This conversation, Aferro Publication No. 38, accompanies In Time and In Tide, the 2022 solo exhibition by Armisey Smith, curated by Evonne M. Davis. It was recorded in Smith’s studio at Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ, during her 2021 Lynn and John Kearny Fellowship for Equity.
Evonne M. Davis:
I’m thinking of when I’ve interviewed other people. I interviewed Gladys, and Eleta Caldwell, with Rodney when we were doing a thing for Art Reach at cWOW. It was like this big, dramatic thing.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, I remember Art Reach. I mean, it was a good program, but it was a lot of work.
Evonne M. Davis:
It was a lot of work, yeah.
Armisey Smith:
For absolutely no money, which was, you know… But it was for the youths.
Armisey Smith:
It was for the youths.
Evonne M. Davis:
I like that they also paid the youths. Even though, again, it wasn’t a lot of money. All right. All right. Let’s do it. So these are just kind of framework questions. They’re not necessarily anything other than that. But I thought we should start with the basics, right? Like where you’re from and stuff like that. So, Armisey?
Armisey Smith:
Yes?
Evonne M. Davis:
Where are you from?
Armisey Smith:
I am from Canarsie, Brooklyn. Second-to-last stop on the L train. (pause.) Projects. That’s where I’m from.
Evonne M. Davis:
Got you.
Armisey Smith:
That’s where I’m from.
Evonne M. Davis:
You told me a little bit about your schooling in Canarsie when we did our first studio visit. There were some pretty intense stories there.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, it was definitely intense. And we were initially sent to a mostly Black, Brown school in the “poorer” neighborhoods, quote unquote. And my mom and dad didn’t like the quality of the education that we were getting, because they grew up not having access to really good education, and they wanted their kids to have that. So they took us out, and got us to go to schools in a white neighborhood, (laughs) which was… I mean… it had its good parts in terms of the quality of the education, if we can kind of focus, and not deal with like all the racial stuff that was around us and being traumatized in classrooms and outside of the classrooms.
But it was rough. There were a lot of racist teachers, racist students, racist parents. And if you’re a smart Black kid, oh, you get triple. Triple the threats, problems, namecalling, all that stuff. And it was hard. But at some point I was just like, well, screw y’all. I’m here to get my education. And yeah, that I can read better than you. Guess what? You know what I mean? Because we grew up around books, and we had books in the house. I was reading Baldwin at 12. You know what I mean? I didn’t understand. Most people… I was just like, “Ugh.” So yeah. The schooling was difficult. And I still think about those times, from elementary through to high school, just being berated, not all the time, but most of the time. And then being berated for being kind of like a nerdy Black girl, nerdy, artsy. I had friends through a whole cross section of school, like the boosters, the football people, the nerdy AP kids, the artists, the musicians, the theater kids, all of it. And it was really, really cool, that kind of cross section, because I didn’t necessarily fit into one box. They just kind of sold me like, “Oh, yeah. You see the art girl.” I was like, “Okay.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Identity is pretty cool, because you can either divide it up, or not. Right? I know for me, there’s almost sort of a hierarchy of things, just for me personally, that sort of creates my self identity. Right? And I fully expected, when I was much younger, and I came out, that Queer would be this big, defining thing. And for a second it was. But then it wasn’t. Right? And then I was like, “Oh, so if that’s not my defining character, what is?” And it’s funny how that works. Right? The nerds, the jocks, the this, the that. But then those are just one aspect. You know? I wanted to be nerdy, but I wasn’t smart enough. It’s totally true. I loved the nerdy kids. I hung out with the nerdy kids. But I couldn’t compete with the nerdy kids.
Armisey Smith:
(laughs) I was definitely nerdy, but not like nerdy… One of my friends, I told her, “Oh, yeah, I’m a nerd.” She’s like, “No, but you’re, like, a cool nerd.” I was like, “I’ll take it. I’ll take it.” Because me and my brother, Hiram, were voracious readers. We would just read and read and read and read. And my mom’s like, “Okay, turn the lights out. Time to go to bed.” And we’d be still reading by the hallway light. And she’s like, “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Go to bed’?!”
But yeah. The kids in our neighborhood didn’t appreciate that we were nerdy, either. They were just like, “Oh, you trying to be white.” I’m like, “What does that mean?” I said, “Because I want to read, I like reading, that means I want to be a white person?” No. So they used to try with us. But we were like…they didn’t know. Because it was five of us, so we’d always play fight. So it was like, even if someone came at us and tried to fight us, we would whoop their ass, because… I mean, because we would fight.
Evonne M. Davis:
There’s five of you?
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, there’s five of us. We would always have straight WWF smack down when our parents went out the house. It was like… It was on. And I mean, it could be over nothing. We’d just be running through the house, beating each other up. So yeah.
Armisey Smith:
Keep the nerdy blerdy! I mean, because something cool about it. Love science, love kind of quirky things, and still read every single day, like a nerd should, so.
Evonne M. Davis:
There you go. Are there other artists in your family?
Armisey Smith:
Yes. My brother, Hiram, he’s a cartoonist and illustrator. He graduated with a degree in illustration from Parsons, as I did. And my nephew can draw really well, but he just didn’t pursue that avenue. But he’s very talented. I mean, at nine, he was drawing portraits. And I was like, “Get the hell out.” And then my brother, Maurice, my oldest brother, he was good at drafting, with precision, things like bridges and cars. He would design cars… With just no ruler. He did go to school for graphic design. So there’s this continuum. My mom was the one, the main one who drew, she painted. She did fashion illustration and stuff. So her line continues through some of her children.
Evonne M. Davis:
Very cool. Was she a professional artist?
Armisey Smith:
She wasn’t. She was trying to be, but she grew up in a very abusive home. She had talent. She knew how to draw. She knew how to put clothes together. And there was an opportunity for her to go to a fashion school, but her parents were like, “No, you can’t go.” Because she had to take care of her siblings, because her parents didn’t do it. So that was dreams dashed.
Evonne M. Davis:
Was she supportive of you and your artistic endeavors, or…?
Armisey Smith:
Yes and no. I mean she knew I had an aptitude for it. I liked drawing. Because I always asked her what her drawings were on the wall. I was like, “Ma, how’d you do that?” And so she would share with me how she did it and what she used and all that stuff. But growing up, I was like, “Oh, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor. I want to be a doctor.” I think because I wanted to help people. But mostly because my mom was always sick, having surgeries, and stuff like that. So I felt like that was kind like an offshoot of why I wanted to be a doctor. And I got pretty good grades. Aced biology. Came to chemistry, it was like the door just slammed closed. I was like, “Oh, man.” So in my teenage brain, I was like, “Well, if I can’t master chemistry, I cannot be a doctor. There’s no way I can be a doctor.” I was like, “Well, maybe I’ll try to be an artist.” Yes. I like to draw and paint and stuff like that. So it really kind of came to fruition, in the latter part of my sophomore year into my junior year. So it was my junior year I really started embracing that part of myself. My mom saw what I was doing. When I told her, “Mom,” I said, “I think I want to be an artist. I want to go to art school.” And she was like, “You’re going to end up driving a cab.” I was like, “Thanks, Mom.”
