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The thirteenth episode of the Broadening the Narrative podcast is out now! You can listen to the episode "Bringing People Together Through Art" for the Broadening the Narrative podcast by clicking on any of the hyperlinked platforms below.
In this episode of Broadening the Narrative, I talked with Dennissa Young about the art she creates and bringing people together through art. Dennissa is a newly Chicago-based Spanish and Native-American video performance and relational artist. With projects focusing on activism, organizing, and collaborating, she has exhibited all across the US and internationally. She shared about her depression, the evolution of her art, and how she desires to foster gentleness, radical empathy, and softness through her work. I hope that if you know and love me you can engage with the Broadening the Narrative blog, social media accounts, and podcast, as well as any recommended resources. Then, you can share with people who know and love you, and little by little, person by person, we can broaden the narrative.
#broadeningthenarrativepodcast #podcast #newpodcast #podcastsofinstagram #bringingpeopletogetherthroughart #dennissayoung #artist #relationalartist #performanceart #videoperformance #art #faith #hope #love #loveeveryneighbor #erronthesideoflove #thereisnolawagainstlove #empathy #equality #humanity #depression #belonging #community #relationship #healing #gentleness #radicalempathy #softness #challengethenarrative #broadeningthenarrative
Transcript
4 clock ticks
“It’s past time to broaden the narrative” (said by Sequana Murray)
Intro Music
Introduction: Hello and welcome to another episode of Broadening the Narrative. This is a podcast where I talk to some of my favorite people who have broadened the narrative for me. I'm your host, Nicki Pappas, and I'm so glad you're here.
Transition Music
First Segment
Nicki: On today's episode of Broadening the Narrative, I am joined by Dennissa Young. We will be discussing art and her work as an artist. Before we begin, I just want to say that Dennissa is one of my favorite people because of the way that she brings groups of people together and makes everyone feel included. You radiate such joy, Dennissa, and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say today. Thank you for coming onto the podcast.
Dennissa: Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Nicki: Yes. Well, let’s jump in. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Dennissa: Yeah. So, like Nicki said, I’m Dennissa Young. I’m a Spanish and Native American relational artist. I was born in New Mexico, but I moved around a ton as a kid. And I’m newly based in Chicago, which is very exciting. I just moved here. Crazy to move in a pandemic, but here we are. Yeah. My pronouns are she and her, and I really care about people and understanding and belonging and the arts, so yeah, that’s kind of a little bit about my background.
Nicki: Yes, thank you for sharing that, and I definitely see in you just the ways that you care about people and honor their humanity, so I’m so excited to have you. Well, what narrative were you taught or did you believe about artists and creating art when you were younger?
Dennissa: Yeah, this is a great question. I think I was told or it was reiterated to me that art was easy, like it was an easy topic, it was an easy thing to study, it was always like really fun, and like loosey-goosey, which is like a really great way to enter into art, I think, and my parents always taught me to do what I loved, and often what we love isn’t easy, so I think, I believed a lot that it was just kind of like, you know, loosey-goosey, I guess.
(laughter)
Nicki: Yeah, so when did you begin creating art?
Dennissa: I think I’ve always been making art. I loved like painting and drawing as a kid, which as a mom you probably often are giving your kids something to do with their hands, and so I was homeschooled until about fifth grade, and there was a lot of freedom to create. I was involved in dance, yeah, I was actively always artistic with my brothers, and I really loved photography growing up as a kid, and my mom used to take us to CVS and be like, “You can pick one toy,” and I would always, always pick a disposable camera. I think I just loved keeping memories of friends and I was like a very nostalgic kid and very dramatic, which no one should be surprised -
(laughter)
Dennissa: - knowing me now. But I was also very sensitive, and so I just like loved to reminisce, so I would just take photos of all the places I lived and all the friends I had because I’m from New Mexico but I moved around a lot as a kid, and I went to like three high schools in four years, and subsequently as an adult have moved a ton. I think just like these tactile objects and I really cared about nostalgia, which I think is where creating first began for me.
Nicki: Wow, I love that so much. So, you were always kind of creating, but can you point back to anything that prompted you to create art that you could feel in you or anything like that?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think it was the need to remember. I loved Harriet the Spy growing up as a kid, that movie, I don’t know if-
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: - anyone remembers that. It was like on an orange VHS. It was a Nickelodeon movie. It was awesome. And she was taught to write everything down so that she would never forget. And I think the photographs for me growing up were like these items that I would never forget, really tactile things to keep and hold onto. And I think that morphed into you know going to school for art and now like an art career, which is pretty crazy. I think, yeah, I think my brother prompted me to create. I think my whole family. They’re pretty creative in what they do. My oldest brother is a pastor, and the brother that’s a year older than me, he’s a freelance photographer, and then my mom was always really creative. My dad was always like really silly, so like there was just like lots of room to create in our family. We were always like, you know, I don’t know, doing stuff with each other, and yeah, excited to kind of show each other what we made, cootie catchers, I don’t know, like all these kind of just 90s, 2000s childhood things. That’s when like Photoshop and all these kind of like online programs were coming about. Like I definitely remember when we were kids, we used to play this game, I think it was called Easy DJ, and we would like make songs and DJ on this one tiny desktop computer, and just get really pumped about it. We were just like really nerdy spending time together making stuff as siblings.
Nicki: Aw, I love that so much. Well, so you mentioned doing art as a career now. So what types of art do you create?
Dennissa: So I create mostly video performance and relational art. So I would say performance art is the larger category I fall under, and that’s like maybe most simply described as art that involves the body, time, and space, and so I make a lot of experiences or moments or happenings that are in a specific time at a specific location, and then the best way for those to be viewed is like video, that’s why they’re called video performances, so the final product is a video. And then I also make relational art, which involves other people. It’s a lot about connection and about activating a space and that community and people coming together is what the art is really about. So I also make, I don’t know, I feel like a real artist, wherever the art takes me, learning how to make clothes or learning how to make a box out of wood because I need that or yeah, it’s kind of just this free flowing thing, but my main mediums are video performance and relational art.
Nicki: Yeah, well I can’t wait later in this conversation to get into more about a performance piece that I saw. But before we get there, who or what has inspired you as an artist, and how so?
Dennissa: So I would say the biggest inspiration was probably my brother Spencer. He’s a year older than me, and like I said, he’s a photographer. He was always like drawing and doing graphic design and making stuff in his room, just like this very kind, sweet, introverted man of a brother that I love dearly. He went to Savannah College of Art and Design, and so when he was like going to, thinking about going to college, he was like, “I’m going to do this,” and I was like, “Wait. You can go to college for this. This is amazing.” Yeah, so I wanted to be like him. I think I wanted to create like him, and though we’re really different in the ways that we’re making, I think a lot of our style or integrity I think comes from this work hard attitude that we have as a family. Yeah, and then I feel, besides my brother, my other inspirations for creating is I just like love this idea that I was made by a Creator. Like I believe that there’s a God, and he created me very specifically and very on purpose, and so I think that inspires me to create knowing that it’s maybe inherently inside of me. I was also just very curious as a kid. I’ve been thinking a lot about this origin story idea of where did this all start even before you invited me here. But I was always really curious, and I would always just like rummage through people’s bags and purses. I would definitely get caught at church in the nursery in some bag fully just pulling stuff out, like, “What do you use this for? Why do you carry band-aids?” Just like really interested in people. And so, I think that inspired me being around others and the first church we ever went to was a Spanish English church, and all of the old ladies played tambourine in the audience, and so I always felt like really comfortable expressing myself and using my body as a way of, like worshiping or using my body in laughter or, you know I had brothers, so we’d be like wrestling around. I think there’s just something about having a deep connection to my body that felt like it was empowered to create.
Nicki: All of that is so beautiful. The connection with your brother, but also the connection to being created and being a creator out of that, and then your curiosity, that’s just so cute to think of little Dennissa digging through bags.
Dennissa: Honestly think of grown me but just smaller with cheeks that are like twice the size and no knuckles, just like [indiscernible audio] fingers. And I like, I think physical touch has a big part in that, of creating, and friendship, like these moments of wanting to make something happen for people to feel like they could belong. Yeah, with moving around so much, I think I just, I was tired of being the new kid so often, and so I think I thought a lot like, how could the art be something that creates relationship, that creates friendship, that creates a moment together, even if it’s fleeting, that maybe there could be commonality, and maybe I could be that commonality to other people. Yeah, and my brother, I think, he, I don’t know, sometimes with my siblings we love to be like each other and then we hate to admit it. And so, he’s a huge inspiration to me. He’s just like making it in Houston. Like he works with Simone Biles. He’s like on Nike shoots and like -
Nicki: What?
Dennissa: He’s amazing, and I’m like, “Oh he’s the real artist in the family.”
(laughter)
Dennissa: Which is cool. So yeah.
Nicki: Aw yeah. Well, you mentioned this earlier, like the nostalgia and the making memories, and even here as you’re saying connecting with people and belonging, so is there anything you would add for how creating art has shaped your life?
Dennissa: For sure. I think it’s taught me to care for myself. I think this is a big thing I’ve been thinking about for the last, you know, probably since college. You know I graduated in 2015, so 5 years out, which is crazy, but I think it’s a way that it’s shaped how I see myself, how I see the world, how I see others. I think I’m often filtering things through the eyes of art, like I’m taking a lot of photos, even if it’s like on a walk. I’ve been documenting all the masks on the street since I moved to Chicago. And so maybe that won’t turn into anything, but I’m like collecting a lot, which I think is a really cool way of intaking the world, by seeing and responding to what we’re seeing. I think it’s made me more attentive and intentional, gentle, a lot slower, which I’m not slow, I’m like a flaming extrovert that’s always going a million miles per hour, so I think it’s really taught me, yeah, how to tune in and why, like when I go to a gallery, like, “Why does this other artist want me to focus on this doorknob?” And I have to get into my own brain, and I’m like, “Why, why do they care about the doorknob, and why should I care about it?” And it feels like this connection point, and I think that’s shaped the way that I move through the world through collaboration, though groups of people. I think a lot of my closest friends have come from, you know, groups that I’ve been involved in, whether they’re collaborative groups or projects for art or exhibitions and, yeah, I think it keeps me close to God. It keeps me grounded in my body, which I think is important. I think growing up in the church, which I would love to know what you think about this, but growing up in a church, I think I often was taught to put others first, which is beautiful, right, it’s a great concept if we are caring for ourselves first. I think I somehow missed that part, so I’m 27, I’m relearning how to care for myself, and if I want to stand up for, you know, 3 hours doing a performance, I have to have a strong core, which means I have to like exercise and eat the right things and really care for this body that I was gifted, you know.
Nicki: Yeah, I love you bringing that up because I feel like, too, for me, I’m 30 and beginning to question how, I feel like, yeah, what I was taught about caring for myself would then translate to being selfish or loving yourself is selfish, but it’s been recently to figure out. Like we went to a church where the benediction was, “We want to love God completely so we can love ourselves correctly in order to love our neighbors compassionately.” And that was just last year, sitting in that and realizing that what I had been taught or internalized was always, like, “Oh, we don’t need to love ourselves because we already do.” I started to see, well, like, there’s a difference between a narcissistic, selfish, focused on myself love versus “Oh, I’m made in the image of God and the same way I care for others and have compassion towards them, I need to be having that same compassion toward myself,” and obviously going to therapy has helped a ton.
Dennissa: Oh yeah. Totally. And what is it, I’ve been thinking about the verse love your neighbor as yourself. I think growing up in the 2000s in the church, the “as yourself” part was never explained to me.
Nicki: Right.
Dennissa: And exactly what you’re saying. It’s supposed to be natural, or it’s supposed to come from all these other things, and so I guess I’m just trying to be really intentional of not giving from a place of emptiness. I often have been giving out of nothing, and that’s not helpful. And it’s not helpful to show up to an event or with a friend and be angry or sad because I’ve overcommitted, not because being angry or sad is inappropriate but just because I’m exhausted because I forgot to care for myself.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: It’s like days could pass and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to eat because I was so busy running around or doing instead of being,” and so I think I’m learning, yeah, through my art to be. I think when I graduated college I felt like there were two trajectories. Like, oh this relational art feels very external, feels very like, maybe what God calls me to as an extrovert, as someone who’s a community builder, as someone who like loves others people, but then I felt like this other fork in my practice was this slow contemplative video work that was so strange, honestly. To watch these sort of moving paintings that just created room for my own contemplation. They felt like really small things that just kind of like these little performances that felt like they meant nothing, but then when I would think about them more they would turn into something else. So even letting myself explore what I thought was visually appealing or what felt good in my body or what was like fun. And so I think I’ve been learning a lot through letting the art transform, my own art transform me and then letting the art of others like kind of wash over me and teach me something. I think that’s what all art can do. It can teach us. It can change us. It can create social change. It can create, you know, art as activism is something I think about a lot. It’s not just making for the sake of making in my own room by myself, it’s like to create, yeah to fight the evil in the world, to have conversations, to move things forward, you know.
