Widening the Aperture, with Virginia Thomas

In addition to serving up delicious cocktails and hosting great musicians, Myrtle supports Awesome Foundation Rhode Island, a monthly program offering restriction-free grants of $1,000 in support of ideas that benefit the Ocean State. The foundation’s most recent recipient, RI BIPOC Trans Oral History Project, is spearheaded by Virginia Thomas. We had a chat to learn more about the project and Virginia herself.

The Well (TW): Good afternoon Virginia. Congrats on the grant! Who are you?

Virginia Thomas (VT): I’m a southern queer academic living on the unceded lands of the Pokanoket. I research the impacts of white racial hierarchies on the formation of family, gender, photographic archives, and property. 

TW: Tell us about growing up in the South.

VT: I grew up in a small one story ranch in the woods playing witches on a rock outcropping and watching a lot of TV. My sister and I would climb trees, eat spiders, and walk a mile out into the fields behind our house (used to be a dairy farm until it was developed into a mansion cul-de-sac) until we heard a whistle from our dad to come back home for dinner. Our dirt driveway led to a two lane highway (15-501) with a Black-owned old style country store (Gordon's) painted forest green with a line of empty glass coke bottles on a shelf near the ceiling. By the time I was 18 it had become a four lane highway with a Walmart, strip malls, and major developments. I attended a public school and made friends who lived in gated mansion communities and friends who lived in trailer parks. For a couple of years I attended a tiny hippie private school where kids were allowed to run around naked all day if they wanted to and half the school day was “nature class,” which I loved. Throughout my childhood, I went to a small Episcopal church every Sunday in Pittsboro. When I was 7 I cried because I wanted to be an Acolyte in the church so badly, but you weren’t allowed to be one until you were 8. Needless to say, this saintly child was an Acolyte from age 7-18. I learned to drive a stick shift at the age of 12 while helping my dad clean up branches from an ice storm. I have carried a handkerchief in my back pocket—trained by my dad—since I was 6. We did so many chores that my friends even knew not to call me at certain times on the weekend because it was “chore time.” I went to a loosey-goosey Quaker high school that taught me how to hold complexity, to never judge a book by its cover, and to really listen.

TW: How about art practices, or more self-directed hobbies?

VT: I was really into ceramics as a kid. I remember hand-molding my vision of Puff the Magic Dragon around age 7 and having a feeling of being truly proud. That and pressing wild flowers into books.

TW: Are you still molding dragons? 

VT: I am not molding dragons at this time, but I did build a cob oven—first time doing such a thing—with my friend, Kate Jones, for the West End Raices Urban Farm (a program of Movement Education Outdoors) which brought a similar kind of pride in playing with mud. And you can bake things in it so I guess the fire element is there, too.

Above: Virginia’s in the tree; red sweater

TW: So you’re now a New Englander now. Where exactly have you landed? 

VT: My partner and I moved to Warren from Providence last year and have been surprised by how much we love it. After living in a tiny one person apartment with our dog, Milo, for 7 years, the magic of sitting on our porch, growing vegetables and herbs in our backyard, and walking to the town beach for a dip at the end of a summer day is really not lost on us. We've gotten into clamming; my partner has the waders and everything. A lot of people like to go to Blount Clam Shack, which we love, but we also send as many people as possible to Amaral’s–a classic old school Portuguese spot with the best Rhode Island clear chowder and fish sandwiches around. There are also a fair amount of flashy spots, but we usually make our way to Arc{hive}, a bookstore slash bar owned by two really awesome folks, Janet and Euriah, who make it cozy for newbies and townies alike. 

TW: How about Warren through the lens of your research practice?

VT: There is so much history that has yet to be addressed here, so we are starting to slowly peel the layers back. I just got back from visiting the Equal Justice Initiative's Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama and Warren (along with Providence, Bristol and Newport) is listed among some of the top cities in New England to import enslaved Africans between 1501 and 1808. There is an annual Pokanoket Heritage Day held at Burr’s Hill in early August each year that we always recommend.

TW: And, what of Rhode Island more broadly?

VT: Rhode Island is a place profoundly shaped by the transatlantic slave trade and settler colonialism, with a wide array of present day collectives either reproducing these histories or fighting for their undoing. My relationship to Rhode Island is rooted in my own ancestor's multiple generations of settler colonialism here. While I grew up in North Carolina and my family has lived in North Carolina and Virginia since before and just after the Civil War, looking further back, I actually have settler colonial ties specifically to Rhode Island. Several family names appear on street signs and mills like the Cutler Mill in Warren. My current relationship to this place grows out of a desire to redress the harm of my biological ancestors, and a love of the communities I am part of who are aligned in those values.