Evonne M. Davis:
(laughs) There have been some really great art projects that came from cab drivers.
Armisey Smith:
(laughs) I was like, “Thanks, Mom.” But I was still going to do it. And I did it mostly because that’s what I wanted to do. But I also did it because that door was closed on her. And I wanted to kind of pick up where she wasn’t allowed to. She didn’t tell me I couldn’t go. But I guess she was wrestling with some stuff. What, I don’t exactly know, but I know that she was wrestling with some things. And when I got the acceptance letter… I got accepted to SVA and to Parsons, but I really wanted to go to Parsons. And my teachers were like, “Oh, why don’t you try to go to Cooper Union?” I was like, “I don’t really like Cooper Union.” I don’t know what it was about Cooper Union, but I was just like, “Yeah, no.” I just wanted Parsons. And I got the acceptance letter. And it was a very muted response from my mother. I don’t know if she was proud or scared or something, but I was just kind of still going.
Evonne M. Davis:
There you go. And how was it? Did you like it? Tell me about Parsons. Wait, tell me the year first. What year are we talking about here?
Armisey Smith:
I graduated in ’95. I took a semester off, so I didn’t graduate with the class that I went in with. It was… a very interesting experience. I learned a lot of technical skills, how to care about your work, and the way that you treat it, and the way that you approach it. So that was good. And I met some really fantastic people, professors that we’re still in contact with each other through social media and stuff today. The downside to Parsons was that the only thing that really made that school diverse was the HEOP program, which I was a part of, because the HEOP programs help you to go to school. And my average was a little high, but they try to wiggle… Because basically, your grades have to not be so great, and you have to fit some financial criteria, like, basically, poor. So I fit the poor part, because my dad died when I was 15, and so there wasn’t any other income coming in. And so it was good, but it wasn’t diverse. Which, in some ways, I was kind of used to it, but not really. You know what I mean? My senior year, I was really into like activism: around racism, around, “Don’t wear fur!”
Evonne M. Davis:
You didn’t go around throwing red paint on people in fur coats, did you?
Armisey Smith:
I ripped some fur out of somebody’s jacket.
Evonne M. Davis:
Ohhhh. Did you join PETA?
Armisey Smith:
I sure didn’t, but I damn sure messed some fur up. So I used to go to a lot of protests and just things that my parents did, too. Because they were very political and talked about racism, talked about equality and equity. And so there was a lot of kind of racial encounters that I had in school. Because at that point, I was just like, “Y’all ain’t telling me what to do, not one goddamned thing what I should do with my work. This is my work, my worldview. This is how I see the world.”
Evonne M. Davis:
And did you find they were trying to kind of push you into-
Armisey Smith:
They were trying to push… They were like, “Well, you’re going into illustration.” I was like, “If I need to draw a white person, I will draw a white person.” I said, “But for now, this is what I’m going to draw. I want to draw or paint illustrations that reflect who I am, who I came from, as Black people. That’s what I’m going to do. And if you don’t like it, you can go kick rocks. Because I’m getting A’s anyway, because that’s how it is.”
So there was a lot of drama, especially around this Japanese graphic design artist, and they curated a show for him. And there was this coon-type figure with the big, red lips or whatever, advertising toothpaste. And I wasn’t there when it happened, but one of the HEOP students wrote on the piece, “This is racist bullshit,” in red. On the actual art.
Evonne M. Davis:
On the art, wow, that’s some bravery.
Armisey Smith:
And I knew the guy who did it. I was like, “For real?” He’s like, “Yeah, man.” He’s like, “Fuck this school.” And so it created this whole thing around censorship versus racism versus, how the hell did the curator not see or care? Just say, well, this might be a trigger for a particular group of people. Yeah. Even though they were like, “Oh, this is just about toothpaste.” I was like, “No, they could have done toothpaste without freaking big, red, watermelon-lipped Black person. He could have done that,” I said, “But he chose not to. He chose instead to go with a racist trope. So as Black people, we’re helping pay for the gallery, for their professors, for the facilities, for this, for that, whatever. And you damn best believe that if I was in there and somebody gave me a marker…I would’ve written on that shit, too.” So there’s all these talks and discussions and meetings and this and that and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the teachers were looking at me side-eye. And I was just like, “whatever.” I was like, “Okay, I’m going to be in class for 40 minutes, and then I got to go, because I got to go to a protest at the new school, so….” She’s like, “Well, you can’t leave.” I was like, “Watch me.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Do you think that it sparked a dialogue that went anywhere? Or was a little controversy and then it kind of fizzles out?
Armisey Smith:
It never goes anywhere. I mean, we burned books in the New School courtyard! I was on the kind of peripheral edges. And it was like, “Yeah, fuck financial aid!” And they threw all these financial aid books in the bonfire, whatever. And nobody came out. I mean, it was this huge bonfire in the courtyard. Nobody came to get us, arrest us, nothing. They were just like, “Let’s kind of leave them alone, let them be crazy, and just keep it moving.” But as there were teachers who didn’t really understand, there were teachers that did understand. And they were in solidarity with us. And that helped kind of move me through the rest of my time there. But I was still arguing with rich, white people from Long Island. Like, “Well, why did you have to put a boot on a Black person’s head? I don’t understand.” I’m like, “What?! You live where you live. I live where I live, where my brothers were chased when they went into certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Like, you don’t go to Bensonhurst. You don’t go to Bay Ridge. You don’t go to certain sections in Brooklyn or Queens or whatever. If you went there, they’re chasing your ass out, with bats and all kinds of stuff. So that’s not your experience, that’s my experience. So why are you questioning my experience?”
So I was happy I graduated. I was sad that my dad wasn’t there, because he had died five years prior to that. But my mom was proud. She was proud, she actually… I won a printmaking award. And she would go to the community center with all the other older ladies. She was like, “My baby won this award at Parsons, one of the top art schools.” I was like, “Mom, I thought I was driving a cab. What happened?”
Evonne M. Davis:
Did you ever drive a cab?
Armisey Smith:
I drove in a cab. But I actually never drove a cab, because I didn’t know how to drive, because I’m a New Yorker, and we just get on the bus, the train, that’s it. Yeah. So towards the end, she was proud. She was proud. Yeah.