Nicki: I love you going here with this conversation, yeah, because I think a lot of it, too, roots back into boundaries and learning to accept boundaries for ourselves.
Dennissa: Why you gotta say my least favorite word?
(laughter)
Nicki: But even just like the internal boundaries, right, to know yourself well and to know when to engage, when to step back, and to trust yourself and trust your body is really important and sounds like it’s, you know, even though it’s a new phenomenon for you, already shaping you, which makes me think, in these different times in your life and as things have been shaping your art throughout your life, have there been evolutions in your art through that?
Dennissa: 100%. I mean I used to make really dumb, bad art.
(laughter)
Dennissa: Yeah, or just like really blatant Christian art that sucked, and maybe that’s growing up watching you know, movies that we can all name that were just bad acting, and we blessed it because it was made with the gospel in mind, or like God’s people made it, so therefore it’s good. And my, in South Carolina, the team that I was working with there with that non-profit would call it like “Dove, Cross, Fish Syndrome” where like artists feel the need to put the dove, the cross, or the fish to call it Christian, and I just would make garbage stuff like that that was so lame and super shallow, and I’ll never tell anyone about it, and I’ll never share it, and all the photos are destroyed. Yeah, I think I thought my duty as an art school student was to engage in this one specific way, to like share Jesus in a way that was like, you know, I don’t even know, it was just not good. And I think I’ve learned to tell the truth and to tell it slant. I’ve learned to tell my truth, whether that’s capital-t Truth for me or lowercase-t truth and really leave room for ambiguity. Nobody likes to be told what to do or how to feel, you know. We love freedom. We love to explore, and so how do I create work that makes rooms for exploration. One artist that I, like a peer that was with me in college, we met at a conference, and he was talking about making art with a lot of crafted ambiguity, and I love that idea that you’re making room for everyone and everything that isn’t like you while still being authentic and specific, which I think is, I don’t know, the best part of art is that it’s, if you’re trying to just talk about something broad, you’re never going to hit anything because you’re talking about love, but if you talk about that feeling you get when you knock on the door of your crush and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what are they wearing? Is there anything in my teeth?” Like that’s so specific and people can kind of relate to that or they know what butterflies feel like or they know what that nervous energy feels like. So I think there’s something in how I’ve morphed in showing rather than telling or, yeah, in practicality, less meta in my brain. I mean I used to be a photographer, that’s what I got into school with. A really garbage portfolio that I looked at the other day, and I was like, “How the heck did they let me into this really prestigious art school with these terrible photos?” And now, like, photo is never, is rarely my main art and goal, and so I think that’s morphed, too, not only conceptually with the way I’m making, but also physically, what I’m making. So I think that’s, yeah, that’s a lot of transformation that has happened over the course of, I would say more specifically from 2011 onward when I started, I went to college, and I started taking art seriously. Because I went to a really, I didn’t say this earlier in the intro, but I went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a very small, prestigious art college. So, I think even there being like a straight, Christian woman was pretty like, an anomaly, you know, so really just letting my environment and the people around me, help like broaden my viewpoint of what is humanity, what is race, gender, you know, what is queerness, what is, you know, all these kind of elements that I just was sheltered from. I mean, period. We don’t have, I think some of it is the faith element. I think some of it was fear of my family, I think, yeah, so many things were just broadened and like really being able to have conversation with anyone, I think that’s what we were always taught growing up, what does it look like to enter in with anyone and everyone, even if they’re completely different than you, like you bleed the same blood, so there’s a lot to relate on.
Nicki: Yeah. For sure. I remember as you're talking now, that when we, one of our first conversations, you bringing that up about your experience in school. And being, yeah, cisgender heterosexual, like, Christian, and then how that shaped you. So I’d forgotten. So thanks for bringing it up again. Yeah.
Dennissa: I guess I talk about it a lot. I guess, too, because I think, I think it's just so good for people to place themselves in the world with their, and be confident, you know, in their gender identity, and then their racial or ethnic background. And yeah, these things should be normalized, you know, that everyone is different and unique. And I, I believe God made everyone that way, on purpose. And so the more I get to know other people, I think the more I get to know the one who created me, if we, if I'm believing that everyone is made in the image of God.
Nicki: Yes, that's so good. Well, Dennissa, you brought up social activism. So I'm curious, has that come into play in your art at all?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think, this wave in quarantine of, you know, violence, particularly against Black and brown bodies in this moment, mostly against, you know, Black, with Black lives matter. I think, I think art as activism is something I'm often thinking about, like, how can my art create social change? I don't think I've done enough work or research or, you know, self analysis on how to really meld the two. I think I'm more focused on like, the local offline kind of conversations in my activism. And with my job, like, you know, I mentor a lot of artists and young people. And so really bringing the conversation there. And then through art, I think when there's gentleness and radical empathy and softness, I think there's just more inclination for those kinds of conversations. But I'm not like making work, maybe specifically about what's going on. I think it just coexists with the times we're living in. Yeah, but it's something I'm thinking about a lot. Like, what does it mean to be a perceivably white or racially ambiguous woman in the world, making art that includes my body? It kind of feels inherently political, as Ai Weiwei says or Barbara Kruger or these other great artists that come before me who talk a lot about the presence of a body makes it political, and then being a female body and being a cis female body and what does that mean. So I think I'm really, you know, inkling to connect the dots. I think my organizational work focuses more on racial reconciliation, or restorative justice, like about the projects that we're doing here in Chicago with the current nonprofit that I'm working for, is a lot about platforming Black artists. So I think that the social part is definitely very engaged in my work. I think the content of my work is not maybe specifically about activism, though I am an activist.
Transition Music
Second Segment
Nicki: I just want to say the words you used of like gentleness and radical empathy and softness. Like, oh, so much like Jesus, right? Like those words just make me feel the presence of Christ and I love that so much.
Dennissa: Yeah, I mean he was like the greatest man of inclusion like he just, he like wrecked social barriers between women, between prostitutes, between thieves. You know, like if you know the Bible, you can go on and on about this. And so I'm like, why aren't his people replicating this? And I would like my personal, you know, duty to be, yeah, reminding people who they are, which I think is part of being, to remind people, yeah, the parts of them that are very, like God's image in them, no matter what they believe or think, like I think only uplifting and encouraging people is going to, you know, help us build a unified community or a unified neighborhood, whatever we want to, whatever space we're occupying, but then also like, this radical acceptance.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: So if God's people aren't housing that radical acceptance or radical empathy, or like a, yeah, incredible softness, like we're missing the gospel. We’re missing like, we're reading two different Bibles, because the man flipped tables, like he was righteous, he was angry about people making a mockery of a place of worship, and how often am I, how often am I mocking God or mocking, you know, or not genuine or not authentic or not bringing my true self even in the deepest presence of the Lord by myself? And then how often am I performing or pleasing people outside of that, and so, yeah, really trying to find a center of like, I'm first loved and accepted by this, like, huge creator. So what does that mean? And how does that, you know, really radically transform everything I'm doing and hopefully everything I'm saying? And art isn’t apart from that. I think growing artistically and spiritually, they're equal for me. They're not, one isn't greater than the other because as I'm growing spiritually, it inspires me artistically. And as I'm growing artistically, it's getting me closer to the creator. And so they feel intrinsically, like, linked to me.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: As well as activism, like if we're not, you know, changing, whether it's at our dinner table, or in our household or with our neighbors, or with our friends, or, you know, with the people in Timbuktu, like what, what are we doing?
Nicki: Yes.
Dennissa: That's coming from like, a sharer, you know, I'm like, an extreme connect, I'm always on like the extreme side of life. I could probably talk to a brick wall, and it might have fun, you know, so like, I know, I'm high connector, high like energy, high like whoo, or whatever. But I do think, in everyone's own respective, self loving way, we can be sharing and making a difference and a change. Whether it's picking up a piece of trash, or, you know, feeding the hungry or showing up at a protest, or, you know, I think there's different ways for different people, and it all can be with the help of moving humanity closer to love and softness and gentleness and restoration. I mean, you can insert any like feel good word there, you know?
Nicki: Yes. Ooh, okay. I'm gonna I'm here to say right now, the brick wall would definitely have fun. Ok.
(laughter)
Nicki: And, yeah, you just reminded me of the late Rachel Held Evans when she talked about what makes the gospel so offensive isn't who it keeps out but who it lets in.
Dennissa: Oh come on.
Nicki: And just this, yeah, this inclusivity and this like, our shared humanity, like unites us. And we're in this together, like, we are in this together. So thank you for sharing all of that. I just loved it so, so much. So with this journey you've been on, has this narrative that you believe about artists and creating art changed?
Dennissa: Oh, for sure. Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm like, oh my gosh. In light of this conversation, I'm like, always changing, you know, I’m always changing I think. I don't believe art is easy, I don't believe artists have it easy, now for sure. Especially being in many different forms of that world, right. Like I was in it in a collegiate sense in Boston. And then I was in it in like a practicing kind of going to galleries setting when I was in Turkey, and then working as an arts organizer in South Carolina and now being like a practicing artist in a big city in Chicago, like, I've seen it in so many forms. And I think there's a lot of othering that happens, right. Like artists are often the people in social groups who are just like othered, whether it's misunderstood, you know, we, we as artists, host a lot of like, yeah, people of color, a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community, like there's a lot of safety, I think, in the arts, that I just didn't really realize before, that there's like a lot of chosen family. There's a lot of acceptance, and so I think I didn't realize maybe how understood one could feel once they were with their people inside the art space. I think, too, practically I used to think that art was just like drawing and painting. And, you know, I didn't know, it could be, and that it was mostly based on like technique or skill. And I don't think that's true anymore. I also used to think that art had to be beautiful. And that's like a word that we were like, you know, it's like a swear word in art school, to use the word beautiful, which is so different than I think what my faith was telling me, it had to be wrapped up or like, you know, all the things had to be put into a very nice Jesus box, you know, and I think I have been challenged to be on the messy journey of humanity and be on the, you know, the parts that are really just hard and not to show the final product as like, “I am A-OK,” you know, or, “I was depressed, and now I'm not.” It's like, “No, I'm still depressed. And this is, you know, still unfolding.” So I think it's been challenging me, the journey of this narrative that, yeah, I have to be perfect in art and outside of it.
Nicki: Well, can I ask you a question about something that isn't planned?
Dennissa: Of course.
Nicki: Yeah, ok, so I have this friend, Marquis, and he, he'll have an episode that from our recording is going to come out, you know, in two weeks, but it will have already come out by the time this airs, but his is about life as an artist, and I love one thing he said, and I was wondering if you could talk to this. He said, “I hope that people begin to ask questions, ask more questions, don't just look at the art or the thing that you're experiencing as something that only holds entertainment value. I think that it's that it's a person, an artist, a creative, is a person that has literally decided to be vulnerable by exposing their art to you and sharing their heart, sharing their truth with you, in hopes, not necessarily that you would understand it, but more so that they could be heard.”
Dennissa: Oh, come on. This man, I don’t need to say anything else. He just said it more eloquently than I did. And, and I think what's really, really crazy is actually like, some of the other prompts that you gave me to think about included exactly what he's talking about, asking more questions, which I just think is so true. I think I've often, you know, people who are not in the arts will be like, “Oh, my gosh, will you go with me to the museum?” And I'm like, “Sure.” They're like, “You can just like tell me everything I'm supposed to get.” And I'm like, “No, I will not go with you, actually, if that's how this is gonna go. I know some art history maybe that you don't know. But you are capable of seeing art and letting it affect you. You just need to ask some questions or spend a little more time with it.” And so I love that. Yeah, it's about being known and knowing the artist and then knowing yourself if the artist isn't present, you know, how do you let the art read you? Or how do you, there's this author, his last name is Saidel, and he talks about like, letting the art do something to you. When he started approaching art with that mentality of like, “This art’s going to do something to me,” it’s like you have this expectation that it's going to challenge you, it's going to invite you it's going to, it's going to pat you on the back, you know, it's going to tell you you're cool. I don't know, it's gonna do something to you. That's really different than being passive. Or that you have to get something from it.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: I don’t think we need to get it. I don't think we ever, I don't know if that's the artist, I never think, “Well, Nicki’s gonna see this piece and she's gonna understand everything about me.” That’s just like impossible, right? Like, there's too much nuance. And so I think I'm, yeah, I'm definitely always wanting people to come in 100% their whole self. And then, and then like, put it next to my art and then see how it feels. You know, what is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like on your skin? What are you thinking? Maybe you're thinking nothing. That's totally fine. You know, there's nothing like, “Oh, I hope you walk away with this.” I hope you walk away with like, you had some time and space to think and feel and see and know of me and then maybe that's a reflection of yourself or maybe that's something totally different.
