little bit more about how that practice came to be, and maybe how you think about it in relation to your work and to other touchstones in art history? 

Mary Lum   

I started really thinking about walking in the City. I think around 1999, I had a residency at the International Studio Curatorial Program in New York. And at that time, it was in Tribeca and so every morning, I would have the walk through Soho and then across the canal and down to the studio; I think it was on Washington Street. I took different routes through Soho all the time, but I always stopped to get a coffee on Broadway. Ever since I had been going to New York regularly or sometimes living in New York, I always took pictures. I have a lot of pictures of the very same stretch of sidewalk and Soho from probably 1982 to 2002.  

But when I'm walking around, one of the things that I started understanding was the relationship between walking in the city and walking around your own memory. So I started making the analogy, and I made work about this, that you could be standing in one place, say Chinatown [in New York], and you could be thinking about another place, say Chinatown, San Francisco, and you could be from an entirely different place, you know, so that this kind of layering of identities through memory, it's the simultaneous aspect of that, where you can be three things at once.  

Caitlin Woolsey  

And do you think about that layering of memory in relation to a concept like psychogeography, or some of these terms that artists working in the 60s in Paris, like [Guy] Debord and the Situationists explored, or do you see what you're doing as something that on the surface maybe seems similar but is in fact quite different? 

Mary Lum   

I think it's really related, and at the same time I hesitate to jump into the Situationist pool. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

You evoking this layering of memory and then a kind of compression through this layering—I was curious to ask you about a work that you published 20 years ago in Art Journal, the art history journal, called 64 Scenes, and I believe the introduction was written by Steven Nelson for the piece. It plays on this questions of text and memory and narration and appropriation. But I also think, because it is a long horizontal, or a long, extended format, there's also this extended temporality that has something to me to do with a film strip splayed out. 

Mary Lum   

Thanks for about this piece called 64 Scenes, because I always felt that it was the hidden sleeper of the number of multiples that I've made over the course of my life. You're exactly right. It was meant to resemble a filmstrip. It’s a collection of 64 images that are fragments from New York Times photographs, and the fragments are all in color. They weren't cut from the paper in 1997. But 1997 was the year that the New York Times started printing color photographs in their paper, much to the chagrin of all “intellectual” people. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Did they think it was somehow less serious, or had less pathos than black and white? 

Mary Lum   

They really thought that it turned the New York Times into a popular paper like USA Today. Just the height of snobbery. So I would make a viewfinder, which was one of the strategies of Corita Kent, too, and then viewfinder out sections of these colored photographs from the newspaper. It was like walking around the city. It was like walking around the newspaper and trying to viewfinder these fragments, and so I would get a whole palette of fragments, and I would cut out hundreds of things. And then I would just slowly start assembling them into the strip. And this is not the only strip I made, this is just the only one that I that got to have another life beyond my making it. And I would try to arrange the fragments into rhythms of color and space, not by topic, because by then I was totally divorced from the topics that the photograph was. And then on the back of this filmstrip, it's about a yard long, on the back of each fragment is a text that is made by taking part of the stage directions from plays and reassembling them so that they form a more poetic reading. For example, one of the backs of these photo fragment says “the back door opens After a moment, a young late comer appears at the top of the balcony with a very slight and rather becoming glow of orange.” And so you know, they ostensibly made sense, but there was no narrative created. They were just these little thin vignettes of poetic re-combinations of words. And on one side of the photographs, there's a tiny, tiny, tiny text that's meant to represent the way sound might be added to the side of the film. I meant for it to be bound into the spine of the magazine so that once it was unleashed from its folded state, it would forever hang out of that magazine and be annoying, and could never fold it back up quite right, and so it might get destroyed in the process of use. I don't think it ever it didn't get bound into the magazine, it got put into the magazine as a multiple. And so I don't think it ever had that effect on anyone, or I don't know what the actual use of the piece was. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

So thinking about the interweaving of text and memory and image, I understand that you had a recent piece, which is your first foray into anything textile-based. And I'd love to hear you speak a little bit about that process, and the research that you did that in Oxford that led to the creation of this work. 

