dirt palace

Interview: Ari Montford and Dominic Molon

Detail, Installation in the Dirt Palace storefront Window Gallery, 2024

Ari Montford was our October/November Storefront Window Gallery Artist. Ari is a Two Spirit, cultural practitioner, interdisciplinary artist, work ranges from photography and collage to performance art. On the faculty of URI and Montserrat College of Art. Graduated with Honors in Fine Arts at Brandeis University, awarded the Rosland W. Levine Award. Earned his MA in Art and Education Columbia, MFA Hoffberger School of Painting, MICA. Pursued a studio practice committed to challenging the canon. Curated Black Futures at HallSpace Gallery in Boston MA 2023 and Material Matters at The Jamestown Arts Center in 2024. Persuasions, a mid-career retrospective exhibition, was presented at the BCA. Residencies include four Yaddo Fellowships, the Art Matters Inc. NYC Artist Fellowship, Skowhegan residency and a VT Studio Center Grant. Dune Shack Residency Cape Cod MA in 2019 and a Blue Mountain Residency NY. Received 2 Connecticut Commission Arts grants, NEA Artist Fellowship, the New England Foundation, Art Matters Grant and two Pollock Krasner Foundation International Grants, In 2020 recipient of A.R.T. Grant Berkshire Foundation. Representation Yezerski Gallery Boston, affiliated with June Kelly Gallery NYC. In the collections of the RISD Museum, Chrysler Museum, Fitchburg Art Museum DeCordova Museum, Taft Museum, Scottsdale Arts Center, Visual Artists Fellowship Archive Smithsonian Institution’s NMAA and the Haas Family Arts Library Yale among others. A 2023 recent acquisition at Rose Art Museum Brandeis. Fellow Brown University’s (CSREA) Center for Study of Race and Ethnicity in America for 2020-21.

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Dominic Molon: What would people be most surprised about in terms of what informs your practice? Ari Montford: I believe there to be an intimacy about the work that creates and generates provocative conversation. This is something that I think is important to the discourse of contemporary art, that it has the ability to engage the audience and the work, then becomes a collaborative effort, and that is important to my practice. Therefore, it is important to me that there remains a continuum in my studio practice from the 1990s with the Homeland series to present work which deals with issues around being Two-Spirit in the context of cultural appropriation or appreciation.

Homeland 12, 1989, 48” x 72”

DM: This project puts your work in a very direct relationship to a very public audience - what are your thoughts on public art and creating work for that context? AM: Public art is located in the public square, and in this case the project is located in the center of Olneyville Square. A good pedestrian and vehicle thoroughfare. The opportunity then exists in the space for dialog. For me, recognition of Goya’s Third of May represents an attempt to bring you, the viewer, into the experience in a way which is transformative. Black Indians in Space is working to do the same, inspired by current events and made by individuals representing that experience and there's an opportunity here to speak truth to power. DM: What projects or ideas from your past do you wish you could revisit, reconstruct, or reconceive? Or are there projects that never came to fruition that you wish had happened? AM: I presently have the opportunity to revisit a previous concept, I called it PanCarta , and that relates to the idea of Cross-mapping. This is being done now at the Montserrat College of Art in the program related to Jay Critchley's exhibition, Democracy of the Land, inc., FLAGrancy. where we are creating pancarta’s (flags/banners) with gallery visitors and students who are interested in the idea of cross mapping as it relates to personal and individual identities and societal considerations and constructs.. DM: Your work has spoken to issues and concerns specific to Native American history, culture, and identity for years - how do you see the recent ascendency of Native American art and artists in the art world and what it means? AM: It means that after more than 300 hundred years since first contact, indigenous peoples are now just beginning to have agency and this is not to be confused with ascendancy. The numbers are small. A few artists that come to mind are Jeffery Gibson, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, James Luna, Rebecca Belmore and, at RISD, Duane Slick. These artists all support an inclusive agenda that is about a practice within Two-Spirit and an understanding of the ongoing oppression and subjugation of people of color. These artists often speak with a performative voice,as do I. Perhaps this relates to more traditional modes of making as in storytelling. One aspect that remains a constant is respect and care of the land called Turtle Island. DM: What’s been the biggest change in your work over the years? Has it been formal? Conceptual? Material? Political? An example of the biggest change is installation work is currently in the collection of the RISD Museum, Holocaust Blankets with Smallpox. This work exemplifies for me the bringing together of the formal. conceptual, materiality and political. A work that is transformative and thus exemplifies the journey that has been at the center/core of the practice. More recent work called Talking Arrows is a continuation of this practice.

Mills performance, Holocaust Blankets w Smallpox 2016

DM: This has me wondering about the role of mystery or the gray areas in your work. Holocaust Blankets with Smallpox is in some ways a very direct, pointed, and clear work in what it's intending to communicate, but in other ways there is a lot left "unsaid" for the person who encounters the work to extrapolate and intuit. AM: I agree with your comments here. I do intend to foster an interactive dialogue with the viewer to examine and question their meaning through this interaction. In many ways the work is not completed until this dialogue becomes part of the meal placed on the table. The fact that there is the “unsaid” brings to the discourse the possibility of divergent perspectives thus fostering pan-diaspora experience or pancarta. DM: What beyond the world of visual art - music? film? book? podcast? food? - has inspired, encouraged, thrilled, or surprised you? AM: What continues to inspire me are my solitary walks along the Narragansett Bay, on the former summer fishing grounds of the ancestors, occasionally encountering their indigenous artifacts. The recognition of material that the Great Creator puts me in re-contact with is both humbling and inspirational. This experience is a transformative one thus engaging me in a spiritual journey which inturn serves to inspire and inform the studio practice.

Ten little black Indians MM collage AC painting 24 x 60″ 2015

DM: In the spirit of your storefront window project’s invocation of outer space, what would your ideal alternative universe look like? AM: As an indigenous black cultural practitioner who is also a first generation Cyborg I have had the privilege of seeing just over the universal horizon. This has provided a perspective that seeks community. that recognizes a future with a universal construct that is ALL about DEIB… The B… is Belonging. And the Dirt Palace in my view is in the camp that is doing the work.. AI is just at the beginning of the next visual and conceptual leap into the cultural unknown. Will indigenous people connect AI to more traditional making techniques? Or will we ALL be replaced with the upcoming changes to our world. So, I end with quotes from James Baldwin. about change and bell Hooks regarding community. "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced." bell hooks wrote that, “beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”

Freedom Arrows, 2023-25

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Dominic Molon is the Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art and Interim Chief Curator at the RISD Museum. He previously served as the Chief Curator at the Contemporary Art Museum (CAM) St. Louis (2010-2013) and as Curator (and interim Curatorial department head) at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago (1994-2010). Molon has organized numerous mid-career survey exhibitions of such internationally recognized artists as Martin Boyce (2015), Liam Gillick (2009), Wolfgang Tillmans (2006), Gillian Wearing (2002), and Sharon Lockhart (2001). He also co-curated “Nancy Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend an Inch,” the largest show to date of this renowned 20th Century African-American sculptor, with former RISD Museum interim director Sarah Ganz Blythe, and Kajette Solomon, Museum Social Equity & Inclusion Specialist, at the RISD Museum in 2024. He has also curated and co-curated thematic shows such as Any distance between us (with Stephen Truax, 2021-2022); Production Site: The Artist’s Studio inside-Out (2010); and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 (2007.)