Nicki: Yeah, and I love that you going with someone, you're not going to give them “answers” because you're not, you're not going to take away from their journey of self discovery as well as sitting with the art and spending time with it.
Dennissa: Yeah, I don't have their eyes or their mind or their experiences. Like even if we grew up in the same town, we went, we have all the same friends, like I could never be in their shoes. And so we're gonna inherently see the same work of art in two very different ways. And that discrepancy is what's interesting to me in conversation. I like when we're similar. That's really fun. That's easy, right? But I like when we're different because then I get to know more about the person. I get to know more, I see different things in the art. Sometimes I'm like, my partner and I will look at the same piece. And he's like, “Wow, this is blue.” And I'm like, “I didn't even see that that was blue. I am, like, very caught up on the way it smells.” Or like, “I just want to touch it.” And he's like, “I love the shape of the canvas.” You know, I don't know, like, or I love the way it's hanging. Like, we're just inherently looking at the same thing, but with very different eyes. And I think that is just like a true picture of humanity, like how different and similar we are. And I love those discrepancies.
Nicki: Yeah, and I love not trying to get someone to where you're thinking, right, like, because I think it honors their agency to have a different opinion, and positions me to learn from someone rather than trying to be the teacher of someone, of like, “See it the way I see it,” but instead, like, “Help me see it, help me see what you see.”
Dennissa: Yeah, and then verbalize it in a way that I understand you. Right. Like, if you ask questions, you're kind of like seeking to understand. And I think that's really cool, too, that it's coming side by side versus like, yeah, one person kind of superior. No one's inferior. If you're speaking from an “I” perspective, it's true. What's true of you, I can't argue that. That's your, that's true, you know?
Nicki: Yeah. Well, I often think back to the performance piece that I came to see you do in 2018. So I was wondering, can you share about that piece and why you decided to do it, what it meant to you.
Dennissa: Ok. I'm gonna flip the script. I would love for you to tell me what you remember from it, and why it stuck out to you. That's like, way more interesting.
Nicki: Yeah, okay. I remember there was ice. And I remember you were so cold. And you're trying to melt the ice and inside of the ice was - was there something with The Velveteen Rabbit?
Dennissa: Yep. Wow, you are killing this.
Nicki: Yeah. And I just remember sitting there, and I would get up and walk off and like, come back, and you're still at it, right? Still sitting with that ice and still using your body to melt it. And I just remember being really intrigued because I had never seen anything like that before. And it was actually just really beautiful to watch. Like I think about it a lot. Yeah, and I don't know if you, did you say something about this, about depression or anything related to it?
Dennissa: Yeah, I'm smiling, so big [indiscernible audio]. Wow, that like means a lot to me. Thank you for thinking about my work. That's like, the biggest and truest like compliment. So thank you. Yeah, you killed it. That's exactly what happened. There were three pieces of ice and suspended in the ice was, yeah, something different. So “Vulnerability” was what I called The Velveteen Rabbit, just because if you haven't read that book, please go buy yourself a copy. It is for children, but it will change your adult life.
Nicki: And it’s your favorite book, right?
Dennissa: Oh, my favorite book. I have so many copies of it. And I have gone into so many bookstores at so many times in my life, and that book has popped up with a new cover and with new insights and new wrapping its little Velveteen Rabbit arms around me and yeah reminding me of so much truth. It's amazing. It feels like a prophetic book that often walks into my life at really strange times. But, yeah, and then the second one was called “The Crusty Love from My Boyfriend.” It was dried flower petals from a bouquet of course that I had kept that he had sent me. And then the third one was like an antidepressant, like a pill, that was suspended and so I yeah, over the course of two hours, I melted the ice with my body, kind of yeah, thinking about what it meant to embody and to show what my depression feels like often. It feels like watching ice melt, and I thought a lot about unthawing. I think that's a concept I say a lot. Like, “I'm just like unthawing from like these emotions or from you know, these like past traumas or these like, yeah, feelings.” And so what does it look like to physically watch something unthaw? And so it was a lot about duration. Like I think exactly what you said was the goal. Like people would watch it and be like, “This is ridiculous,” and then you kind of get like in this like sort of trance where you're like, “What is happening,” and then you start thinking about your own thoughts. It's like if you're ever in yoga and you stay in the pose for a really long time, like your brain just like wanders and your body's like doing all the work. I was kind of doing all the work, and I was hoping that your mind would wander somewhere to yourself or to me. And so, yeah, and then people would walk away and then come back. Some people sat with me the whole two hours, which was also crazy. And so I think the goal of the piece was to create space, again for contemplation, but also to put on display a feeling that I often don’t know how to describe to people. I think depression sits on peoples’ shoulders or on their chest or in their mind or on their heart really differently. And for me, it often feels like, yeah, it just feels like watching ice melt, where you’re like, “Well, there’s another drop. Maybe if I breathe on it, it’ll go faster. Maybe if I rub it on my thigh, it’ll melt quicker.” It felt like a lot of trying, and then there’s some parts in the performance where I would just put it on my leg and lay down and let it be there and not try hard. And the intention of the piece when I set out for, it happened at an opening with two other artists, yeah, Brandi Voigt Fox, actually, who Nicki knows, and she invited me into her show to do a piece, which was really special. So I kind of had just created this in this specific time and space. And I had never, I hadn't done live performance in a long time. So it was a really cool reentry point, and my first piece that I actually ever did in Rock Hill, and the piece was called “Transparent.” And I guess learning to be more transparent in my wants and desires and needs and feelings. Like I'm a very deep feeler. One person who I was on a team with a couple years ago used to say, like, “You should be more concerned if she isn't crying, like that’s a problem. Like if she's not shedding tears, you have a version of Dennissa that is like, you know, way far gone.” And so, yeah, my heart with making the piece was kind of just setting up this goal of melting all this ice to get to the heart of these things, vulnerability, you know, love, like healing through, yeah, therapy and medication, which I firmly believe are gifts from God to enter into and take ownership of our own kind of mental health journey. Yeah I think that piece was wild. It was crazy to see, I look back at the photos, and I’m like, “Man, people really, they committed to watching, they committed to understanding, they had questions.” I think it creates tension, I love performances that create this tension. Like you said, you remember me being really cold. I want people to fight to be like, “Should we help her? Is that part of the goal, to like, yeah, help her?” Or it was funny to watch people, because I wasn’t, I was like zoning out of the audience, right, like I obviously was cognizant of what was going on but I was very much in my space, and I could feel people not wanting to look at me also, which is often how I feel in depression, where I’m like hiding in plain sight, and it feels like depression is written all over my body and everyone’s choosing to ignore it, but then I also feel like, you know, people who know me the best are like, “Yeah, you’re a little different, but it’s actually like mostly in your head,” So really kind of just trying to like yeah, continue to create a relationship with this thing that comes, you know, pretty yearly for me, between, it happens in the fall often, like September, August, September to like January, I just feel the cloud.
Nicki: Yeah, I remember you mentioning that before in a conversation. Because you moved here in like July or something and you were saying you have that -
Dennissa: I’m like, “Nicki, It’s gonna come.”
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: I’m always curious if she’ll come get me, you know. Some seasons she doesn't and I’m like, “Cool, I guess we’re doing better together.” And then other seasons it comes really hard, and it feels unbearable. And sometimes ice when it’s so cold on your body, it feels unbearable, and you don’t want help, but you want help. Those tensions I think I love wrestling with.
Nicki: Yeah, so could people have come and - did people come help you melt it?
Dennissa: Nobody helped.
Nicki: Could they have? Could people have?
Dennissa: I don’t know. I think I would have jumped off that bridge when we got there. I think if someone sat next to me and maybe put their hands out, I would have maybe given them a cube of ice. I don’t know. That’s the beauty of live performances, is it’s so unpredictable. I think if that was the goal, I would have oriented the performance differently -
Nicki: Oh ok.
Dennissa: - if I wanted people to help me. Yeah, I feel like I’ve been at performances where people definitely tried to like take it into their own hands and like help the performer and the performer’s like, “I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing because that’s actually not how you’re supposed to respond.”
Nicki: Interesting. So you just, if you’re part of the people watching, you just have to try something.
Dennissa: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve definitely been a part of one where there was clear instruction like if you wanted to interact with the performance or the performer, you had to take off your shoes. And he was sitting nude on this mound of dirt, and above him was birds, like 20 birds in this huge cage, just suspended above him, and you could, this is in Turkey, and you could, there was seeds to plant in the ground and bird seed to feed the birds, and the piece was called “Cycle.” So, like, basically, you’re planting seeds, you’re feeding the birds, and then the birds are like pooping on the man, and then the man’s like in the dirt, and it was kind of talking about these life cycles, right. So there were some people who came and they would clean off all the poop that was on him. Like every so often, people would just feel this inclination. One lady tried to give him water because he was just sitting there for like three hours in this trance state. And he just didn’t receive it. He just stayed in his zone. Some people like took the bird cage door away. One girl tried to take a bird out of the cage. There was like a lot happening. And I’m often just curious to know what are the rules of performance art and how is the artist communicating the rules. So I think it was pretty clear in “Transparent” that the rules were that you couldn’t come on that black fabric I was sitting on. That felt like the stage if you were to say that, like this is kind of your boundary as an audience. But you could get as close as you wanted to, but people didn’t. People stayed pretty far away from me actually, but.
Nicki: Yeah. Even just thinking back on it now with all these layers, it’s really interesting to think about, yeah, people staying back and people who wouldn’t look at you and what that communicates, you know for me to translate into my real life now.
Dennissa: Yeah, and how often, maybe as womxn we want to be looked at but we’re not or we’re being looked at too much, you know, there’s kind of, I’m always thinking about being too much and not enough, that’s like my two, my dichotomy in life.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: And I think that’s often I think one that womxn feel specifically, those two kind of pulling points.
Nicki: Yeah, that’s so good and that’s so true.
Transition Music
Dennissa: Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Nicki: Yes. Well, let’s jump in. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?
Dennissa: Yeah. So, like Nicki said, I’m Dennissa Young. I’m a Spanish and Native American relational artist. I was born in New Mexico, but I moved around a ton as a kid. And I’m newly based in Chicago, which is very exciting. I just moved here. Crazy to move in a pandemic, but here we are. Yeah. My pronouns are she and her, and I really care about people and understanding and belonging and the arts, so yeah, that’s kind of a little bit about my background.
Nicki: Yes, thank you for sharing that, and I definitely see in you just the ways that you care about people and honor their humanity, so I’m so excited to have you. Well, what narrative were you taught or did you believe about artists and creating art when you were younger?
Dennissa: Yeah, this is a great question. I think I was told or it was reiterated to me that art was easy, like it was an easy topic, it was an easy thing to study, it was always like really fun, and like loosey-goosey, which is like a really great way to enter into art, I think, and my parents always taught me to do what I loved, and often what we love isn’t easy, so I think, I believed a lot that it was just kind of like, you know, loosey-goosey, I guess.
(laughter)
Nicki: Yeah, so when did you begin creating art?
Dennissa: I think I’ve always been making art. I loved like painting and drawing as a kid, which as a mom you probably often are giving your kids something to do with their hands, and so I was homeschooled until about fifth grade, and there was a lot of freedom to create. I was involved in dance, yeah, I was actively always artistic with my brothers, and I really loved photography growing up as a kid, and my mom used to take us to CVS and be like, “You can pick one toy,” and I would always, always pick a disposable camera. I think I just loved keeping memories of friends and I was like a very nostalgic kid and very dramatic, which no one should be surprised -
(laughter)
Dennissa: - knowing me now. But I was also very sensitive, and so I just like loved to reminisce, so I would just take photos of all the places I lived and all the friends I had because I’m from New Mexico but I moved around a lot as a kid, and I went to like three high schools in four years, and subsequently as an adult have moved a ton. I think just like these tactile objects and I really cared about nostalgia, which I think is where creating first began for me.
