Ja'Tovia Gary Page | The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts

Ja’Tovia Gary has taken part in many interviews. Here, a culling: consider that together they might offer a world view.

I’m resisting categorization. I’m attempting to put forward my own style, something that is new, a new language. 1

Though I am a filmmaker, my practice also includes sculpture and installation, and to a lesser extent paintings. I have plans for a number of cinematic sculptures, basically sculptures that have a filmic element…I view space, time, and color as materials.

Much of my work exists between the "art" and "film" worlds. Meaning there are iterations of works that might screen in a theatrical context, like in a cinema. That work might also take shape in a different iteration within a museum or gallery exhibition space. Within that context the work might also include art objects, ready-mades, sculpture, or props in order to further flesh out the ideas presented in the time based work that is being projected. 2

I feel because I am someone who comes from communities that have been marginalized, it’s very easy for folks to say, Oh, you’re this or You’re that. I’m interested in kind of pulling back the layers of the thing and understanding the multivalent aspects of my lived experience, be it black, be it woman, be it queer, whatever. 3

The past is not gone, because it’s ever-present. Right?... We are not moving through life untethered to the past. There is a tradition that I exist in, and I’m often trying to talk about something that is enduring. 4

History is never gone, it’s always present with us, its residue lingering. For us to attempt to erase or obscure this is not only dishonest, but willful violence. I’m here as the timekeeper to correct those acts of violence wherever possible. 5

What you’re seeing comes from a kind of necessity. 6

The artist is here to show us things that we are unfamiliar with, whether they’re about ourselves or whether it’s about the collective. We are here to expose in many ways what can be done, what can emerge, to excavate the future from the ashes of the past. 7

If you are denied something, you have to get creative on how to fill in the blanks. 8

“Regard is a habit of care. It is appreciation and esteem. It is the right of repair.” 9

- Christina Sharpe

“Imagination is the engine of internal life for Black people. It is an engine of black life.” 10

- Christina Sharpe

I want folks to think about the possibilities of crafting a new reality. The possibilities of crafting a whole new world. Do we have to live in a society that’s governed how it’s governed now, or can we completely wipe it away and start new? That is the role of the artist, is to bring about the notion of a new possibility. 11

Creativity and storytelling are in fact a critical terrain. It's not just where imagination goes to flourish. It's where people are wrestling for power, people are wrestling for their right to define reality, their right to assert their perception of reality as the dominant perception. 12

When I start a project, it’s a kind of investigation and curiosity at the beginning. I’m basically culling materials. I’m gathering. A lot of the work takes on a collage aesthetic. So I am thinking through an idea and then gathering all of the supporting documents. In some ways it’s essayistic.13

A new piece comes from an idea, and it usually also comes from a feeling. The feeling is not disconnected from the idea. 14

My work is largely conceptual. The films are at once experimental, essayistic, surreal, and deeply personal. I am concerned with how power and the state use narrative to shape the public's perception. also deeply concerned with history and the future and Black women's roles within it. 15

…I think you have to be doing something different with your structure. I think you have to be transgressing the normative form, like the Aristotelian form. I think that it’s hard to bring a “Black Radical Imagination” or, as [Arthur] Jafa says, “Black visual intonation” into a structure that is overwhelmingly European and Western. You can, but you would have to break it, at least in part. 16

I remember thinking: This may be a stretch to these folks. They may or may not be able to understand, or see, that what I’m doing feels quite impressionistic as well, in terms of the cutting. The fact that these are, in my mind, cinematic poems. They’re not following the traditional structure of cinema, but they are in turn really interested in a kind of affective possibility and a kind of emotional resonance above story. 17

- On the installation of The Giverny Suite at MOMA, 2019

My idea of universal is to be very specific. This is a notion that comes from Toni Morrison…the more detailed and specific you are about your audience and about your experience when you are creating your work, the more universal it becomes. 18

I’m always thinking about Black people when I’m making work. 19

I’m placing myself in the works because they’re autoethnographic. You can get to a truth through me. I’m using my body, my life, my experiences to talk about larger ideas. 20

It has always been really important for me not only to include my own body and likeness in the work, but also to “show my hand.” This might include: a style of editing that draws attention to itself and moves against the Hollywood style of continuity editing, the use of my voice, and other stylistic and aesthetic choices that point to an actual maker behind the camera. Doing so allows me to subvert the preponderance of so-called objective filmmaking by asserting a clear point of view and literally pointing to the manipulation inherent in filmmaking.

I’ve been including my body in my work since my undergraduate experiments in film…I am attempting to draw connections between my lived experiences and the concepts and ideas articulated in the works. For Quiet As It’s Kept, that includes notions around beauty, colourism, madness, duality, artistic process, innocence, and intimacy. How does my body lend credence or perhaps invoke dubiety in conjunction with the arguments presented, bringing both a tension and a sense of corroboration? My image is important in the work because I am the vessel through which the ideas are filtered. These are subjective films shaped by my voice and life as a contemporary Black woman in America and all that entails. 21

What am I offering up that will be helpful in some way that will bring about beauty, that will bring about understanding, that will bring about the transformation that we are so desperately in need of? 22

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” 23

- Audre Lorde

“Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.” 24

- Saidiya Hartman

The artist exists in the domain of truth-telling, in the domain of those who are care workers and educators. It shouldn’t be under the control of the tyrant. The artist has to be free. I forget who says this: “The king fears only the poet.” Thank God for the poet. Right? You’ve got to be somebody that they fear. 25

“The individual artist is by nature a questioner and a critic; that’s what she does. Her questions and criticisms are her work., and she is frequently in conflict with the status quo. But the artist can’t help that; if she is to have any integrity at all in her art, she can’t help it.” 26

- Toni Morrison

“There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” 27

– Toni Morrison

1. https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2023/september/why-art...

2. Herb Alpert Award application, Fall 2024

3. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a45357785/jatovia-...

4. Ibid.

5. https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/sadie-barnette-ja-tovia-gary-erin...

6. https://filmmakermagazine.com/111526-the-rocking-chair-interview/#.YkW4f...

7. https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/visual-artist-and-filmmaker-ja...

8. Filmmaker Magazine, op. cit.

9. Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, Note 181

10. Ibid. Note 209

11. https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/art-books-music/a45357785/jatovia-...

12. https://sva.edu/features/q-and-a-with-ja-tovia-gary

13. The Creative Independent, op. cit.

14. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/t-magazine/jatovia-gary-moma.html

15. Herb Alpert Award application, op. cit.

16. Filmmaker Magazine, op. cit.

17. https://yalereview.org/article/rachel-cohen-inheriting-impressionism?fbc...

18. The Creative Independent, op. cit.

19. Ibid

20. Ibid.

21. https://cmagazine.com/articles/sinister-pleasure-interview-with-jatovia-...

22. The Creative Independent, op. cit.

23. Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury, 1985. https://makinglearning.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/poetry-i...

24. Quoted by Christina Sharpe in her essay, Beauty is a Method, e-flux Journal, Issue 105, December 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/303916/beauty-is-a-method/

25. SVA Features, op.cit.

26. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations

27. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970