Above: Artwork for Queer StoRIes Project by Hilary Nestor

TW: How are you getting by? Is research your paid gig and if so, where?

VT: I get by through my full time job as an Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and Art History at Providence College. To do my research and scholarly projects like Queer Stories Project (QSP), I have gotten small grants ($1,000–$3,000) from places like the Awesome Foundation, Rhode Island Foundation, and Rhode Island Humanities.

TW: Read that before the Providence College gig, you did postdoc studies at Rice. Always curious to hear about life beyond our borders...what was Houston all about?

VT: It was incredibly hot and humid. I thought I was ready having lived most of my life in the summer heat of North Carolina, but it was a wholly different experience. Biggest, most intense thunderstorms I have ever witnessed occurred regularly. There, I had the opportunity to work with some amazing scholars who read my work and helped me develop it which was such a gift. Also, the food there was absolutely incredible. I am grateful to my dear friend Sophie Moore, who has the best taste in food of anyone I know, who educated me on this fact.

TW: Cool. Now that we know you a bit better, let’s get into the Queer Stories Project. What is it; what are the goals?

VT: The work I do with the Queer StoRIes Project is about creating space for queer and trans stories to be told. It's about challenging archival silences that perpetuate normative ways of thinking about who we are. But it's also rooted in understanding white settler colonial definitions of family, gender, and relationship practices that appear to be innocent and healthy, but are designed to perpetuate logics of property. I am driven by a craving to listen to and hear stories that might give us windows into other ways of being that have existed and persist despite the attempts to erase, censor, and remove them from our perception of reality.

TW: Where did this idea originate, and how is it taking shape today?

VT: The Queer StoRIes Project came out of a time when I was in graduate school doing my American Studies PhD at Brown. I noticed there was no centralized, publicly available archive documenting the area's LGBTQ+ history. I contacted the Providence Public Library to see if they would be interested in hosting an LGBTQ+ oral history archive since they had an orientation around community-based archives. They were excited about the idea of an oral history project and were also open to my approach of training youth how to do oral histories and then pairing them with "elders" to do oral histories. During summer 2018, I started working with youth from Youth Pride, Inc. and since then it has expanded to a training that is open to people of all ages and, particularly, working with organizations and collectives who want to record their histories for their own use. We are super excited because we are currently working in partnership with Project Weber Renew's Beyond the Understanding of Gender and recording oral histories with some of their members. Participating doesn't mean your oral history will go into the PPL's archives, but it's an option if that is important to you.

Above: Virginia highlighting student work at a Protest Against Censorship on Providence College’s campus

TW: Truly awesome work! When did you first start being interested in, or more deeply researching things like racial hierarchies, power structures, etc?

VT: Growing up in the South, the air is thick with its history as a slave plantation economy, the southern civil rights movement, and the ongoing consolidation of power by wealthy elites and their disenfranchisement of working and poor people. I grew up in a family and in schools that taught us about the importance of the civil rights movement and celebrated desegregation as the pinnacle of justice movements. However, from a young age, it was clear to me that race continued to be very powerful and it informed gendered and sexual norms (not how I would have articulated it, but those were the feelings). 

TW: Did you have the sense things were different elsewhere?

VT: I actually grew up with anger at "The North" because I perceived it to carry a superiority complex to the South. Now I can see that that was partly based in a problematic position fomented by a culture that perpetuated Old South nostalgia. But it was also based in a sense that the South was backward and the North was forward which is a logic that not only allows people from northern white families to avoid accountability for the ways their wealth and power derived from slavery and colonization, but also, as historian Natalie Ring has argued, enables the US to operate as an imperial country and global empire with the perception of itself as progressive. I was so angry at all of that and I still am. 

TW: You turned the anger into action. 

VT: It's hard not to let that rageful despair eat you. So I decided to try to find the words to describe it, to make the familiar strange, and to find ways to address it. I felt, and still feel, I must live my life looking directly at it, trying to understand it, and seeing what other ways to be are possible.

TW: Could you provide one or two concrete examples of how white racial hierarchies impact family and gender?