Nicki: Wow, I love that so much. So, you were always kind of creating, but can you point back to anything that prompted you to create art that you could feel in you or anything like that?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think it was the need to remember. I loved Harriet the Spy growing up as a kid, that movie, I don’t know if-
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: - anyone remembers that. It was like on an orange VHS. It was a Nickelodeon movie. It was awesome. And she was taught to write everything down so that she would never forget. And I think the photographs for me growing up were like these items that I would never forget, really tactile things to keep and hold onto. And I think that morphed into you know going to school for art and now like an art career, which is pretty crazy. I think, yeah, I think my brother prompted me to create. I think my whole family. They’re pretty creative in what they do. My oldest brother is a pastor, and the brother that’s a year older than me, he’s a freelance photographer, and then my mom was always really creative. My dad was always like really silly, so like there was just like lots of room to create in our family. We were always like, you know, I don’t know, doing stuff with each other, and yeah, excited to kind of show each other what we made, cootie catchers, I don’t know, like all these kind of just 90s, 2000s childhood things. That’s when like Photoshop and all these kind of like online programs were coming about. Like I definitely remember when we were kids, we used to play this game, I think it was called Easy DJ, and we would like make songs and DJ on this one tiny desktop computer, and just get really pumped about it. We were just like really nerdy spending time together making stuff as siblings.
Nicki: Aw, I love that so much. Well, so you mentioned doing art as a career now. So what types of art do you create?
Dennissa: So I create mostly video performance and relational art. So I would say performance art is the larger category I fall under, and that’s like maybe most simply described as art that involves the body, time, and space, and so I make a lot of experiences or moments or happenings that are in a specific time at a specific location, and then the best way for those to be viewed is like video, that’s why they’re called video performances, so the final product is a video. And then I also make relational art, which involves other people. It’s a lot about connection and about activating a space and that community and people coming together is what the art is really about. So I also make, I don’t know, I feel like a real artist, wherever the art takes me, learning how to make clothes or learning how to make a box out of wood because I need that or yeah, it’s kind of just this free flowing thing, but my main mediums are video performance and relational art.
Nicki: Yeah, well I can’t wait later in this conversation to get into more about a performance piece that I saw. But before we get there, who or what has inspired you as an artist, and how so?
Dennissa: So I would say the biggest inspiration was probably my brother Spencer. He’s a year older than me, and like I said, he’s a photographer. He was always like drawing and doing graphic design and making stuff in his room, just like this very kind, sweet, introverted man of a brother that I love dearly. He went to Savannah College of Art and Design, and so when he was like going to, thinking about going to college, he was like, “I’m going to do this,” and I was like, “Wait. You can go to college for this. This is amazing.” Yeah, so I wanted to be like him. I think I wanted to create like him, and though we’re really different in the ways that we’re making, I think a lot of our style or integrity I think comes from this work hard attitude that we have as a family. Yeah, and then I feel, besides my brother, my other inspirations for creating is I just like love this idea that I was made by a Creator. Like I believe that there’s a God, and he created me very specifically and very on purpose, and so I think that inspires me to create knowing that it’s maybe inherently inside of me. I was also just very curious as a kid. I’ve been thinking a lot about this origin story idea of where did this all start even before you invited me here. But I was always really curious, and I would always just like rummage through people’s bags and purses. I would definitely get caught at church in the nursery in some bag fully just pulling stuff out, like, “What do you use this for? Why do you carry band-aids?” Just like really interested in people. And so, I think that inspired me being around others and the first church we ever went to was a Spanish English church, and all of the old ladies played tambourine in the audience, and so I always felt like really comfortable expressing myself and using my body as a way of, like worshiping or using my body in laughter or, you know I had brothers, so we’d be like wrestling around. I think there’s just something about having a deep connection to my body that felt like it was empowered to create.
Nicki: All of that is so beautiful. The connection with your brother, but also the connection to being created and being a creator out of that, and then your curiosity, that’s just so cute to think of little Dennissa digging through bags.
Dennissa: Honestly think of grown me but just smaller with cheeks that are like twice the size and no knuckles, just like [indiscernible audio] fingers. And I like, I think physical touch has a big part in that, of creating, and friendship, like these moments of wanting to make something happen for people to feel like they could belong. Yeah, with moving around so much, I think I just, I was tired of being the new kid so often, and so I think I thought a lot like, how could the art be something that creates relationship, that creates friendship, that creates a moment together, even if it’s fleeting, that maybe there could be commonality, and maybe I could be that commonality to other people. Yeah, and my brother, I think, he, I don’t know, sometimes with my siblings we love to be like each other and then we hate to admit it. And so, he’s a huge inspiration to me. He’s just like making it in Houston. Like he works with Simone Biles. He’s like on Nike shoots and like -
Nicki: What?
Dennissa: He’s amazing, and I’m like, “Oh he’s the real artist in the family.”
(laughter)
Dennissa: Which is cool. So yeah.
Nicki: Aw yeah. Well, you mentioned this earlier, like the nostalgia and the making memories, and even here as you’re saying connecting with people and belonging, so is there anything you would add for how creating art has shaped your life?
Dennissa: For sure. I think it’s taught me to care for myself. I think this is a big thing I’ve been thinking about for the last, you know, probably since college. You know I graduated in 2015, so 5 years out, which is crazy, but I think it’s a way that it’s shaped how I see myself, how I see the world, how I see others. I think I’m often filtering things through the eyes of art, like I’m taking a lot of photos, even if it’s like on a walk. I’ve been documenting all the masks on the street since I moved to Chicago. And so maybe that won’t turn into anything, but I’m like collecting a lot, which I think is a really cool way of intaking the world, by seeing and responding to what we’re seeing. I think it’s made me more attentive and intentional, gentle, a lot slower, which I’m not slow, I’m like a flaming extrovert that’s always going a million miles per hour, so I think it’s really taught me, yeah, how to tune in and why, like when I go to a gallery, like, “Why does this other artist want me to focus on this doorknob?” And I have to get into my own brain, and I’m like, “Why, why do they care about the doorknob, and why should I care about it?” And it feels like this connection point, and I think that’s shaped the way that I move through the world through collaboration, though groups of people. I think a lot of my closest friends have come from, you know, groups that I’ve been involved in, whether they’re collaborative groups or projects for art or exhibitions and, yeah, I think it keeps me close to God. It keeps me grounded in my body, which I think is important. I think growing up in the church, which I would love to know what you think about this, but growing up in a church, I think I often was taught to put others first, which is beautiful, right, it’s a great concept if we are caring for ourselves first. I think I somehow missed that part, so I’m 27, I’m relearning how to care for myself, and if I want to stand up for, you know, 3 hours doing a performance, I have to have a strong core, which means I have to like exercise and eat the right things and really care for this body that I was gifted, you know.
Nicki: Yeah, I love you bringing that up because I feel like, too, for me, I’m 30 and beginning to question how, I feel like, yeah, what I was taught about caring for myself would then translate to being selfish or loving yourself is selfish, but it’s been recently to figure out. Like we went to a church where the benediction was, “We want to love God completely so we can love ourselves correctly in order to love our neighbors compassionately.” And that was just last year, sitting in that and realizing that what I had been taught or internalized was always, like, “Oh, we don’t need to love ourselves because we already do.” I started to see, well, like, there’s a difference between a narcissistic, selfish, focused on myself love versus “Oh, I’m made in the image of God and the same way I care for others and have compassion towards them, I need to be having that same compassion toward myself,” and obviously going to therapy has helped a ton.
Dennissa: Oh yeah. Totally. And what is it, I’ve been thinking about the verse love your neighbor as yourself. I think growing up in the 2000s in the church, the “as yourself” part was never explained to me.
Nicki: Right.
Dennissa: And exactly what you’re saying. It’s supposed to be natural, or it’s supposed to come from all these other things, and so I guess I’m just trying to be really intentional of not giving from a place of emptiness. I often have been giving out of nothing, and that’s not helpful. And it’s not helpful to show up to an event or with a friend and be angry or sad because I’ve overcommitted, not because being angry or sad is inappropriate but just because I’m exhausted because I forgot to care for myself.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: It’s like days could pass and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I forgot to eat because I was so busy running around or doing instead of being,” and so I think I’m learning, yeah, through my art to be. I think when I graduated college I felt like there were two trajectories. Like, oh this relational art feels very external, feels very like, maybe what God calls me to as an extrovert, as someone who’s a community builder, as someone who like loves others people, but then I felt like this other fork in my practice was this slow contemplative video work that was so strange, honestly. To watch these sort of moving paintings that just created room for my own contemplation. They felt like really small things that just kind of like these little performances that felt like they meant nothing, but then when I would think about them more they would turn into something else. So even letting myself explore what I thought was visually appealing or what felt good in my body or what was like fun. And so I think I’ve been learning a lot through letting the art transform, my own art transform me and then letting the art of others like kind of wash over me and teach me something. I think that’s what all art can do. It can teach us. It can change us. It can create social change. It can create, you know, art as activism is something I think about a lot. It’s not just making for the sake of making in my own room by myself, it’s like to create, yeah to fight the evil in the world, to have conversations, to move things forward, you know.
Nicki: I love you going here with this conversation, yeah, because I think a lot of it, too, roots back into boundaries and learning to accept boundaries for ourselves.
Dennissa: Why you gotta say my least favorite word?
(laughter)
Nicki: But even just like the internal boundaries, right, to know yourself well and to know when to engage, when to step back, and to trust yourself and trust your body is really important and sounds like it’s, you know, even though it’s a new phenomenon for you, already shaping you, which makes me think, in these different times in your life and as things have been shaping your art throughout your life, have there been evolutions in your art through that?
Dennissa: 100%. I mean I used to make really dumb, bad art.
(laughter)
Dennissa: Yeah, or just like really blatant Christian art that sucked, and maybe that’s growing up watching you know, movies that we can all name that were just bad acting, and we blessed it because it was made with the gospel in mind, or like God’s people made it, so therefore it’s good. And my, in South Carolina, the team that I was working with there with that non-profit would call it like “Dove, Cross, Fish Syndrome” where like artists feel the need to put the dove, the cross, or the fish to call it Christian, and I just would make garbage stuff like that that was so lame and super shallow, and I’ll never tell anyone about it, and I’ll never share it, and all the photos are destroyed. Yeah, I think I thought my duty as an art school student was to engage in this one specific way, to like share Jesus in a way that was like, you know, I don’t even know, it was just not good. And I think I’ve learned to tell the truth and to tell it slant. I’ve learned to tell my truth, whether that’s capital-t Truth for me or lowercase-t truth and really leave room for ambiguity. Nobody likes to be told what to do or how to feel, you know. We love freedom. We love to explore, and so how do I create work that makes rooms for exploration. One artist that I, like a peer that was with me in college, we met at a conference, and he was talking about making art with a lot of crafted ambiguity, and I love that idea that you’re making room for everyone and everything that isn’t like you while still being authentic and specific, which I think is, I don’t know, the best part of art is that it’s, if you’re trying to just talk about something broad, you’re never going to hit anything because you’re talking about love, but if you talk about that feeling you get when you knock on the door of your crush and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, what are they wearing? Is there anything in my teeth?” Like that’s so specific and people can kind of relate to that or they know what butterflies feel like or they know what that nervous energy feels like. So I think there’s something in how I’ve morphed in showing rather than telling or, yeah, in practicality, less meta in my brain. I mean I used to be a photographer, that’s what I got into school with. A really garbage portfolio that I looked at the other day, and I was like, “How the heck did they let me into this really prestigious art school with these terrible photos?” And now, like, photo is never, is rarely my main art and goal, and so I think that’s morphed, too, not only conceptually with the way I’m making, but also physically, what I’m making. So I think that’s, yeah, that’s a lot of transformation that has happened over the course of, I would say more specifically from 2011 onward when I started, I went to college, and I started taking art seriously. Because I went to a really, I didn’t say this earlier in the intro, but I went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, a very small, prestigious art college. So, I think even there being like a straight, Christian woman was pretty like, an anomaly, you know, so really just letting my environment and the people around me, help like broaden my viewpoint of what is humanity, what is race, gender, you know, what is queerness, what is, you know, all these kind of elements that I just was sheltered from. I mean, period. We don’t have, I think some of it is the faith element. I think some of it was fear of my family, I think, yeah, so many things were just broadened and like really being able to have conversation with anyone, I think that’s what we were always taught growing up, what does it look like to enter in with anyone and everyone, even if they’re completely different than you, like you bleed the same blood, so there’s a lot to relate on.