Evonne M. Davis:
Very cool.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, yeah. So that was my art school life.
Evonne M. Davis:
And now here we are, a month away from your solo show. I mean, with a whole lifetime in between, of course. (laughs)
Armisey Smith:
With a whole lifetime. Yes, Lord. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Evonne M. Davis:
And you’ve done a lot of interesting things. I mean, you worked with different populations, students, people with disabilities. You’ve done murals…
Armisey Smith:
I’ve also worked with LGBT+.
Evonne M. Davis:
Tell me about that.
Armisey Smith:
That was really my formative years. I was 24 when I started working there. And I was a “youth worker,” quote unquote. I don’t know what the hell is.
Evonne M. Davis:
24 is a youth.
Armisey Smith:
I got to be like a pained-ass worker or whatever, because those kids were a pain in the ass. But I loved them, because I felt like they were mine. I was very super protective over them. And it was really, really interesting. I formed a lot of really great bonds with some of the staff, definitely with the young people. But definitely, some really tragic things happened that really destroyed me.
Evonne M. Davis:
So that would be the late ’90s?
Armisey Smith:
It was the late ’90s. These things would happen, either drug overdoses, or… the one that really, really hit me hard was this young woman, I still think about her to this day. Her name was Karine Bastian and she was from Haiti. Well, her mom was from Haiti, but I think she was first generation. And I was doing these art classes, in one of the rooms there. And she just came in. And she was like, “Oh, I was just drawing or whatever.” So she was drawing. She’s like, “Yeah, I wish I could do this instead of what I’m doing now.” I was like, “Well, what are you doing now?” And she’s like, “Oh, I’m just doing architecture.” And she’s like, “I really hate it,” and all this stuff.
And I was just like, “You should do what you love to do.” So she was like, “Well, my mom would be upset.” And she said “Ms Verna”, she was the ED at the time, “Ms Verna would be so upset if I decided to quit school and do something different.” And I was like, “Well, just have a conversation.” I said, “This is what you want to do. I can work with, you build your portfolio up and get that going and all that stuff.” And she actually did. And she actually got accepted. And I was so proud of her. She was just the most effervescent, beautiful young woman and just super smart, smart as a whip, talented.
And years later when she aged out, I remember walking in Union Square, and I bumped into her. I was like, “Hey, Karine, how you doing?” She was just glowing. She was like, “Oh, I’m so great. I really love Parsons.” And she went for fine arts, so she’s doing a lot of abstract work, which was really difficult, especially if you’re a young Caribbean American, Haitian American. That was like a brain explosion. And I was like, “Oh my God, I’m so happy for you.” And I said, “But are you happy?” And she was like, “Yes.” And she was like, “I love you, Armisey.” And then she kissed me on the cheek, and then ran down the street with her friends.
And a week later, she was killed.
Evonne M. Davis
Ohhhh.
Armisey Smith:
I mean, when I say “destroyed,” it was literally… Because I feel like she was my celestial child. You know what I mean? I feel like she was my daughter. I was like her mom, a lot of coaching and stuff like that. And a week later, her girlfriend called me. She was like, “Armisey,” she said, “Karine’s dead.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And she was like, “She was in Lincoln Tunnel or whatever. And one those buses kind of jacked over a lower car and then landed on her car, just obliterating her.”
Evonne M. Davis:
That’s awful.
Armisey Smith:
And I was destroyed. I was destroyed, absolutely destroyed. (pause) She was just this brilliant kind of light, like this… Something that I wanted to aspire to at some point, because she was just doing her thing. That was one of those pivotal moments in life where, what do you do with that? The only thing I could really think of was to have some of her artist friends do some pieces and share some pieces. We actually had an exhibition at the Hetrick-Martin Institute and Parsons. It was an exhibition/memorial. It was really beautiful. All the people that weren’t even artists took part, I said, I don’t care. Let’s just do something, it’s not about if it’s like this, or that. If you want to create something in honor of her, create it. I’ll put it in the exhibit. That’s what I did.
Evonne M. Davis:
That sounds beautiful. Grief is a powerful, powerful, powerful thing.
Armisey Smith:
It is. I almost fainted at the funeral. I cried so hard, I was hyperventilating, because I kept playing this Sarah McLachlan song over and over. Somebody had to hold me. At the graveside, her mom was like, “Put me in there with her.” It was mind-blowing. I mean, hundreds of people came out, because that’s how much of an impact she had.
Evonne M. Davis:
Then you’re lucky to have known her.
Armisey Smith:
Oh yeah. That was my child. I swear to God. Nobody can tell me otherwise. When she was my student, I was like, you better leave Karine alone, I’ll be fired up in here, okay?
Evonne M. Davis:
It’s kind of amazing how working with kids opens you up, and kind of changes you, really immensely.
Armisey Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Evonne M. Davis:
But then also working within “the system” also kind of changes you, right? I don’t think you can grow up in America and not know that racism is real and it exists and it’s out there, but I didn’t ever ever really, really understand it until I worked in a high school. And I went to a high school, of course, but I went to a basically all-white high school with a handful of Black and Brown people. But working in a high school in Queens, and all of those teachers that I worked with, if they heard me say this, would be furious with me, but I have never seen such racism and homophobia and sexism in my whole life as in this average, run of the mill high school in Queens, where nothing bad is happening on the surface.
Armisey Smith:
Yes. Scratch that a little bit.
Evonne M. Davis:
And on the surface nothing bad is happening. We’re all just going about our days, and the kids are going to their class and blah blah blah. I was an attendance coordinator, and it was made sooo crystal clear to me which kids I was supposed to pay attention to, and which ones weren’t worth it, and which ones were “lost causes”. You start to be like, “No, what are you talking about?” They’d be like, “No, really.” You’re like, ” But so-and-so!” They’re like, No, don’t waste your time.”
Armisey Smith:
It’s so messed up.
Evonne M. Davis:
Like somebody’s child is a waste of my time. Then you notice all these waste of time kids have something in common, don’t they?
Armisey Smith:
Brown, Black.
Evonne M. Davis:
Brown, Black. Latino.
Armisey Smith:
Brown, Black, Latino, gay, lesbian.
Evonne M. Davis:
Girls. Brown girls. Brown girls, man. I was like, “Come on. These are brilliant kids. They just need a little.” The response was always, “You’re not going to get her to go back to class.” Then what would happen is, I’d finally convince a girl, “Okay, come on. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do it together, today.” She’d walk through the door of the classroom and I’d be standing there with her, and the teacher would make some smart-ass remark that made her feel bad about herself, and she’d turn right around and walk back out like, “Fuck you.”