VT: What many do not realize is that the gender binary originated in European cultures as a means of outcasting and degrading the gender systems of peoples in Africa, Asia, and the lands that are currently known as the Americas. As Europeans sailed across the Atlantic and Indian oceans enacting genocide and enslavement in places like India, Nigeria, and Brazil, they used the idea that there are only two genders against the people they encountered whose gender presentations differed from this model as an excuse to dehumanize them. Holding the European gender system above other gender systems became a rationale for dehumanizing Black and indigenous people as well as settling upon their lands and robbing natural resources in order to concentrate power and wealth among European nations. It was the descendants of Europeans who transformed what was a largely British colony into a settler colonial nation state that began operating independent from British rule. This history is the foundation of our legal system, medical system, education system, and dominant culture writ large in the contemporary moment.

In addition to being used as a tool to legitimize the colonization of indigenous lands and forced displacement of indigenous people, the binary and heterosexuality became part of a system of passing down property. With the rise of capitalism in Europe and the translation of this emphasis on private property into colonialism, the question of how that property was passed onto others became a central cultural and legal concern.  As Fredrich Engels has argued, monogamous, heterosexual familial arrangements are not based on what is natural, but on upholding the transformation of indigenous lands into private property. Colonists imported to what is currently known as the United States very rigid, stringent gender roles, gendered division of labor and power construction of the hetero-normative family—to ensure that men who were the legal property owners had clear, undisputed paternity over their children, for whom women in that arrangement were designated to biologically reproduce heirs. This was a system designed to hold onto land from which colonists could extract resources to transform into social and financial capital.

Above: Virginia (left) discussing the history of quilting by Black women at Gee’s Bend, Alabama. With Betty Anderson (right), Executive Director at The Shoe Shop Museum in Camden, AL.

VT: This was in direct contrast to the equitable gender role distributions in many Indigenous communities—wherein women were farmers, in charge of resource distribution, where power balance was often equitable across genders, and women were leaders and decision makers. For the colonial system to reproduce itself and to take over, the policing and demonization of gender identities and sexualities outside of the colonial model had to be done in order to maintain the charade that heterosexual and cisgender identities are the most natural and therefore entitled to the ownership of property and the wealth derived from private property.

TW: You’ve elsewhere cited queer relational practices as being part of the toolkit we might use to combat oppression. Could you offer a definition for that concept, and talk about what it looks like in action?

VT: Queer relational practices will always be beholden to a legacy of LGBTQ+ folks fighting against capitalism, homophobia, and transphobia, but in our current political cultural moment, I think it's important to understand queerness—not as a style or identity—but a set of practices that work against dominant forms of power. Another way to put that is fighting for the world to become more livable for everyone. These practices change over time as the context changes. They can even change moment to moment. With the Queer StoRIes Project, I think it is important to hear about how people who have been marginalized due to their gender and sexuality built a life and formed communities while under police surveillance, being exiled from their bio families, struggling with employment discrimination, and so many other forms of structural violence. I also think it's important to look at the ways people hoped to challenge some norms while they perpetuated others; being able to hold complexity is its own vital praxis. I think listening to people's histories is a vital way to pass on skills and frameworks we can use to build futures that empower everyone to thrive.

TW: A few minutes ago, you mentioned this idea of the logics of property. Could you flush that idea out a bit for us?

VT: Basically, white settler colonial logics of property shape every facet of life. Advertising, intimacy, art, political discourse, historical archives, the food system, architecture, every facet. Every interaction is undergirded by a massive campaign to hide the fact that indigenous people here had their own ways and systems for relating to the land and that dominant culture has opted to invest in a system that white settlers have used which has involved writing English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish words on paper to claim ownership of indigenous land. This system of property and its logics also informs ways of relating to one another. For example, if you have ever wondered if a person is worth your time, you are operating out of property logic. Of course, there are and have always been groups of people—most importantly and originally indigenous people—who have fought these systems and ways of thinking. There have been and are other ways to be. But private property is a system imported from European contexts to suit their intended ends and we still live under the immense weight of that.

Above: A young researcher, out in the field

TW: We’re getting low on time and there’s a lot more to learn here—what are some books you’d suggest for folks who want to keep digging?

VT: Understanding Health and Care Among Sex Workers: Perspectives from Rhode Island by Claire Macon, Eden Tai, and Sidney Lane, and Like Children: Black Prodigy and the Measure of the Human in America by Camille Owens.

TW: You’ve got your own book in the works, too?

VT: Yes, tentatively titled Dark Trees: Visual Grammars of Family and (Anti)Lynching Aesthetics, which should be published in about two years. It is about the indelible ways in which racial capitalism has shaped the nuclear family through looking at the ways in which the figure of the tree has been used to symbolize family structure as well as racial terror through lynching violence. I focus on white supremacist applications of the tree as symbol for two out of four chapters and, for the other two, on how Black visual activists have taken the tree and reworked it into material to make worlds based in environmental and reproductive justice.