Nicki: Yeah. For sure. I remember as you're talking now, that when we, one of our first conversations, you bringing that up about your experience in school. And being, yeah, cisgender heterosexual, like, Christian, and then how that shaped you. So I’d forgotten. So thanks for bringing it up again. Yeah.
Dennissa: I guess I talk about it a lot. I guess, too, because I think, I think it's just so good for people to place themselves in the world with their, and be confident, you know, in their gender identity, and then their racial or ethnic background. And yeah, these things should be normalized, you know, that everyone is different and unique. And I, I believe God made everyone that way, on purpose. And so the more I get to know other people, I think the more I get to know the one who created me, if we, if I'm believing that everyone is made in the image of God.
Nicki: Yes, that's so good. Well, Dennissa, you brought up social activism. So I'm curious, has that come into play in your art at all?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think, this wave in quarantine of, you know, violence, particularly against Black and brown bodies in this moment, mostly against, you know, Black, with Black lives matter. I think, I think art as activism is something I'm often thinking about, like, how can my art create social change? I don't think I've done enough work or research or, you know, self analysis on how to really meld the two. I think I'm more focused on like, the local offline kind of conversations in my activism. And with my job, like, you know, I mentor a lot of artists and young people. And so really bringing the conversation there. And then through art, I think when there's gentleness and radical empathy and softness, I think there's just more inclination for those kinds of conversations. But I'm not like making work, maybe specifically about what's going on. I think it just coexists with the times we're living in. Yeah, but it's something I'm thinking about a lot. Like, what does it mean to be a perceivably white or racially ambiguous woman in the world, making art that includes my body? It kind of feels inherently political, as Ai Weiwei says or Barbara Kruger or these other great artists that come before me who talk a lot about the presence of a body makes it political, and then being a female body and being a cis female body and what does that mean. So I think I'm really, you know, inkling to connect the dots. I think my organizational work focuses more on racial reconciliation, or restorative justice, like about the projects that we're doing here in Chicago with the current nonprofit that I'm working for, is a lot about platforming Black artists. So I think that the social part is definitely very engaged in my work. I think the content of my work is not maybe specifically about activism, though I am an activist.
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Second Segment
Nicki: I just want to say the words you used of like gentleness and radical empathy and softness. Like, oh, so much like Jesus, right? Like those words just make me feel the presence of Christ and I love that so much.
Dennissa: Yeah, I mean he was like the greatest man of inclusion like he just, he like wrecked social barriers between women, between prostitutes, between thieves. You know, like if you know the Bible, you can go on and on about this. And so I'm like, why aren't his people replicating this? And I would like my personal, you know, duty to be, yeah, reminding people who they are, which I think is part of being, to remind people, yeah, the parts of them that are very, like God's image in them, no matter what they believe or think, like I think only uplifting and encouraging people is going to, you know, help us build a unified community or a unified neighborhood, whatever we want to, whatever space we're occupying, but then also like, this radical acceptance.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: So if God's people aren't housing that radical acceptance or radical empathy, or like a, yeah, incredible softness, like we're missing the gospel. We’re missing like, we're reading two different Bibles, because the man flipped tables, like he was righteous, he was angry about people making a mockery of a place of worship, and how often am I, how often am I mocking God or mocking, you know, or not genuine or not authentic or not bringing my true self even in the deepest presence of the Lord by myself? And then how often am I performing or pleasing people outside of that, and so, yeah, really trying to find a center of like, I'm first loved and accepted by this, like, huge creator. So what does that mean? And how does that, you know, really radically transform everything I'm doing and hopefully everything I'm saying? And art isn’t apart from that. I think growing artistically and spiritually, they're equal for me. They're not, one isn't greater than the other because as I'm growing spiritually, it inspires me artistically. And as I'm growing artistically, it's getting me closer to the creator. And so they feel intrinsically, like, linked to me.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: As well as activism, like if we're not, you know, changing, whether it's at our dinner table, or in our household or with our neighbors, or with our friends, or, you know, with the people in Timbuktu, like what, what are we doing?
Nicki: Yes.
Dennissa: That's coming from like, a sharer, you know, I'm like, an extreme connect, I'm always on like the extreme side of life. I could probably talk to a brick wall, and it might have fun, you know, so like, I know, I'm high connector, high like energy, high like whoo, or whatever. But I do think, in everyone's own respective, self loving way, we can be sharing and making a difference and a change. Whether it's picking up a piece of trash, or, you know, feeding the hungry or showing up at a protest, or, you know, I think there's different ways for different people, and it all can be with the help of moving humanity closer to love and softness and gentleness and restoration. I mean, you can insert any like feel good word there, you know?
Nicki: Yes. Ooh, okay. I'm gonna I'm here to say right now, the brick wall would definitely have fun. Ok.
(laughter)
Nicki: And, yeah, you just reminded me of the late Rachel Held Evans when she talked about what makes the gospel so offensive isn't who it keeps out but who it lets in.
Dennissa: Oh come on.
Nicki: And just this, yeah, this inclusivity and this like, our shared humanity, like unites us. And we're in this together, like, we are in this together. So thank you for sharing all of that. I just loved it so, so much. So with this journey you've been on, has this narrative that you believe about artists and creating art changed?
Dennissa: Oh, for sure. Yeah, totally. I mean, I'm like, oh my gosh. In light of this conversation, I'm like, always changing, you know, I’m always changing I think. I don't believe art is easy, I don't believe artists have it easy, now for sure. Especially being in many different forms of that world, right. Like I was in it in a collegiate sense in Boston. And then I was in it in like a practicing kind of going to galleries setting when I was in Turkey, and then working as an arts organizer in South Carolina and now being like a practicing artist in a big city in Chicago, like, I've seen it in so many forms. And I think there's a lot of othering that happens, right. Like artists are often the people in social groups who are just like othered, whether it's misunderstood, you know, we, we as artists, host a lot of like, yeah, people of color, a lot of people in the LGBTQ+ community, like there's a lot of safety, I think, in the arts, that I just didn't really realize before, that there's like a lot of chosen family. There's a lot of acceptance, and so I think I didn't realize maybe how understood one could feel once they were with their people inside the art space. I think, too, practically I used to think that art was just like drawing and painting. And, you know, I didn't know, it could be, and that it was mostly based on like technique or skill. And I don't think that's true anymore. I also used to think that art had to be beautiful. And that's like a word that we were like, you know, it's like a swear word in art school, to use the word beautiful, which is so different than I think what my faith was telling me, it had to be wrapped up or like, you know, all the things had to be put into a very nice Jesus box, you know, and I think I have been challenged to be on the messy journey of humanity and be on the, you know, the parts that are really just hard and not to show the final product as like, “I am A-OK,” you know, or, “I was depressed, and now I'm not.” It's like, “No, I'm still depressed. And this is, you know, still unfolding.” So I think it's been challenging me, the journey of this narrative that, yeah, I have to be perfect in art and outside of it.
Nicki: Well, can I ask you a question about something that isn't planned?
Dennissa: Of course.
Nicki: Yeah, ok, so I have this friend, Marquis, and he, he'll have an episode that from our recording is going to come out, you know, in two weeks, but it will have already come out by the time this airs, but his is about life as an artist, and I love one thing he said, and I was wondering if you could talk to this. He said, “I hope that people begin to ask questions, ask more questions, don't just look at the art or the thing that you're experiencing as something that only holds entertainment value. I think that it's that it's a person, an artist, a creative, is a person that has literally decided to be vulnerable by exposing their art to you and sharing their heart, sharing their truth with you, in hopes, not necessarily that you would understand it, but more so that they could be heard.”
Dennissa: Oh, come on. This man, I don’t need to say anything else. He just said it more eloquently than I did. And, and I think what's really, really crazy is actually like, some of the other prompts that you gave me to think about included exactly what he's talking about, asking more questions, which I just think is so true. I think I've often, you know, people who are not in the arts will be like, “Oh, my gosh, will you go with me to the museum?” And I'm like, “Sure.” They're like, “You can just like tell me everything I'm supposed to get.” And I'm like, “No, I will not go with you, actually, if that's how this is gonna go. I know some art history maybe that you don't know. But you are capable of seeing art and letting it affect you. You just need to ask some questions or spend a little more time with it.” And so I love that. Yeah, it's about being known and knowing the artist and then knowing yourself if the artist isn't present, you know, how do you let the art read you? Or how do you, there's this author, his last name is Saidel, and he talks about like, letting the art do something to you. When he started approaching art with that mentality of like, “This art’s going to do something to me,” it’s like you have this expectation that it's going to challenge you, it's going to invite you it's going to, it's going to pat you on the back, you know, it's going to tell you you're cool. I don't know, it's gonna do something to you. That's really different than being passive. Or that you have to get something from it.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: I don’t think we need to get it. I don't think we ever, I don't know if that's the artist, I never think, “Well, Nicki’s gonna see this piece and she's gonna understand everything about me.” That’s just like impossible, right? Like, there's too much nuance. And so I think I'm, yeah, I'm definitely always wanting people to come in 100% their whole self. And then, and then like, put it next to my art and then see how it feels. You know, what is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like on your skin? What are you thinking? Maybe you're thinking nothing. That's totally fine. You know, there's nothing like, “Oh, I hope you walk away with this.” I hope you walk away with like, you had some time and space to think and feel and see and know of me and then maybe that's a reflection of yourself or maybe that's something totally different.
Nicki: Yeah, and I love that you going with someone, you're not going to give them “answers” because you're not, you're not going to take away from their journey of self discovery as well as sitting with the art and spending time with it.
Dennissa: Yeah, I don't have their eyes or their mind or their experiences. Like even if we grew up in the same town, we went, we have all the same friends, like I could never be in their shoes. And so we're gonna inherently see the same work of art in two very different ways. And that discrepancy is what's interesting to me in conversation. I like when we're similar. That's really fun. That's easy, right? But I like when we're different because then I get to know more about the person. I get to know more, I see different things in the art. Sometimes I'm like, my partner and I will look at the same piece. And he's like, “Wow, this is blue.” And I'm like, “I didn't even see that that was blue. I am, like, very caught up on the way it smells.” Or like, “I just want to touch it.” And he's like, “I love the shape of the canvas.” You know, I don't know, like, or I love the way it's hanging. Like, we're just inherently looking at the same thing, but with very different eyes. And I think that is just like a true picture of humanity, like how different and similar we are. And I love those discrepancies.
Nicki: Yeah, and I love not trying to get someone to where you're thinking, right, like, because I think it honors their agency to have a different opinion, and positions me to learn from someone rather than trying to be the teacher of someone, of like, “See it the way I see it,” but instead, like, “Help me see it, help me see what you see.”
Dennissa: Yeah, and then verbalize it in a way that I understand you. Right. Like, if you ask questions, you're kind of like seeking to understand. And I think that's really cool, too, that it's coming side by side versus like, yeah, one person kind of superior. No one's inferior. If you're speaking from an “I” perspective, it's true. What's true of you, I can't argue that. That's your, that's true, you know?
Nicki: Yeah. Well, I often think back to the performance piece that I came to see you do in 2018. So I was wondering, can you share about that piece and why you decided to do it, what it meant to you.
Dennissa: Ok. I'm gonna flip the script. I would love for you to tell me what you remember from it, and why it stuck out to you. That's like, way more interesting.
Nicki: Yeah, okay. I remember there was ice. And I remember you were so cold. And you're trying to melt the ice and inside of the ice was - was there something with The Velveteen Rabbit?
Dennissa: Yep. Wow, you are killing this.
Nicki: Yeah. And I just remember sitting there, and I would get up and walk off and like, come back, and you're still at it, right? Still sitting with that ice and still using your body to melt it. And I just remember being really intrigued because I had never seen anything like that before. And it was actually just really beautiful to watch. Like I think about it a lot. Yeah, and I don't know if you, did you say something about this, about depression or anything related to it?
Dennissa: Yeah, I'm smiling, so big [indiscernible audio]. Wow, that like means a lot to me. Thank you for thinking about my work. That's like, the biggest and truest like compliment. So thank you. Yeah, you killed it. That's exactly what happened. There were three pieces of ice and suspended in the ice was, yeah, something different. So “Vulnerability” was what I called The Velveteen Rabbit, just because if you haven't read that book, please go buy yourself a copy. It is for children, but it will change your adult life.
