LILLY MANYCOLORS interview with SAGE MORGAN-HUBBARD

Conversation between Storefront Window Artist Lilly Manycolors and Artist/Poet/Educator Sage Morgan-Hubbard

Lilly Manycolors (Australian-American b.1989) is a single mother, scholar, youth arts educator and interdisciplinary artist known for their emotionally-excavating artworks and ritual performances. Manycolors utilizes their racialized, marginalized/impoverished upbringing and experiences of being a disconnected/reconnecting person of mixed-raced/ethnic heritage in their art practice to “move towards existential reconciliation and evolving beyond the [western] human, restoring a sense of beingness, and reclaiming the self from the desires of white supremacy”. Their scholarly work centers trans-species kinships and decenters human supremacy seeking to understand the human’s role in a planetary future. Manycolors runs youth arts programs yearly for elementary, middle and high schoolers that are rooted in political liberation, planetary kinships and reframing art as a mechanism for growing, learning and sharing. Manycolors founded the community arts studio AUNTY’S HOUSE in Providence, RI in 2023 to fulfill the need for a parent/youth centered art space that bolsters multigenerational engagement. Manycolors is an adjunct faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.

Below is an interview between Lilly Manycolors and artist/poet/educator Sage Morgan-Hubbard 

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: Lilly, I love your play and use of masks so much in your work. Can you talk about why you choose to use the images of masks in this storefront piece?

LILLY MANYCOLORS: Masks have always been part of my life. My father’s mother ran an African import business and I grew up with different masks from west Africa watching over me. I didn’t really notice this kind of conditioning until recently, until after I’d made a few masks and thought seriously about why I make them. Around the install time for the storefront gallery I was hitting burnout and had to work with what art pieces I had. While sitting in my studio, looking around, my masks illuminated and I realized they wanted some public facing time. These masks are animate - beings - that have social needs. They are in conversation with each other and with the humans walking past. The orange and red masks (Speak Flowers) is speaking about the issues of Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women, which is a term coined in the so-called United States and speaks to a global pandemic of femicide. Specifically in the so-called US MMIW has contemporary ties to the oil pipeline man-camps and human trafficking businesses on a macro level, while on a micro level has historical ties to violent-toxic patriarchy and sexism (think men eating women in all the ways the word eating can mean). Femicide happens right here in Providence RI. MMIW is happening in Rhode Island. People aren’t generally aware of that. Women are the keepers of bloodlines, and blood is another form of water. Blood is the child of water. The blue mask is a water being that is demanding attention about the issues around water. Humans have disrespected the waters for so long now. If humans/people don’t change their ways literally immediately the waters will leave. These two masks are having a public conversation about the necessity to remember the water as our kin, as necessary to our lives, and that women/femmes/uterus carrying people are just as important to human survival as water. Humans need to be confronted more with this reality, and so these two masks had their conversation in the storefront.

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: Can you speak to the use of the mirror at the womb space? What does this represent in this work?

LILLY MANYCOLORS: The mirror piece at the red woman’s stomach is actually another mask. It is from a performance I did about healing the mother and child. Many mothers in the US are riddled with trauma and often those mothers pass that trauma down to their children. It is hard not to when you are in constant survival mode and not well resourced, when the world is eating you alive everyday. This performance was a cleansing and prayer for mothers to have what they need to heal, and that their children are healed and protected from the suffering their mothers endure. The mask is a womb with an umbilical cord. I chose to make this mask out of a mirror so that people could see themselves inside the womb. This is part of the prayer, that by seeing yourself in the womb you are receiving whatever support you need. For the storefront gallery I put this mirror womb mask in the Red figures stomach as a portal so that people walking by could see themselves and whatever else the mirror captured. The umbilical cord flows into the cords of the water being demonstrating the oneness of blood and water.

 

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: How does your role as a mother and your work as a curator and programmer for mother artists in Aunty’s house relate? It seems like it is an important identity for you at this time in your practice.