Armisey Smith:
She knew what the deal was.
Evonne M. Davis:
She knew what the deal was. It was hard for me coming to terms, learning that, because at first I didn’t know what the deal was, not like that. No, not on that level. Anyway, this isn’t about me. Sorry. I went off on a tangent there.
Armisey Smith:
No, I totally get it, though.
Evonne M. Davis:
Let’s talk a little bit about this side-eye work, because I think it’s related to what we’re already talking about.
Armisey Smith:
Yes, it is!
Evonne M. Davis:
How long have you been working on this body of work?
Armisey Smith:
Since the pandemic. Everything popped off: actually, getting paint onto paper art, ideas to paper or canvas.
Evonne M. Davis:
You’d been doing these big constructed masks prior to that.
Armisey Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I was doing those masks, and I really loved doing it. But they became so cumbersome. I just wanted to work smaller. Even though I loved doing the masks, but if I could do smaller and more works, and figure out a way to store them, I’m good with that, but bigger, they’re just like, “Where the hell do I put this stuff? Where do I put it?” I was working on masks, but I was also doing some painting and kind of experimenting, mixing paint in with working in sculpture and adding those sculptural elements to my painting. But these works didn’t actually really start until the beginning of the pandemic.
Evonne M. Davis:
What was the first one? What did the first one feel like? Who is she?
Armisey Smith:
The first six of them, they were all really super angry, like really, I’m going to cut you angry. It was just, because I was so frustrated. During that time, I learned of friends that I grew up with, their parents died from COVID, and I was just hearing one horror story after another. Mostly, it was just this cavalier attitude amongst white men that was just so freaking enraging. I’m just like, “You don’t give a shit about us, but I give a shit about us. I care that I can get sick or whatever, I can pass it on to one of my siblings, or somebody else and get them killed. Y’all just like, “we ain’t wearing masks, blah, blah, blah.” It was so, I can’t even explain how just enraged I was because…. it was mostly Brown and Black people who were dying.
Then on top of that, you have… the orange orangutan in charge, and his overt racism and his very overt racist party. I always thought Republicans were assholes anyway, racists. People are like, “We didn’t know.” I was like, “Republicans were always assholes when I was growing up.” The Republican party of now or then or ’80s or whatever is totally different than the Republican party that was 100 years. It is totally different. So when we grew up, it was like, “Republicans are a bunch of racists.” We thought Reagan was an asshole, especially around denying the people dying from AIDS, all that stuff. I was like, “What a fucking dick.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah. How old are you? We’re similar in age, aren’t we? How old are you?
Armisey Smith:
I’m 50.
Evonne M. Davis:
Okay. I’m 46, so we’re pretty close, and I remember as a child, Reagan and his insanity around AIDS and all of his little subtle, not-so-subtle jokes.
Armisey Smith:
Right. I went to rallies and stuff like that, because I was like, “Who the hell wants to die like that? What the fuck? Do some research on AIDS.”
Evonne M. Davis:
And refusing to even accept that it was happening, that there was a pandemic of AIDS.
Armisey Smith:
Exactly. Exactly. That’s what Donald Trump and his minions of evil were doing. Then one after another, Black man shot, Black woman shot, Black man choked out on the street.
And that was it, that was it. That kind of stirred up, spurred on, the series of people that I knew, women that I knew, to talk about what the side-eye could represent. It could represent us. My mom used to give a side-eye, straight side-eye! If we were acting up, she’d just look at us. We’d just shut it down. She wouldn’t have to say a word. It was her talisman. Her side-eye was like, “Oh. We’d better shut this down right now.” To me, there’s attitude or whatever, but there’s also a strength behind it. You’re questioning what’s going on, what the status quo is, and why is this so fucked up? You know the answers, I mean, I know the answer to the question, but the side-eye can be a very piercing, kind of don’t play with me type of thing, because you’re going to get a clap back that you don’t want.
I asked my friends if they would participate. I just, it was all, everything at that point was remote and online because we couldn’t go anywhere. I just got a bunch of photos from friends, “Just give me photos.” It was a way for me to just kind of perch, but it was really literally…just like living or going to school in Canarsie and having a bunch of white people throw rocks at our school bus time, times a million. The rage was so…. I could just touch it… It was so palpable and tangible. I was just like, I have to be able to communicate this or get that out, because it’s going to hurt me. And that’s how this came about. We were in dialogue with each other. I’d just work on it and just keep going.
Evonne M. Davis:
So you’re feeling isolated. You’re feeling under attack, and you reach out to the women in your community, and they responded.
Armisey Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Evonne M. Davis:
Nice.
Armisey Smith:
They did. I live by myself, so it’s not like I could ping somebody sitting on the couch or in the kitchen or whatever. It was just me and my cats. The series, it just started. Then Antoinette did this really lovely poem based off the series. It just grew on its own. It wasn’t intentional, for it to grow as a series. It was just this catharsis. I just needed to do it, because I was going to do harm to myself. All that rage internalized turns into depression. I suffer from depression, and I know that when I wake up with dread in my chest one day after another, I’m going to end up in a psych ward. I’ve already been there, and I ain’t trying to go there again. No, no, no. (laughs) I was like, in combination with this series, I’m also on the phone with my therapist. Every week, it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Evonne M. Davis:
Antoinette is kind of amazing. I don’t know her very well. I actually know her more through social media than person to person, but I’ve had some dark and lonely moments, and looked at her posts and just saw her and her super supportive tone, “Everybody hang in there.” Look at these beautiful pictures, and really felt really better. I actually messaged her.
Armisey Smith:
You did?
Evonne M. Davis:
I said, “I don’t really know you that well, but I just want you to know that your posts are helping me through this minute right here. So thanks for that.”
Armisey Smith:
That’s great.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, she’s great. It was a difficult time, because I couldn’t go see my family. I didn’t see my niece until, let me think. It must have been later, because she’s a pandemic baby.
Evonne M. Davis:
Oh, my God. That little girl with her cheeks? Oh, my, God.
Armisey Smith:
She kills me. I love that child. I love my little niece and nephew. Trust me. I love them. I will take a bullet for them, but it’s something about that baby. It is something about her look in her eyes. She’s just gibbly-gabbling, doing her little gibber. (makes sounds) She’s touching my glasses. I’m just looking at her, all googly-eyed, like, “I love you, man.” She’s just such a sweet child. That was a little ray of window, a ray of hope, because my brother got jumped some months before. He had a broken eye socket.
Evonne M. Davis:
Oh no.