Nicki: And it’s your favorite book, right?
Dennissa: Oh, my favorite book. I have so many copies of it. And I have gone into so many bookstores at so many times in my life, and that book has popped up with a new cover and with new insights and new wrapping its little Velveteen Rabbit arms around me and yeah reminding me of so much truth. It's amazing. It feels like a prophetic book that often walks into my life at really strange times. But, yeah, and then the second one was called “The Crusty Love from My Boyfriend.” It was dried flower petals from a bouquet of course that I had kept that he had sent me. And then the third one was like an antidepressant, like a pill, that was suspended and so I yeah, over the course of two hours, I melted the ice with my body, kind of yeah, thinking about what it meant to embody and to show what my depression feels like often. It feels like watching ice melt, and I thought a lot about unthawing. I think that's a concept I say a lot. Like, “I'm just like unthawing from like these emotions or from you know, these like past traumas or these like, yeah, feelings.” And so what does it look like to physically watch something unthaw? And so it was a lot about duration. Like I think exactly what you said was the goal. Like people would watch it and be like, “This is ridiculous,” and then you kind of get like in this like sort of trance where you're like, “What is happening,” and then you start thinking about your own thoughts. It's like if you're ever in yoga and you stay in the pose for a really long time, like your brain just like wanders and your body's like doing all the work. I was kind of doing all the work, and I was hoping that your mind would wander somewhere to yourself or to me. And so, yeah, and then people would walk away and then come back. Some people sat with me the whole two hours, which was also crazy. And so I think the goal of the piece was to create space, again for contemplation, but also to put on display a feeling that I often don’t know how to describe to people. I think depression sits on peoples’ shoulders or on their chest or in their mind or on their heart really differently. And for me, it often feels like, yeah, it just feels like watching ice melt, where you’re like, “Well, there’s another drop. Maybe if I breathe on it, it’ll go faster. Maybe if I rub it on my thigh, it’ll melt quicker.” It felt like a lot of trying, and then there’s some parts in the performance where I would just put it on my leg and lay down and let it be there and not try hard. And the intention of the piece when I set out for, it happened at an opening with two other artists, yeah, Brandi Voigt Fox, actually, who Nicki knows, and she invited me into her show to do a piece, which was really special. So I kind of had just created this in this specific time and space. And I had never, I hadn't done live performance in a long time. So it was a really cool reentry point, and my first piece that I actually ever did in Rock Hill, and the piece was called “Transparent.” And I guess learning to be more transparent in my wants and desires and needs and feelings. Like I'm a very deep feeler. One person who I was on a team with a couple years ago used to say, like, “You should be more concerned if she isn't crying, like that’s a problem. Like if she's not shedding tears, you have a version of Dennissa that is like, you know, way far gone.” And so, yeah, my heart with making the piece was kind of just setting up this goal of melting all this ice to get to the heart of these things, vulnerability, you know, love, like healing through, yeah, therapy and medication, which I firmly believe are gifts from God to enter into and take ownership of our own kind of mental health journey. Yeah I think that piece was wild. It was crazy to see, I look back at the photos, and I’m like, “Man, people really, they committed to watching, they committed to understanding, they had questions.” I think it creates tension, I love performances that create this tension. Like you said, you remember me being really cold. I want people to fight to be like, “Should we help her? Is that part of the goal, to like, yeah, help her?” Or it was funny to watch people, because I wasn’t, I was like zoning out of the audience, right, like I obviously was cognizant of what was going on but I was very much in my space, and I could feel people not wanting to look at me also, which is often how I feel in depression, where I’m like hiding in plain sight, and it feels like depression is written all over my body and everyone’s choosing to ignore it, but then I also feel like, you know, people who know me the best are like, “Yeah, you’re a little different, but it’s actually like mostly in your head,” So really kind of just trying to like yeah, continue to create a relationship with this thing that comes, you know, pretty yearly for me, between, it happens in the fall often, like September, August, September to like January, I just feel the cloud.
Nicki: Yeah, I remember you mentioning that before in a conversation. Because you moved here in like July or something and you were saying you have that -
Dennissa: I’m like, “Nicki, It’s gonna come.”
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: I’m always curious if she’ll come get me, you know. Some seasons she doesn't and I’m like, “Cool, I guess we’re doing better together.” And then other seasons it comes really hard, and it feels unbearable. And sometimes ice when it’s so cold on your body, it feels unbearable, and you don’t want help, but you want help. Those tensions I think I love wrestling with.
Nicki: Yeah, so could people have come and - did people come help you melt it?
Dennissa: Nobody helped.
Nicki: Could they have? Could people have?
Dennissa: I don’t know. I think I would have jumped off that bridge when we got there. I think if someone sat next to me and maybe put their hands out, I would have maybe given them a cube of ice. I don’t know. That’s the beauty of live performances, is it’s so unpredictable. I think if that was the goal, I would have oriented the performance differently -
Nicki: Oh ok.
Dennissa: - if I wanted people to help me. Yeah, I feel like I’ve been at performances where people definitely tried to like take it into their own hands and like help the performer and the performer’s like, “I’m gonna keep doing what I’m doing because that’s actually not how you’re supposed to respond.”
Nicki: Interesting. So you just, if you’re part of the people watching, you just have to try something.
Dennissa: Yeah. Yeah, I’ve definitely been a part of one where there was clear instruction like if you wanted to interact with the performance or the performer, you had to take off your shoes. And he was sitting nude on this mound of dirt, and above him was birds, like 20 birds in this huge cage, just suspended above him, and you could, this is in Turkey, and you could, there was seeds to plant in the ground and bird seed to feed the birds, and the piece was called “Cycle.” So, like, basically, you’re planting seeds, you’re feeding the birds, and then the birds are like pooping on the man, and then the man’s like in the dirt, and it was kind of talking about these life cycles, right. So there were some people who came and they would clean off all the poop that was on him. Like every so often, people would just feel this inclination. One lady tried to give him water because he was just sitting there for like three hours in this trance state. And he just didn’t receive it. He just stayed in his zone. Some people like took the bird cage door away. One girl tried to take a bird out of the cage. There was like a lot happening. And I’m often just curious to know what are the rules of performance art and how is the artist communicating the rules. So I think it was pretty clear in “Transparent” that the rules were that you couldn’t come on that black fabric I was sitting on. That felt like the stage if you were to say that, like this is kind of your boundary as an audience. But you could get as close as you wanted to, but people didn’t. People stayed pretty far away from me actually, but.
Nicki: Yeah. Even just thinking back on it now with all these layers, it’s really interesting to think about, yeah, people staying back and people who wouldn’t look at you and what that communicates, you know for me to translate into my real life now.
Dennissa: Yeah, and how often, maybe as womxn we want to be looked at but we’re not or we’re being looked at too much, you know, there’s kind of, I’m always thinking about being too much and not enough, that’s like my two, my dichotomy in life.
Nicki: Yeah.
Dennissa: And I think that’s often I think one that womxn feel specifically, those two kind of pulling points.
Nicki: Yeah, that’s so good and that’s so true.
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Third Segment
Nicki: Well, Dennissa, I also remember attending a short films festival event with Gwen, and we were below Amélie's in downtown Rock Hill. And we saw you afterwards, and I remember you asking me something about what I thought about the films. And I mentioned that I was trying to figure out why I was feeling such discomfort about two of the films in particular. And you acknowledged that art should make people uncomfortable or something about, “Then it’s done its job.” And I’ve thought about that a lot as I’ve interrogated my discomfort in other areas. But I was wondering if you could kind of expound on that idea of the art and the discomfort?
Dennissa: For sure. I totally remember that. Yeah, my job put on, it’s called Art Party, it’s a yearly festival, and we had added short films I think to the lineup, which was really cool. They were very strange, all of them, were really cool and locally done from artists in Rock Hill, which was awesome, but yeah, I think discomfort is one of those things that we obviously aren’t good at feeling, especially when it feels likes it’s crawling up your body, you know, and you want to jump out of your skin. I think, I think about art like food, right, if you’re eating a burger and you take a bite, and you’re like, “Yuck, I hate mustard. This is gross. How nasty that this is on here.” And you kind of just pick apart what you like and don’t like about food and you stay away from things with mustard because you don’t like the taste. I think art’s the same way. The more you intake and the more you understand, the more you kind of feel like what you like. And I think, I think for certain artists, being uncomfortable, making people feel uncomfortable is part of the gig or the shtick or like, you know, what’s supposed to happen. I had an art teacher in high school that told me, “Touch everything. If you see a desk in a gallery, try to open the drawers.” He was like, “If the artist didn’t want you to open the drawers, they would bolt them shut,” and so I think it’s the same thing, that there’s this pushing of boundaries, and I think if I’m thinking about artists who feel uncomfortable in their bodies or in their communities, maybe some of it is wanting other people to feel the way they feel. And to kind of understand just for a minute maybe a three minute short film what it feels like to be them. Kind of what that other artist was saying, to create a space or a piece or a visual, something to create understanding of what, of an artist self to show something. And I think some of the best tension in art for me is those pieces that you can’t look at it and you can’t look away from it, like a car accident, you know, there’s something that we’re drawn to to watch, but it hurts us, and I think we like some of that pain sometimes. And so I think uncomfortability is something that artists play a lot with because it’s kind of easy to make a person who’s not an artist feel uncomfortable, you know. We’re uncomfortable with silence. We’re uncomfortable with awkwardness. We’re uncomfortable about sex, about money, about, I don’t know, there’s so many things in America that people are so uncomfortable talking about, which feels wild to me, just as a person. And so I think sometimes maybe artists forget that they talk about these things all the time but their closest friends don’t think about them. I was talking to a Chicago-based choreographer actually that I met recently, and we were talking about when you’re just so steeped in art culture, whether that’s like, yeah, politically correct language or queer culture or any of these big topics, and you forget that other people don’t think about this all the time, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so radical,” and you’re like, “Oh this is my normal thought. I’m not trying to do anything extreme.” I think we can often just be seen as extreme because the world’s kind of mundane and artists bring a lot of diversity and complexity to it, you know.
Nicki: Yeah, well I think even you mentioning earlier the otherness of artists, and you know, as you’ve talked about the art community and people within that, I was curious if you could talk about how you’ve seen art bring people together.
Dennissa: Yeah, I think some of it is that moment brought us together, right, even if it was passing between moments, that that’s a conversation you’ve thought about a lot that I probably, you know, I just think I’m always trying to make art accessible to people, like what we’ve talked about, they don’t have to get it, they can just feel their own feelings, and so I think some of it for me is conversation. I’ve seen art bring people together through meals, common goals. I’ve seen it break barriers and comfort levels. I think a lot of the art that I create about experience or the audience, they activate the space, they make it come alive. Like a lot of my work wouldn’t exist if there wasn't people to see it or people to, yeah, touch it or feel it or interact with it physically. I think I’ve seen it, people get what they need from it. Like, this, for example, this thing about uncomfortability, that one or two short films, whatever they were about, they challenged your viewpoint on yourself and your current world, right. They kind of gave you space to think and feel in a new way, and I think that’s the power of art, and I think groups like, you know there’s a group in Rock Hill that has local artists and then artists across the US called WAMA, it stands for We Also Make Art. There’s something when a group of artists comes together to organize, to collaborate, to promote, that brings validity to what we’re doing. I think the same with Friday Arts Project, the nonprofit I was working for, kind of where we met and shows that you’ve been to, yeah, this goal of organizing time and space around art and around community and that the point is to go deeper and do more. I think that’s how I’ve seen art bring people together is just by doing together.