LILLY MANYCOLORS: Being a mother means being a steward of needs and practitioner of care. Being an artist, curator, founder, director, programmer are just synonyms of mothering. As far as AUNTY’S HOUSE, that is a space and structure I made to do that mothering work for others more efficiently. Everyone needs mothering, even mothers. And if we don’t have mothers that are well resourced and well cared for then we won’t have healthy societies. AUNTY’S HOUSE is such a small effort, but it is what I’m contributing to the struggle for making sure mothers have what they need to be well. For me mothering is to be intimate and engaged with other people’s needs, and to uplift their karmic destiny. I am of service to the people as a mother.

Sympoietic Mapping LILLY MANYCOLORS  2022

Mixed Media on Canvas: acrylic paint, kitchen cupboard mat, cotton & polyester fabric, placemat, shells, metal, moss, beads, paper, vinyl, markers, mirrors, buckskin, leather.

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: Can you speak to your use of mixed media and the choice of materials and making in this piece? The stitching in both the cloth and the clay are prominent and create such visceral tactile handmade elements and signatures of your presence as the artist that pop right through the window installation.

LILLY MANYCOLORS: My art practice always includes mixed media materials. My practice is a reflection of what I am: a mixed race, ethnically mixed non-human who grew up between two continents that sit opposite each other on the planet and raised by non-humans as well as humans. I often work with what I have in my studio which means finding materials that speak to each other. I like to collect objects and materials that might need a home and thus my studio is full of seemingly random things. I understand what materials and objects want to go together through touch and a feeling. There is usually a “feeling right” moment that happens. I touch, smell, listen and see if the relationship is good/reciprocal.

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: What inspired the particular phrasing and terminology included in your prayer to water that accompanies the piece?

LILLY MANYCOLORS: Desperation, anger, and a deep yearning for liberation. I have grown weary of being palpable and nice. I am no longer interested in keeping the “boat” from rocking. I am going to turn the boat over. I am so uninterested in people feeling good and pacified by art. I want people to choke, gasp and be shaken with a deep desire to act on the collective need for healing. I am not interested in being misunderstood and so I’m working on speaking clearly. The written peace is my attempt and demanding we face the reality of our actions, of the world we’ve contributed that in rooted in insanity.

SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: What do you want the viewer to walk away from the window installation thinking or doing? It feels like a call to action, a piece that speaks back to the viewer and is active, not passive in tone.

LILLY MANYCOLORS: I want people to have their inner revolutionary activated. I want their hearts to swell and overpower their minds. I want the viewers to remember how to love and move from that remembering.

 SAGE MORGAN HUBBARD: Thank you for this powerful work, is this part of a larger series or what is next for you?

LILLY MANYCOLORS: I continue to nourish AUNTY’S HOUSE into a stable existence, and situate myself for my next body of work which is about trans-species relationships, human-eating beings, and saving the planet from the anthropocene. 

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Sage Morgan-Hubbard, BA Brown University,  MA+ with Ph.D. coursework in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, is an educator, public speaker, engaged scholar, and organizer who co-curates inclusive diverse public spaces for lifelong living and learning for all people. She is the current Director of Learning and Engagement at the Museum of African American History of Boston and Nantucket. An award-winning poet, social justice artist, and activist, she has worked at four colleges and six museums, four of which are Smithsonian museums including the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), and the National Museum of American History (NMAH). She was the inaugural Ford W. Bell Education Fellow at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and has taught students from pre-K through senior citizens- online, incarcerated, and everything in between. Sage uses her creative lens to make sure that everyone has the multimedia tools of poetry, performance, storytelling, collage, history, and curriculum they need to bring their dreams and ideas to life. She loves aqua aerobics, her two spirited children, her Jindo dog Broch A. Lee, and her middle name, Xaxua, which is an onomatopoeia meaning the rustling of the leaves in the wind.