Armisey Smith:
Because before that, we weren’t talking to each other for years, years. My sister called me and told me what happened. I was like, “Oh, my God” “We’re all going over there.” I was like, “I don’t know if Ryan’s going to want me to come over.” She’s like, “Just come.” I said, “If anything pops off, I just want you handle it, because I don’t want to handle it” or whatever. We saw each other, and we just hugged and just said, “I love you. I’m sorry.” I said I’m sorry. He said, “I’m sorry, too.” Because we’re ‘Irish twins’, which is a derogatory term. Technically, it is a derogatory term. We’re ten months apart.
Evonne M. Davis:
You could just call it a mathematical equation. (both laughing)
Armisey Smith:
Or my mom’s horror and chagrin that she’s pregnant after just giving birth. I’m like, “Damn, my dad was fucking horny, man.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Also, women are much more likely to get pregnant, I think it’s in the first six weeks after.
Armisey Smith:
Your hormones are like (makes whooshing sounds)
Evonne M. Davis:
Everything’s going (makes bleeping sounds)
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, so we are very close. It was a hard few years, not being able to talk to my brother, and when that happened, we just forgave each other. I already forgave him in my heart. I always thought about him and his family, a burgeoning family, I always did a little meditative thought, keeping him in my thoughts, “Please provide safety and abundance to them.” I always tried to lift, because it lifts my spirit. It doesn’t make sense for me to hold on to that.
Evonne M. Davis:
They say that, right, about healing the anger is really bad for you and forgiveness is good for you. Man, I wish I could master that.
Armisey Smith:
Forgiveness is, I don’t understand… there are some things that are unforgivable, right?
Evonne M. Davis:
There are things that are unforgivable.
Armisey Smith:
But if it’s making you feel a certain way inside, then it’s time to forgive. It is. It’s just, what’s the point of holding onto all that? There isn’t. It’s not hurting that person while you sit there thinking of how many ways you can curse them out, you know what I’m saying? Yeah, and I’ll say this and this and that and f- you and blah, blah, blah and pointing my finger and rolling my head. That’s not going to work, right? You’re sitting there and that other person is living their life.
Evonne M. Davis:
They’re living their life.
Armisey Smith:
The only thing you can do is just let it go and just be like, “I forgive them,” and that’s it. You just keep it moving.
Evonne M. Davis:
All right. Let’s talk about this work some more. One of the questions I have, everybody knows the stereotype of the strong Black woman, but these, to me, feel like they’re almost an archetype of a woman. I don’t know. They all seem almost elevated to…demigoddesses or something. You know what I mean? They’ve transcended even being on the same plane that us humans and our horrible stereotypes are.
Armisey Smith:
Right.
Evonne M. Davis:
Talk about that. Am I anywhere?
Armisey Smith:
Yeah, you’re there.
Evonne M. Davis:
To me, you’ve taken these women, who are in your community, women that you know, and almost pushed them into this elevated position. It’s just amazing, and it’s instant. For me, it was instant. I saw the work on social media, but even through the computer, through the bullshit that is social media, through all of that, it was instant for me! It was like, something transcendent has happened here between Armisey and the paper and these women. Talk about that a little bit.
Armisey Smith:
I really, really fervently hold women to a higher standard than men. No shade to my father and my brothers and my nephew. I love them for them, but just maleness as a whole, is really toxic and poisonous to who we are, to society, the world.
Evonne M. Davis:
And to men.
Armisey Smith:
And to men, yes. Exactly. Not saying that women don’t have their stuff. We do. We’ve got our shit.
Evonne M. Davis:
The ladies can be assholes.
Armisey Smith:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Especially because I really looked up to my mom, even though we would always fight like cats and dogs….I was just a precocious child. I always held women in that, I always saw them in this elevated sense, this untouchable or iconic way. My auntie Evelyn, I loved her almost as much as I loved my mother. We would go visit her in Bed-Stuy. She had a beautiful brownstone, which is still there, but somebody else has it. I just looked up to her. I thought she was this really strong woman. She had her shit together. She bought that house. She bought it. It was hers. The only thing she had to do was pay taxes on it. She had a career. She was a nurse and all this stuff. And I freaking worshiped her. She didn’t know. She probably was like, “Why are you sitting at my feet, child? Go up and see Amy on the third floor.” I’m like, “Auntie Evelyn, no!” And I would go up to Aunt Amy’s apartment and she showed me these things that were probably from way back, like burning your hair. You would brush and comb your hair or whatever and you get hair and put it in a bowl and burn it.
Evonne M. Davis:
How come?
Armisey Smith:
So that birds won’t get it and make a nest out of it, and you won’t go insane. I was just sitting up in there. She was the older one. She was probably close to her 90’s, sweet lady. I would just go, me and her would just be sitting up there talking or whatever. She would comb my hair. And she would take the hair out and burn it. I asked her, and she told me. From that point on, I was like, it was these little things, women teaching me certain things about life and who I could be, especially my mom. She was like, “If anybody, any man puts their hands on you, you find whatever you can and knock the crap out of them.” I was like, “Okay.”
Evonne M. Davis:
You’ve got to protect yourself, right?
Armisey Smith:
I was like, “Okay.” She’s like, “Don’t ever let a man abuse you.” I was like, “All right.”
Evonne M. Davis:
This is part of toxic masculinity. Men are a thing that even girls need to protect themselves from.
Armisey Smith:
Yes, yes, exactly. I just look at a lot of the ills in this world are created by dudes.
Evonne M. Davis:
We just lost bell hooks.
Armisey Smith:
I know.
Evonne M. Davis:
One of super eye-opening moments for me was, and I reposted a quote from her on social media recently, was really talking about how much men need feminism as well as women do. I think about that a lot. I really think about that. Yes, we are slightly biologically different, we have slightly different bodies with slightly different chemistries. But the socialization of the cultural differences sometimes just feel utterly overwhelming and just immense and insurmountable some days.
Armisey Smith:
It is. It’s overwhelming every day. I try to tamp down on, people will tell me, “The new variant, have you been watching the news?” I’m like, “No.” I really try not to watch the news.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah, because it gets you all ramped up, right?
Armisey Smith:
It gets you, my heart. I can feel my heart. I’m like, “Okay, I’m turning the TV to tiny houses or whatever. I’m going to turn it to that or some nerdy shit.” It’s like I cannot consume it any more.
Evonne M. Davis:
It’s a difficult balance, because you want to be informed.
Armisey Smith:
I want to be informed.
Evonne M. Davis:
You want to know what the hell’s going on in the world, but I don’t want to be ramped up to the gills.
Armisey Smith:
No, no. It’s too much. It’s one after another after another. They repeat the same shit over and over again.