Mary Lum   

For a long time, I've known that the words “text,” “textile,” and “texture” all have the same Latin root, and I have never really had an opportunity to play that out in my work. But in 2019, I was invited by St. John's College at Oxford to enter a competition for a tapestry project for their new library and study center. I made a proposal for that project. And I didn't get it; a wonderful UK artist named Susan Morris was chosen. But they had liked my presentation so much that they invited me to work with another space. In the end, it was the interstitial space between a seventeenth-century library and the new study center. So it was kind of perfect for the way that I work. Because in these vertical fragments that I often use, it could be a kind of transition space between seventeenth-century and twenty-first-century. And so I went to the archives, to the special collections at the St. John's Library. And I looked at a lot of different texts from the eleventh century to the nineteenth century. And I chose several things to work with, and got photographs made. And then I just brought all of those photographs into the studio and started chopping them up and reassembling them.  

The final tapestry, which is really large—20 feet long, and I think eight feet high—it's comprised of fragments of text from different centuries, all arranged in vertical strips. And at the beginning, in the center, and at the end, I have words from Johnson's eighteenth-century dictionary. The first fragment is a fragment of the definition for “to read,” the middle one is “to study,” and the last one is “to write.” So these three fragments frame all of this other language chosen for its visuality rather than its meaning, including Gaz, which is an early form of Eritrean and Ethiopian root language, and including ancient Hebrew and Arabic, and old alchemical symbols, and so all framed by these three words. It's almost in the colors of the archive: off-whites, yellows, reds, the things that you would find in these in these ancient and more modern texts. My favorite text in there are Jane Austen's letters to her niece. The niece had written a book and asked her auntie for some advice about it, and Jane Austen wrote in no uncertain terms, her absolute opinion: not at all good! 

Caitlin Woolsey  

It’s fitting in some ways that the finished work hangs in this interstitial space. Thinking again back to your early formative experience doing the window installations at Design Research, and this sort of interplay between passing through but accruing. Maybe in closing, we can take it back to our local context here. I would invite you to speak a little bit about your work at MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, just down the road from the Clark. 

Mary Lum   

I feel so lucky to live here in this area. I don't think I'll live here forever. But to have the Clark and MASS MoCA and the Williams College Museum all within 15 minutes of where I live, is just the most wonderful thing. And in 2017, the director and curators at MASS MoCA asked me to make a proposal for another kind of interstitial space, what was eventually going to be a bike path. They asked for four murals that would invite repeated viewing and be adaptable. It is a space that opens to the outside at certain times of year. It's also the loading dock of the museum. And when MASS MoCA has their big concerts, it's the green room for the musicians. And so it’s a space that's both part of and not part of the museum. So I made three different proposals. The proposal that they chose was one where I had mixed the First Amendment of the Constitution with lorem ipsum, which is the dummy text that graphic designers use when they don't have the real text yet for their design work. And I mixed those up in Helvetica. And then I fragmented that text, and made a collage, or several collages. Then I projected those collages onto the walls of the space, and then I hand-painted them all. So it's an enormous amount of space. It took a really long time to paint in. I interspersed mirrors into this space as well, long, vertical mirrors. So if it were indeed a bike path—if I were riding a bike, I’d want to see myself riding the bike through the space. And then all sorts of accidental things happened in that work. It's very stark, black and white. And the letters in many sections are really big. So not only do you sort out some words upon viewing from the First Amendment, like “freedom of press” and “power of assembly” and all of the other keywords, but you also see accidental words. There are words that are put together through the combination of those texts, that really maybe only you see, or were certainly unintentional. I had always said to my students when I taught word and image classes, imagine that if every word you ever said hung in the air forever, so that when you're walking in a space, you're always parting a curtain of words. And this installation at MASS MoCA plays that out in some real way, which was very satisfying. 

Caitlin Woolsey  

It's such a beautiful concretization of what can be more abstract ideas about the visuality of language. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time and care in sharing your work, and also speaking with me about it today. 

Mary Lum  

Thank you, Caitlin. It's been really fun. 

Caitlin Woolsey 

Thank you for listening to In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing. For more information about this episode and links to resources referenced in the conversation, please visit clarkart.edu/rap/podcast. This program was produced by me, Caitlin Woolsey, with Caroline Fowler, music by lightchaser, sound editing by CJ DeGennaro, and additional support provided by Annie Jun and Maggie O’Connor.  

The Clark Art Institute sits on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people. We acknowledge the tremendous hardship of their forcible removal from these homelands by colonial settlers. A federally recognized nation, they now reside in Wisconsin and are known as the Stockbridge-Munsee community. As we learn, speak, and gather here at the Clark, we pay honor to their ancestors past and present, and to future generations by committing to building a more inclusive and equitable space for all.