Nicki: Yeah. And well how have you personally used art to bring people together?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think “Transparent” is a good example. I think that is more like people seeing me versus maybe art fully bringing people together. I think the unique thing about the work that I make, like for example, this piece called “Take What You Need,” it toured a little bit in Rock Hill and Charlotte actually last year and a little bit of this year in 2020, but I performed it like 4 times, and 2 of which were solo and 2 had a couple other performers in it. But basically this piece I created, actually, because I created another piece before it, which is so cool when pieces kind of flow out of one another, but I made this piece in direct response to what I thought the community in Rock Hill needed. And so my friends, my peers, my, you know, people that were older than me, and so I just created these wearable sculptures that were dresses essentially that had pockets in them, and I just wanted to stand there like a statue and say, “Take what you need.” The whole piece wouldn’t be anything if people didn’t come and take what they needed, right. And so the rules of the performance kind of became clear when they asked me anything else or when they made any comment or talked to me, I would just repeat, “Take what you need,” and my hands were by my side, open, and in the pockets were things like, “decision” or “a call from a mom” or “patience,” some of these kind of just generic feeling words, and then in the pockets were metaphors to those things. So the one for decision was like a little dice that you would, I would say, “Think of a decision you need to make,” and then they would roll it, and the dice was in Turkish, and I would just translate it, kind of like a Magic 8-Ball. And then my mom was on the phone, so they would take the headphones out of the picket, and I would just say, “Say hello,” and my mom would be like, “Hi, how are you?” You know, just for like two hours, she would just sit there on the phone talking to different people. And so I think I’ve seen, for me, art comes together when the people get to really activate the space and my philosophy with you know this radical empathy or radical softness is using it as a weapon to bring people in and love them and make them feel known and let them know that they’re fully allowed to be their biggest self, and I’ve seen transformation. People have cried from that piece, and they’ve seen stuff that didn’t even exist in the piece, you know. Like they’re projecting their emotion because it’s so much of a blank canvas if you will to insert yourself, and so I think I’ve seen my own art bring deeper senses of, yeah, community, togetherness, relationship. Like I think friendship has formed around my art with people who interact with it and people who post about it online and that I message those people and I’m like, “What’d you think?” And they’re like, “It was cool.” And I’m like, “Great, you wanna get coffee?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Awesome.” And then, you know, the friendship lives outside of the one time gallery show.
Nicki: Yeah. Ok, I want to tear up thinking about your mom. Because 1, she’s one of the loveliest humans that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Because I remember when you brought her to my birthday lunch because she was in town, and I was just so drawn to her and then I got to talk to her at your performance, and so I love that she just sat there on the phone and yeah, just think of the people who needed that. So beautiful. So beautiful.
Dennissa: She’s so down, she’s always down to clown with me. I’m like, “Mom, can you do this thing?” And she’s like, “Yeah, when?” And then the after first time, we actually performed it in the same space where the film was in Amélie's with WAMA, that was the first time I performed it in the summer of 2019, and my mom was on the phone for like, the opening was like two hours, and she talked to so many people, and she was like, “When can we do it again?” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I created like a performance monster. She wants to keep performing.” We’ve made a couple pieces together, which has been really cool. We look a lot alike, and I think a lot about becoming her in the best way. Like when people are like, “Oh my gosh, you’re gonna be so beautiful when you’re older,” I’m like, “I know. Look at that skin. I’m like she’s perfect.” So I really adore her. She’s always been my best friend, and she’s always loved and accepted me just as I am. I’ve asked her to do crazy things, and she’s like, “Ok, sure.” Yeah, she radiates radical empathy, softness, the Spirit of God is definitely inside of her, and yeah, she’s a world changer, and I’m utterly grateful she is my mom.
Nicki: Yes, yes. I see all of that in her, too, in just the short interactions. But, Dennissa, why do you think art is able to bring people together like it does?
Dennissa: I think because it’s authentic, right. I think it’s like what that artist said, what you read earlier, it’s someone bringing a vulnerability to the table and then letting other people into it. I think it’s, yeah, I think people love that it can sometimes be something that you touch or something that you keep. I often think about this kind of question, when I was in college I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Fine Arts because my school was attached to it, and I remember standing in the Art of the Americas, you know like on a random Tuesday afternoon, and me and this other woman were standing in front of the painting of the Garden of Eden. It’s this incredibly large painting from a very long time ago, this is very accurate information, this really great painting. And I normally don’t connect to paintings, which I know, yes, haters come at me, I just really, it takes a lot for a painting to speak to me. But I try to pay attention to them even when they’re hard to know. In this painting Adam and Eve are probably, no joke, an inch tall, honestly, and the painting is probably like 4 feet by 3 feet. It’s a huge painting of the vastness of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve are tiny. And I remember standing there with this woman, who I don’t know, right, she’s like older, like my grandma’s age, she’s older, and we’re both looking at the painting like completely in awe, just like fully entranced in it, and I remember looking at her, and I just like pointed at the painting and like made a face like, “Whew. This,” and she was like, “I know,” and then we just had this moment of experiencing this thing that we were both looking at, I think that we both had never seen before, and probably hadn’t both thought about it in that way that the artist was presenting, and I think that, that’s one way artists, art brings people together is just the commonality. Like we could look at this painting and be from completely different times and spaces and generations, but we were like relating because our eyes were both intaking the pigment on the page in the same light in the same moment, and I think, yeah, I think that’s how art brings people together. It’s like a place to start, right, like we can just sit here and talk about something we’ve both seen, and then spiral off into other conversations. And I think there’s something powerful about how it draws us in and pulls us apart and then stays in our mind and then we can keep talking about it. I can probably talk about performances that I’ve been a part of that I hated that still stick with me because I think about them a lot or yeah, we love to share our experiences, I think, as people, and so human to human we can just share what we saw or experienced and then have this moment of yeah, collective effervescence, if you’ve heard of that term. It’s like if you’re at a concert and everyone puts up their phone and starts waving their hands or whatever, there’s like a collective moment because we’re all sharing the same thing at the same time. I think art just has that power of showing people themselves and each other.
Nicki: Yeah, well thank you for sharing about that specific interaction with the Adam and Eve painting. And I feel like it really leads into the next question, and we have a few questions before wrapping up here. But what advice do you have for people as they engage with art?
Dennissa: Take it slow. I would say engage with a lot of different kinds of art. Ask a lot of questions. Spend time with it, you know, someone spent hours, months, even years on the piece that you’re looking at, and yeah, ask yourself why you liked it or didn’t like it, and I think each person is capable of getting something from any piece, and it could be what the artist intended, it could be something you thought about that morning, it could be something that’s probing your heart to go deeper. And I think the risk of putting work in the world is that it might go out and not come back the way you expected, but I think that every piece will land in some space of someone’s life, whether it’s like, “That was cool,” and you sort of move on or some of it is deeper. And I think, I guess I would challenge people to not be afraid. I think what we talked about, you don’t have to get it, whatever it is. The artist isn’t trying to trick you or you know dupe you or kind of be Houdini. They’re really just wanting to show you something, and so, just like in a conversation, how would you listen to them and yeah, let the art challenge you I guess is what I would say for people.
Nicki: Yeah, that seems very fitting for our conversation. Well, Dennissa, what is your hope for the art community?
Dennissa: Well, I have so many hopes. I hope it would be less competitive and more celebratory. I think there’s only so many shows and so many grants and so many opportunities for artists, and so I wish that we would really kind of come together instead of feeling like only one person could sit at the table, that really the art table is huge, multi-layered, and really complex, and so I would hope that we would celebrate one another and that artists would also be respected by the outside as culture shapers, culture influences. I mean, come on, history is defined by art movements when we look back, right. And so I think I would love for everyone to respect the arts that are happening and unfolding in current present-day times. Like we don’t have to wait till the artist is dead to think they’re important. We can understand and spend time with the art now and celebrate it. I think that would help artists feel valued when people think and celebrate their work. I feel like Mario where I just leveled up when you said you think about my work. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, well I have to make more so she can have more to think about.” It feels like this very encouraging, validating thing when people are thinking of us as, yeah, real humans in the world, creating art is a real job. It’s not like this thing that doesn’t take any effort. For some people it’s effortless. Some people rise and shine and can like, you know, draw a realistic drawing, but for me, I have to be in the right mood, it has to be the right climate outside, I have to be very well fed and excited, you know. It’s nuanced for me to create, and so I think for, yeah, for it to be validated as a real career that is transforming people’s lives. I mean people cry at art works, people feel, and I think that’s important in our current world.
Nicki: Yeah, I didn’t come to the “Take What You Need,” but I saw videos, and yeah, I wish I had been there.
Dennissa: Coming to a city near you.
Nicki: Well, what is one action that people listening can commit to bring your hopes to fruition?
Dennissa: I would say look at art and that’s, and then I would say encourage your artist friends. Like if you have a friend who is an artist or if you know an artist, ask them what they’re working on. I think what you’re doing here, like, oh my gosh, you just gave me so much time to say a bunch of things that were like, you know, planned and unplanned, and that helped my brain kind of reiterate and to think my own thoughts. I think, yeah, when people give me any time of day to talk about my work, I’m always very grateful. And I feel celebrated, I feel really, yeah, known, when people are like, “Why did you make that?” or “What prompted you to make that?” or “Why that color?” And sometimes it’s like, “I don’t know. I just did it,” and sometimes it’s like, “Oh I was thinking about this for months,” you know, and it was very specific. So I would say engage with your artist friends by looking at their work, by asking them about it, and you know, by buying it. Buy artwork. I think that’s the most loving thing to do for any artist.
Nicki: Yeah, for sure. Well, Dennissa, I want to one, thank you for broadening the narrative for me about art, and also thank you for coming on the show and sharing about your art and how you bring people together through your art.
Dennissa: Aw, thank you for having me. I’m like hugging myself. I’m in quarantine, I’m often, when I see people from a socially distant view, I’m like restraining myself from running towards them and hugging them, so now, I’m just like, “Oh, yes, thank you. I’m hugging myself. This is beautiful.”
Nicki: That’s right, you’re a hugger. You love hugs, and so yeah, I am, too, and this has been real tough.
Dennissa: Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your beautiful questions.
Nicki: Well, Dennissa, I also remember attending a short films festival event with Gwen, and we were below Amélie's in downtown Rock Hill. And we saw you afterwards, and I remember you asking me something about what I thought about the films. And I mentioned that I was trying to figure out why I was feeling such discomfort about two of the films in particular. And you acknowledged that art should make people uncomfortable or something about, “Then it’s done its job.” And I’ve thought about that a lot as I’ve interrogated my discomfort in other areas. But I was wondering if you could kind of expound on that idea of the art and the discomfort?
Dennissa: For sure. I totally remember that. Yeah, my job put on, it’s called Art Party, it’s a yearly festival, and we had added short films I think to the lineup, which was really cool. They were very strange, all of them, were really cool and locally done from artists in Rock Hill, which was awesome, but yeah, I think discomfort is one of those things that we obviously aren’t good at feeling, especially when it feels likes it’s crawling up your body, you know, and you want to jump out of your skin. I think, I think about art like food, right, if you’re eating a burger and you take a bite, and you’re like, “Yuck, I hate mustard. This is gross. How nasty that this is on here.” And you kind of just pick apart what you like and don’t like about food and you stay away from things with mustard because you don’t like the taste. I think art’s the same way. The more you intake and the more you understand, the more you kind of feel like what you like. And I think, I think for certain artists, being uncomfortable, making people feel uncomfortable is part of the gig or the shtick or like, you know, what’s supposed to happen. I had an art teacher in high school that told me, “Touch everything. If you see a desk in a gallery, try to open the drawers.” He was like, “If the artist didn’t want you to open the drawers, they would bolt them shut,” and so I think it’s the same thing, that there’s this pushing of boundaries, and I think if I’m thinking about artists who feel uncomfortable in their bodies or in their communities, maybe some of it is wanting other people to feel the way they feel. And to kind of understand just for a minute maybe a three minute short film what it feels like to be them. Kind of what that other artist was saying, to create a space or a piece or a visual, something to create understanding of what, of an artist self to show something. And I think some of the best tension in art for me is those pieces that you can’t look at it and you can’t look away from it, like a car accident, you know, there’s something that we’re drawn to to watch, but it hurts us, and I think we like some of that pain sometimes. And so I think uncomfortability is something that artists play a lot with because it’s kind of easy to make a person who’s not an artist feel uncomfortable, you know. We’re uncomfortable with silence. We’re uncomfortable with awkwardness. We’re uncomfortable about sex, about money, about, I don’t know, there’s so many things in America that people are so uncomfortable talking about, which feels wild to me, just as a person. And so I think sometimes maybe artists forget that they talk about these things all the time but their closest friends don’t think about them. I was talking to a Chicago-based choreographer actually that I met recently, and we were talking about when you’re just so steeped in art culture, whether that’s like, yeah, politically correct language or queer culture or any of these big topics, and you forget that other people don’t think about this all the time, and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so radical,” and you’re like, “Oh this is my normal thought. I’m not trying to do anything extreme.” I think we can often just be seen as extreme because the world’s kind of mundane and artists bring a lot of diversity and complexity to it, you know.
Nicki: Yeah, well I think even you mentioning earlier the otherness of artists, and you know, as you’ve talked about the art community and people within that, I was curious if you could talk about how you’ve seen art bring people together.