So sometimes, I do these things with one intent and then another outcome comes out of it. I did these vagina series, and they look like the virgin Mary. Because people had been saying, “Oh, my God. That looks like the virgin Mary.” I was like, “You know what? It actually does.” I’m not Catholic. My mom was Jewish. I was like, “Yeah, it’s an icon.” To me, it was part of my anatomy and yada yada. If I could make it in a way that’s not, getting people to say, “Oh, my God. It’s a vagina…” I put gold on it, because we come out of, most of the time, not forgetting the c-section, but we come out from the vagina. We don’t come out of the penis.
Evonne M. Davis:
We don’t come out of the penis.
Armisey Smith:
Dudes would be dying, just falling over, keeling over, cutting their dicks off. That’s what they would do. They wouldn’t be able to deal with that.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah.
Armisey Smith:
That’s where some of this stuff comes from is just, I have the utmost respect for myself as a woman and myself as an African-American, so when I’m crossed or when somebody disrespects me on those grounds, it’s not good for them. It’s not, because that’s the one thing. I will hold that line, and not be insulted or disparaged. I’m not saying that’s not going to happen, but when it does, I’m like, “You’re going to get it. You’re going to get it.” My mom wouldn’t put up with that shit.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah, these women are scolding us. They’re saying we’re not going to put up with this shit.
Armisey Smith:
Also, what’s behind their eyes varies. For me, it’s like, I’m not putting up with this shit. For other women, it could be, let’s look at how children are being treated. Let’s look at their relationship to their children, “If I have to tell you one more time to sit your ass down.” That’s just how we grew up, that look. You’re like, “Oh, boy. Oh, boy.” It could be a look of sadness behind their eyes, or determination. The side-eye has a lot of things. You can interpret them in different ways, but I do see them as symbols of all the things that make up a woman, all these complex layers of who we are and and who we aspire to be in this world.
I did the paintings, and then I switched over to sculptures. I was doing side-eye sculptures. I toggle back and forth. My brain needs to not keep doing the same thing for a long period of time, so I need to toggle back. Either it’s abstraction, or working a sculpture, or something like that. Then I go back. It just keeps me on my toes, but I love them. I mean, I love these women. I mean, I love them, because I know them and I love them. But painting them, it takes it to a different level.
Evonne M. Davis:
Do you know Gary Campbell?
Armisey Smith:
Yeah.
Evonne M. Davis:
He has the YouTube channel, “the artist recreates the world.” What happens when these women recreate the world? What will our world look like?
Armisey Smith:
Oh, whoa.
Evonne M. Davis:
“Side-eye women take over the world tomorrow.” What is the first thing that they do?
Armisey Smith:
Eradicate racism.
Evonne M. Davis:
Eradicate racism. We talked about that too in the studio visit, right? That this sort of long arc of justice, is it really there, does it even exist?, because it feels like a flat line.
Armisey Smith:
It’s a flat line. It’s not even a flat line. It’s below the flat line. It’s like dead, dead. Yeah, I just don’t feel-
Evonne M. Davis:
Like we’re making any movement.
Armisey Smith:
Oh, no. No. The more we push this way, the more they’re going to push that way.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah.
Armisey Smith:
And that’s just…. how it is. It would take something, I don’t know, like war of the world type shit with aliens, maybe for us to come… Even then, it would be like… “Well, maybe the Black people sent them over here,” or whatever. I mean it would just be like a mess, but it’s never going to change.
Evonne M. Davis:
The hopeful part of me changes my mind every decade about what the answer to the problem is. For real, I try to be hopeful. I really do. For a long time, I was like, if we just had better education, if we just had better education, if we just had better education, we would have, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Armisey Smith:
No. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re smart.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah. Then I think it was Ta-Nehisi Coates did a whole long essay about how education is not the answer.
Armisey Smith:
No, because it isn’t. You could be book smart, but lack critical thinking. Lack social, emotional skills.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah.
Armisey Smith:
Those are the things that, I mean we would have to be obliterated, and then start over. That’s the only thing. Maybe somebody who could think in a different way.
Evonne M. Davis:
Earlier we were talking about the masks, that they were these big constructed heavy cumbersome things. When I think of masks, it’s like the different layers of identity for me, right? Almost like motherhood is a mask, and queerness is a mask. All of those things come together to create a whole self. Right?
Armisey Smith:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Evonne M. Davis:
When I saw this new series, I really thought about how you were taking off the mask. The masks are not gentle either, but they’re… I don’t know…They feel like armor, but they also feel mysterious. You really don’t know. You almost only know that it’s armor. Here, with this new series, I feel like so much of these archetypes or these demi goddesses is revealed. You’ve almost let us in, past that mask. Am I on to something, or am I off the mark again?
Armisey Smith:
No, you’re there.
Masks are supposed to conceal. I wanted to do something that would really just expose the raw feeling, the raw emotion. Which for a long time I didn’t really do so much. I just stayed away from it, because I didn’t want to be angry. But the anger came anyway, and this was like the anecdote to that. Reaching out to the women, and talking with them about what they see, what they experience, what they smell, taste, what they be. Who they are in their being, and how much of society has shaped who they are. Then some of the thoughts that they have about who they are in this world is so chaotic and poisonous and toxic, that there is a little bit of resilience in there.
Resilience to me, people think that’s like you’re building a wall. It’s not so much about that. It’s about you learning more about yourself, and more about how you work and how the world works. How you interface with the world enough that you can ping the negativity off of you, so that you can keep your humanness.
Yeah, when I was working on these, I felt like I was just, it was almost like I had this mantra. Every brush stroke, in my head I just felt like I was in this meditative state, because I wanted to really push through the feeling, like the raw feeling of what these women are trying to convey through their pictures that they’ve sent. And it really helped me, just helped me to not go into that hole, you know, but it also helped to give voice to other people. I think that’s really important work to do and that’s the work that I do or continue to do outside of making my own art.
I work in different communities that are marginalized, that people don’t really think about as much or they denigrate them or they don’t see them as human. I work with adults who have developmental disabilities. Some have neurological, some have physical disabilities. And sometimes when I tell people, “I’ve worked with adults with a disability.” They’re like, “Oh yeah, those kids,” I’m like, “No”. I was like, “They are adults.” I was like, “Chronologically, some of them are like maybe eight, but physically, they are adults. Stop calling them kids.” I was like, “They’re not freaking kids. Stop it.” And I treat them… the approach to the artwork is like how we were taught in Parsons. Everybody has a right to a great education, because I wouldn’t want anything less if it was my child.
Evonne M. Davis:
So we’re not just doing macaroni art here.
Armisey Smith:
No, oh hell no. Color theory, drawing, shading. All the basic foundational stuff because they are really talented artists, but they lack the basics. So sometimes you have to strip it down and then build it back up, so that if you compare their work to what their work is six months from now or a year from now, it’s like vastly different and stronger. So that’s my mandate, especially working with a number of teachers. And then not seeing them as different. Yeah, we all have our differences. We all have our quirks. We all have our disability. We all have our abilities or whatever, but I’m not going to treat you like a baby because you’re not a baby. That’s it.
Evonne M. Davis:
I have an aunt who’s developmentally delayed that I spend quite a bit of time with since I moved, and she took me to task recently. She was like, “It’s okay to talk to me sweet, but don’t baby talk me.” I was like, “Oh shit, sorry.”
Armisey Smith:
That’s right. That’s right. They’ll check you in a second. It’s the subtleties. I have a student that I’ve been teaching for a long time. She’s deaf, on the spectrum. She has some neurological stuff, and I don’t take it easy on her. She knows. And she’s been coming back every week because she knows that what comes out of it is going to be fantastic. And I haven’t seen her in a while because I’ve been working on the mural, but as a student, I’d want someone to kick my ass.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah. Well honesty, right? Real love, real respect, real affection is honesty.
Armisey Smith:
Oh I love her. She’s like my sister.
Evonne M. Davis:
I measure my friends and my loved ones by who tells me the truth, because I have this kind of big, kind of obnoxious personality, and I know somebody’s really my-
Armisey Smith:
Do you? (laughs)
Evonne M. Davis:
I do. And I know somebody’s really my friend when they’re like, “Yo, check it.” Because only your real friends will be honest with you and the rest will walk away, and who knows what.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah!
Evonne M. Davis:
Talk shit about you when you’re not looking or something.
Armisey Smith:
“You need to pump your brakes.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah. Those are the people I know are my real friends. And I’ve told people that I was kind of acquaintances with, “If I’m talking to you like that, it means I actually like you. And if I ain’t talking to you like that, it means I don’t even care.”
Armisey Smith:
You’re like, “La la la.”
Evonne M. Davis:
So there’s something about being honest with students. We were talking earlier about how education changes you and really working with… and we talked earlier about working with kids specifically, but you’re saying working with people, being close to people, being open to them, it changes you. And if you want to have, for me, it’s always been if you want to have a real relationship with the people that you’re working with, you kind of have to risk yourself a little by being really honest and saying what the hard truths are. And that can be scary. It can be really scary to say the hard truth sometimes.
Armisey Smith:
It is. And the thing is with my student, I had to kind of scold her a little bit because it was like… because we have these terms. When we block, it means we paint fast. We’re blocking a color, and she was just taking her sweet time. And I was like, “No.” And she was rolling her eyes. I was like, “I don’t care.”
Armisey Smith:
I was like, “Block. Quick, come on, come on.” And she was like, she took her brush and she was painting. I was like, “We just need you to block out because we only have a certain amount of time” We paint kind of in tandem, so the next week we come, she doesn’t have to kind of catch up to me. So I was just like, “Come on.” But we’re like fam. And then later on she was laughing at me over something. So honesty is really important. Honesty in work, artwork, is important.
I really try to not only convey my inner feelings. I have friends. I do socialize every now and then. But I feel more comfortable at home. It’s strange. I can walk in a room, I can give a speech, but inside it actually takes more work to go out, it takes more work for me to get to that level where I’m like, “Okay, let’s get dressed and go.” So part of me is a little introverted, but there’s another part of me that is like, “Okay, I have to give this speech or this talk,” And I’m like [snaps fingers], it just turns on. But that, to me it’s a skill. You have to build on that. You have to develop that. I wasn’t so vocal when I was in my twenties or early… I wasn’t. I would sit in meetings and not say anything, you have all these ideas, but I wouldn’t say it. And people just made assumptions about me based on the fact that I wouldn’t say anything in the meeting. I’m like, “I know more than you guys.” But I think at that time… I wasn’t yet diagnosed with depression and anxiety. So I kind of lived in my head a little bit and when I wanted to speak, my heart would just be like, you know… so I think I was at the stage where I understood that something’s not right. Just something’s not right. So yeah, I just want to be honest with my work. I think that’s just really what it is.
Evonne M. Davis:
What are some of the titles?
Armisey Smith:
This one is “Tick ‘ere,” which is it’s Jamaican patois. It means, “Look Here.” It’s like “Look here, child,” speaking in Pats.
This one here is like, “The Black Person’s Sundial,” which talks about time, and how time is very disjointed for African-Americans. So I did like a whole series of these… And this series is closest to “The Outside.” This here, it’s called “Choked,” which is like a choker, slave choker thing, for slave girls.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah, these are intense. I noticed them when I walked in.
Armisey Smith:
This has to do with time and this one is called, “We Are Here,” they’re silhouettes and portraits of African-American women, but it’s etched in there so you can barely see it, but we are here. So I etched them in, and it’s still about time, about how time is very disjointed, it’s not organized. But in that time that is not here or disorganized that we are still here.
Evonne M. Davis:
Did you see the Kea Tawana show that we did a couple years ago? She’s the, I guess, outsider artist, although I hate that term, who did the “Ark” here in Newark in the ’80s. We did a show about her work and she was a very strange and mysterious person. And really, Emma spent seven or eight years researching this person, maybe even more than that. We are currently the kind of keeper of her archive, and she has all these silhouettes that she’s cut out of black paper, and they don’t seem to be specifically connected to anything, but we’ve found them throughout all of her belongings. These very cool, just black paper silhouettes. And we believe, although there’s no way to confirm or anything, that they’re her loved ones, that they are these portraits of her friends and her… although it doesn’t really seem like she actually had blood family in her life, but kind of her chosen family. There’s something very powerful about silhouettes. They’re equalizing.
Armisey Smith:
It’s not as in your face like something like these, the side-eye, the pink eye. But it’s a play on it. I try to carry at least a theme or color or something through all my work. And the theme obviously is women. That’s the main theme.
Evonne M. Davis:
But what’s amazing too though is, “Okay, it’s women.” It’s all kinds of women. It’s young women and old women and different bone structures… that’s also what draws me to it. We did a show a while back of a Polish artist, Jan Sawka, and we called the show, “Every Man.” And I almost feel like this is like all the women. It feels like, if there was sort of an essence…and please shut me up if I’m sounding stupid, but…almost like this spiritual essence of all of the women in the world. It feels like that’s in this work. They’re unified, but also they are individual and whole and complete in this really cool kind of collage of beauty kind of thing. I don’t know. Does that make any sense?
Armisey Smith:
It makes sense, because I think that I like working in different styles. I think that a certain style will lend itself to what I’m trying to say, or different materials will. So if I want something that’s a little bit more subtle or you really have to look deeper, like those pieces up there, the plexiglass with the etching, then you really have to look inside. And it’s because there’s been so many times that I felt invisible.