Dennissa: Yeah, I think some of it is that moment brought us together, right, even if it was passing between moments, that that’s a conversation you’ve thought about a lot that I probably, you know, I just think I’m always trying to make art accessible to people, like what we’ve talked about, they don’t have to get it, they can just feel their own feelings, and so I think some of it for me is conversation. I’ve seen art bring people together through meals, common goals. I’ve seen it break barriers and comfort levels. I think a lot of the art that I create about experience or the audience, they activate the space, they make it come alive. Like a lot of my work wouldn’t exist if there wasn't people to see it or people to, yeah, touch it or feel it or interact with it physically. I think I’ve seen it, people get what they need from it. Like, this, for example, this thing about uncomfortability, that one or two short films, whatever they were about, they challenged your viewpoint on yourself and your current world, right. They kind of gave you space to think and feel in a new way, and I think that’s the power of art, and I think groups like, you know there’s a group in Rock Hill that has local artists and then artists across the US called WAMA, it stands for We Also Make Art. There’s something when a group of artists comes together to organize, to collaborate, to promote, that brings validity to what we’re doing. I think the same with Friday Arts Project, the nonprofit I was working for, kind of where we met and shows that you’ve been to, yeah, this goal of organizing time and space around art and around community and that the point is to go deeper and do more. I think that’s how I’ve seen art bring people together is just by doing together.
Nicki: Yeah. And well how have you personally used art to bring people together?
Dennissa: Yeah, I think “Transparent” is a good example. I think that is more like people seeing me versus maybe art fully bringing people together. I think the unique thing about the work that I make, like for example, this piece called “Take What You Need,” it toured a little bit in Rock Hill and Charlotte actually last year and a little bit of this year in 2020, but I performed it like 4 times, and 2 of which were solo and 2 had a couple other performers in it. But basically this piece I created, actually, because I created another piece before it, which is so cool when pieces kind of flow out of one another, but I made this piece in direct response to what I thought the community in Rock Hill needed. And so my friends, my peers, my, you know, people that were older than me, and so I just created these wearable sculptures that were dresses essentially that had pockets in them, and I just wanted to stand there like a statue and say, “Take what you need.” The whole piece wouldn’t be anything if people didn’t come and take what they needed, right. And so the rules of the performance kind of became clear when they asked me anything else or when they made any comment or talked to me, I would just repeat, “Take what you need,” and my hands were by my side, open, and in the pockets were things like, “decision” or “a call from a mom” or “patience,” some of these kind of just generic feeling words, and then in the pockets were metaphors to those things. So the one for decision was like a little dice that you would, I would say, “Think of a decision you need to make,” and then they would roll it, and the dice was in Turkish, and I would just translate it, kind of like a Magic 8-Ball. And then my mom was on the phone, so they would take the headphones out of the picket, and I would just say, “Say hello,” and my mom would be like, “Hi, how are you?” You know, just for like two hours, she would just sit there on the phone talking to different people. And so I think I’ve seen, for me, art comes together when the people get to really activate the space and my philosophy with you know this radical empathy or radical softness is using it as a weapon to bring people in and love them and make them feel known and let them know that they’re fully allowed to be their biggest self, and I’ve seen transformation. People have cried from that piece, and they’ve seen stuff that didn’t even exist in the piece, you know. Like they’re projecting their emotion because it’s so much of a blank canvas if you will to insert yourself, and so I think I’ve seen my own art bring deeper senses of, yeah, community, togetherness, relationship. Like I think friendship has formed around my art with people who interact with it and people who post about it online and that I message those people and I’m like, “What’d you think?” And they’re like, “It was cool.” And I’m like, “Great, you wanna get coffee?” And they’re like, “Yeah.” And I’m like, “Awesome.” And then, you know, the friendship lives outside of the one time gallery show.
Nicki: Yeah. Ok, I want to tear up thinking about your mom. Because 1, she’s one of the loveliest humans that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Because I remember when you brought her to my birthday lunch because she was in town, and I was just so drawn to her and then I got to talk to her at your performance, and so I love that she just sat there on the phone and yeah, just think of the people who needed that. So beautiful. So beautiful.
Dennissa: She’s so down, she’s always down to clown with me. I’m like, “Mom, can you do this thing?” And she’s like, “Yeah, when?” And then the after first time, we actually performed it in the same space where the film was in Amélie's with WAMA, that was the first time I performed it in the summer of 2019, and my mom was on the phone for like, the opening was like two hours, and she talked to so many people, and she was like, “When can we do it again?” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I created like a performance monster. She wants to keep performing.” We’ve made a couple pieces together, which has been really cool. We look a lot alike, and I think a lot about becoming her in the best way. Like when people are like, “Oh my gosh, you’re gonna be so beautiful when you’re older,” I’m like, “I know. Look at that skin. I’m like she’s perfect.” So I really adore her. She’s always been my best friend, and she’s always loved and accepted me just as I am. I’ve asked her to do crazy things, and she’s like, “Ok, sure.” Yeah, she radiates radical empathy, softness, the Spirit of God is definitely inside of her, and yeah, she’s a world changer, and I’m utterly grateful she is my mom.
Nicki: Yes, yes. I see all of that in her, too, in just the short interactions. But, Dennissa, why do you think art is able to bring people together like it does?
Dennissa: I think because it’s authentic, right. I think it’s like what that artist said, what you read earlier, it’s someone bringing a vulnerability to the table and then letting other people into it. I think it’s, yeah, I think people love that it can sometimes be something that you touch or something that you keep. I often think about this kind of question, when I was in college I spent a lot of time at the Museum of Fine Arts because my school was attached to it, and I remember standing in the Art of the Americas, you know like on a random Tuesday afternoon, and me and this other woman were standing in front of the painting of the Garden of Eden. It’s this incredibly large painting from a very long time ago, this is very accurate information, this really great painting. And I normally don’t connect to paintings, which I know, yes, haters come at me, I just really, it takes a lot for a painting to speak to me. But I try to pay attention to them even when they’re hard to know. In this painting Adam and Eve are probably, no joke, an inch tall, honestly, and the painting is probably like 4 feet by 3 feet. It’s a huge painting of the vastness of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve are tiny. And I remember standing there with this woman, who I don’t know, right, she’s like older, like my grandma’s age, she’s older, and we’re both looking at the painting like completely in awe, just like fully entranced in it, and I remember looking at her, and I just like pointed at the painting and like made a face like, “Whew. This,” and she was like, “I know,” and then we just had this moment of experiencing this thing that we were both looking at, I think that we both had never seen before, and probably hadn’t both thought about it in that way that the artist was presenting, and I think that, that’s one way artists, art brings people together is just the commonality. Like we could look at this painting and be from completely different times and spaces and generations, but we were like relating because our eyes were both intaking the pigment on the page in the same light in the same moment, and I think, yeah, I think that’s how art brings people together. It’s like a place to start, right, like we can just sit here and talk about something we’ve both seen, and then spiral off into other conversations. And I think there’s something powerful about how it draws us in and pulls us apart and then stays in our mind and then we can keep talking about it. I can probably talk about performances that I’ve been a part of that I hated that still stick with me because I think about them a lot or yeah, we love to share our experiences, I think, as people, and so human to human we can just share what we saw or experienced and then have this moment of yeah, collective effervescence, if you’ve heard of that term. It’s like if you’re at a concert and everyone puts up their phone and starts waving their hands or whatever, there’s like a collective moment because we’re all sharing the same thing at the same time. I think art just has that power of showing people themselves and each other.
Nicki: Yeah, well thank you for sharing about that specific interaction with the Adam and Eve painting. And I feel like it really leads into the next question, and we have a few questions before wrapping up here. But what advice do you have for people as they engage with art?
Dennissa: Take it slow. I would say engage with a lot of different kinds of art. Ask a lot of questions. Spend time with it, you know, someone spent hours, months, even years on the piece that you’re looking at, and yeah, ask yourself why you liked it or didn’t like it, and I think each person is capable of getting something from any piece, and it could be what the artist intended, it could be something you thought about that morning, it could be something that’s probing your heart to go deeper. And I think the risk of putting work in the world is that it might go out and not come back the way you expected, but I think that every piece will land in some space of someone’s life, whether it’s like, “That was cool,” and you sort of move on or some of it is deeper. And I think, I guess I would challenge people to not be afraid. I think what we talked about, you don’t have to get it, whatever it is. The artist isn’t trying to trick you or you know dupe you or kind of be Houdini. They’re really just wanting to show you something, and so, just like in a conversation, how would you listen to them and yeah, let the art challenge you I guess is what I would say for people.
Nicki: Yeah, that seems very fitting for our conversation. Well, Dennissa, what is your hope for the art community?
Dennissa: Well, I have so many hopes. I hope it would be less competitive and more celebratory. I think there’s only so many shows and so many grants and so many opportunities for artists, and so I wish that we would really kind of come together instead of feeling like only one person could sit at the table, that really the art table is huge, multi-layered, and really complex, and so I would hope that we would celebrate one another and that artists would also be respected by the outside as culture shapers, culture influences. I mean, come on, history is defined by art movements when we look back, right. And so I think I would love for everyone to respect the arts that are happening and unfolding in current present-day times. Like we don’t have to wait till the artist is dead to think they’re important. We can understand and spend time with the art now and celebrate it. I think that would help artists feel valued when people think and celebrate their work. I feel like Mario where I just leveled up when you said you think about my work. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, well I have to make more so she can have more to think about.” It feels like this very encouraging, validating thing when people are thinking of us as, yeah, real humans in the world, creating art is a real job. It’s not like this thing that doesn’t take any effort. For some people it’s effortless. Some people rise and shine and can like, you know, draw a realistic drawing, but for me, I have to be in the right mood, it has to be the right climate outside, I have to be very well fed and excited, you know. It’s nuanced for me to create, and so I think for, yeah, for it to be validated as a real career that is transforming people’s lives. I mean people cry at art works, people feel, and I think that’s important in our current world.
Nicki: Yeah, I didn’t come to the “Take What You Need,” but I saw videos, and yeah, I wish I had been there.
Dennissa: Coming to a city near you.
Nicki: Well, what is one action that people listening can commit to bring your hopes to fruition?
Dennissa: I would say look at art and that’s, and then I would say encourage your artist friends. Like if you have a friend who is an artist or if you know an artist, ask them what they’re working on. I think what you’re doing here, like, oh my gosh, you just gave me so much time to say a bunch of things that were like, you know, planned and unplanned, and that helped my brain kind of reiterate and to think my own thoughts. I think, yeah, when people give me any time of day to talk about my work, I’m always very grateful. And I feel celebrated, I feel really, yeah, known, when people are like, “Why did you make that?” or “What prompted you to make that?” or “Why that color?” And sometimes it’s like, “I don’t know. I just did it,” and sometimes it’s like, “Oh I was thinking about this for months,” you know, and it was very specific. So I would say engage with your artist friends by looking at their work, by asking them about it, and you know, by buying it. Buy artwork. I think that’s the most loving thing to do for any artist.
Nicki: Yeah, for sure. Well, Dennissa, I want to one, thank you for broadening the narrative for me about art, and also thank you for coming on the show and sharing about your art and how you bring people together through your art.
Dennissa: Aw, thank you for having me. I’m like hugging myself. I’m in quarantine, I’m often, when I see people from a socially distant view, I’m like restraining myself from running towards them and hugging them, so now, I’m just like, “Oh, yes, thank you. I’m hugging myself. This is beautiful.”
Nicki: That’s right, you’re a hugger. You love hugs, and so yeah, I am, too, and this has been real tough.
Dennissa: Yeah, thank you for having me. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your beautiful questions.
Transition Music
Closing: I want to thank Sequana Murray for the voice clip she sent to me for the episode intro. You can purchase her music on Bandcamp at bandy17.bandcamp.com. Her music is available on most streaming services under the name Bandy. I also want to thank Jordan Lukens for his help with editing and Danielle Bolin for creating the episode graphic. Please subscribe and review the show, but only if you’re planning on leaving a 5-star review. Otherwise, you can just skip this part. You can access the Broadening the Narrative blog by visiting broadeningthenarrative.blogspot.com, and you can find the Broadening the Narrative page on Instagram by searching for @broadeningthenarrative and on Twitter by searching for @broadnarrative. I hope that if you know and love me you can engage with the Broadening the Narrative blog, social media accounts, and podcast, as well as any recommended resources. Then, you can share with people who know and love you, and little by little, person by person, we can broaden the narrative. Grace and peace, friends.
Outro Music
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