I’m like, “Hey, I’m here. I’m here.” I had to damn near curse out the shoe guy at Nordstrom because I was like, ” I know you see my black ass.” Because it was like I was trying to get his attention because I was trying to see if I can fit in these freaking Dr. Martens…
So I’m in Nordstrom’s and I have two pairs of boots and I’m holding them in my hand, and he was talking to this white woman, and so I was like before he… I timed it. So I was like, “Excuse me,” or whatever. He kind of looked a little bit over his shoulder, but kept on walking. I was like, “Oh no, this motherfucker dead.” So me and the woman started chatting and she was like, “Well, maybe he just didn’t hear you.” I said, “He heard me. He heard me.” And so I was like, “I’m just going to hang out with you. When he comes back, I’m like, ‘Can you find the size 10 for me?'” So he comes out. There’s another white woman. She comes out of nowhere. She was like, “Oh can you help?” And I was like, “Hold on a second. Hold on a second.” I was like, “I actually tried to get your attention more than once.” And I was like, “You go straight to the other white woman and I’ve been standing here for freaking 10 minutes.” And he didn’t say anything. He took her shoe and went into the back.
Evonne M. Davis:
Stop. Are you serious?
Armisey Smith:
Didn’t say not one word. So then a sister finally appeared, like she just beamed herself down from wherever in Nordstrom, just beamed herself down. She was like, “Can I help you?” I said, “Well, first of all, you need to tell so and so, he needs to pay attention to the people who want service.” I said, “I don’t appreciate being ignored. My money green.”
Armisey Smith:
She’s like, “Oh, I’m really sorry about that. I’ll talk to him,” blah, blah, blah. So she helped me out. And he comes back out or whatever, gives the shoes and tries on different shoes with the woman. Because even the white woman, she’s like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” I was like, “That’s what I was trying to tell you.” I was like, “This is the shit. This is the shit right here.” And even like on those little teeny tiny moments compared to having glass shattered in your hair from a bunch of white people throwing rocks at your school bus, it’s on that same continuum.
Evonne M. Davis:
Well, I’m also imagining all those moments all day, every day.
Armisey Smith:
So I’m sitting there waiting for the woman to come to bring me the shoes. This fool comes up to me. He comes up to me like nothing happened. He was like, “Oh, can I help you with something?” I was like, “Well, I asked you twice before and you ignored me, so you can just turn around and go away now.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Good for you.
Armisey Smith:
So he turned and went away. I was like, “Don’t play with me.” I was like, “Do I look like Boo Boo the Fool to you?” No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I will not be ignored period. I am solid straight DNA through the soil. I’m not going to be ignored on purpose. They don’t see you or feel you or whatever.
It’s like if I’m in the supermarket, I’m in the aisle, I actually feel someone come before I hear, because I’m trying to be more conscious or open or aware, but white folks….I did an experiment. I was like, “Let me see if they feel me.”
One aisle was a Black person. The next aisle was another white person. The Black person, before I got to her, she moved. The white person was like all in the middle of the aisle like whatever. And so my cart was literally like right here, like right here. She didn’t move. I said, “So you don’t even feel my essence? Your essence is just all about you. But I feel your essence. So if I feel you, I’m moving or I kind of try to adjust… because I’m aware of everybody else’s energy. And it’s happened time and time again, “Oh, I didn’t see you, oh.” Okay, I’m a 5’8 Black woman, curly hair, wears weird clothes, sometimes looks like a bomb, Rubenesque, and you ain’t seen me really?
Evonne M. Davis:
That’s a choice.
Armisey Smith:
I see all of y’all all the time because I have to. It’s like part of surviving. It’s weird.
Evonne M. Davis:
So speaking of that, just along that vein, what do you want people to see when they come to the show? Because I thought, like I said, when I saw them on social media, it was instant. I felt something deep, not on the surface, not like, “Oh, that’s a pretty picture.” ‘Cause that happens and there’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with something nice and pleasant to look at.
Armisey Smith:
Yeah. No, I don’t do pretty pictures though. I think they’re executed in a way that they’re kind of nicely made… but they aren’t necessarily nice or not nice. They’re kind of like in between, most of them. The reason why I wanted to go with my title, because that piece right there is called “In Time” so with “In Time, In Tide,” that for me is really about the journey that you take as a woman. I don’t know if you ever heard “a watched kettle never boils.”
Evonne M. Davis:
Yes.
Armisey Smith:
And so it’s like do I just create my work, just do my thing and not worry about X, Y, Z, blasé, blasé, and who’s looking at what. It’s like I don’t give a shit. I’m just painting. I need to to get that out.
So “In Time and In Tide,” it’s like tide goes with the flow and the movement of the moon and this and that. All this stuff is just like this ever present kind of like movement and flow. Right. And not letting time take control over my life or over who I am as an artist. I just do it because it’s almost like a compulsion like I need to do it. It’s like my day feels really disjointed if I don’t do any art. I’m sitting there like, “Fuck, what the fuck am I going to do?” It’s like, “I know I can do it. What am I going to do?”
Evonne M. Davis:
I will say all of my favorite artists, that I know personally, say that it’s a compulsion, it’s not even a choice. It’s like eating. There’s something that just has to be done.
Armisey Smith:
I have to. It’s like I have to talk about the people who are in my life, the ancestors, the pain and glory of being a Black woman or a woman of color. All that stuff is mixed into the show via representational work, via abstraction, all of those things I want to be able to convey: that we are very complex and beautiful and sometimes even ugly in spirit…it’s a combination of all these things in time and through tide.
In this series with the women, I asked them to give their finished works the titles because I wanted them to have this ownership. I painted it, after they sent me the photo of themselves. I said, “But I want you to own the title. This is about you.”
So people walk away with different feelings, thinking about it. There’s not one beautiful long way of thinking about a body of work. I don’t think there ever should be. But my own personal way, how I fee,l is different from what other people may feel.
Evonne M. Davis:
Yeah. We’re all sort of looking at each piece of art through the lenses of our own life experiences. I’m excited. I can’t wait to see it. I’m honored that I get to curate it. And I’m so grateful that you want to bring this work here in our gallery.
Armisey Smith:
Well, thank you!
Evonne M. Davis:
And I’m grateful for this time. We’ve now spent almost two hours together just chatting.
Armisey Smith:
Wow, yes. And thank you. I hope you get to understand why, who is Armisey? Because people are always like, “Who is Armisey?” I’m like….everything and nothing?”
Evonne M. Davis:
There you go. I’m grateful that I get to exist for a short period of time within the sphere of you. Cool.