TW: At the top you mentioned an interest in photographic archives—we’d like to close by asking about a favorite photographer or collection.

VT: My favorite under-the-radar photographer is Pauli Murray, who I learned about via the Pauli Murray Center when I was an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill. An album s/he made in the 1930s-1950s is an amazing portrayal of his/her life and Black life in Durham, NC and Harlem, NYC. It has photographs cut out into hearts, keylock holes, and a daguerreotype of her grandfather who was a Union Navy soldier.

TW: Thank you, Virginia. We can’t wait to head over to the PPL and check out the Queer Stories Project!

Oysters, etcetera, with Manya K. Rubinstein

For over two decades, Manya K. Rubinstein has been celebrating all things Providence. Her work with Outpost Journal helped bring critical media attention to the local art scene, and recently, she co-founded the Industrious Spirits Company (ISCO) which—despite being only a few years old—already feels like an Ocean State staple. In the photo above, Manya’s posed with a gorgeous Vendome Copper and Brass Works still. The ISCO team calls it Baby.

The Well (TW): Hello, Manya. Who are you?

Manya K. Rubinstein (MKR): I’m a co-founder and CEO of the Providence-based distillery, ISCO, a storyteller, a hand-talker, a hot glue aficionado, a mama, a surfer, a lover of tasty things, weird flavors and lesser-known edible flowers. I’m a believer in the brilliance of nature, the supreme silliness of French bulldogs, and the absolute necessity of sticking googly eyes on “inanimate” objects.

TW: We can get down with some hot glue and googly eyes. Do you remember any of your most early works, something with a similar materials list?

MKR: There’s a little sculpture I made when I was in kindergarten. It’s fashioned out of toothpicks and a block of wood and glue. It’s hot pink and neon orange and I’ve carried it around with me for 40 years. It still makes me happy when I look at it.

TW: Tell us a bit about this young sculptor. 

MKR: I had a really blessed childhood. I grew up in NYC but spent weekends in upstate New York helping my mom garden, hanging out in the woods, catching frogs and snakes. I developed a love of words early, enjoyed basketball and photography, and was a dedicated classical flautist. High school was a lot of fun—we had a huge amount of freedom, and NYC in the 90s was a very different place than it is today. I was lucky to have great friends, we looked out for each other then and still do to this day.

Above: An artwork by Manya K. Rubinstein, NYC, circa 1984 

TW: Can we ask about Pet Sematary?

MKR: It is my childhood handwriting (reproduced by the art department) on the tombstones for the 1989 version of the film Pet Sematary. And also here for some stills, but you might have to just watch it and wait for my credit...

TW: So NYC in the 90s. What were you up to? Sneaking into Limelight? Chloe Sevigny parties on Wooster street? Hanging low key in the libraries?

MKR: Oh, you should have seen the libraries!! I kid. I read ahead and did all my homework during class so I wouldn't have much work after school. My friends and I spent a good amount of time sitting around in parks or on stoops. An absolutely huge amount of time, actually. There are a handful of NYC dive bars that shall always hold special places in my heart. We also went through a few years of really good dance options: Wednesday hip hop night at BoB Bar (ig), Thursday 80s night at Don Hills, and Saturdays there was salsa and merengue at a place on Varick street that I can't remember the name of anymore! No sign of Chloë Sevigny but I did once style Kristen Chenoweth for a PAPER magazine shoot when I was interning there because the real stylist didn’t show. I hope you are picking up a theme! I am a good bullshitter. 

TW: Cool sighting! The Annabeth Schott arc in West Wing was solid; we appreciate that she stayed on with the Santos administration. Moving on...Let’s talk Providence. Why are you here?

MKR: I came to RI in 1997 for college [Brown], barely made it off campus till 2000. I then discovered what an amazing city Providence was in terms of participatory art making, performance and, let’s be honest, ridiculously fun and often quite beautifully weird parties. I met a boy, stuck around, left a few times for some more school and some work, but kept coming back and decided in my mid twenties to make a life here. I loved—and still love—the collaborative nature of Providence, how its scale helps you to quickly connect with people and keeps folks kind of top line decent to each other (You will see that person again, so try not to be a @#$!). I love the creative spirit here, and that the ocean is never far away. I love how often people come together to try to make things better.

Above: Self portrait, NYC, circa 1996

TW: What was your concentration at Brown. Were you engaged with the local creative community back then, too?

MKR: I studied Comparative Literature at Brown and wrote an entire thesis on Susan Sontag and Donald Barthelme (don't ask). I attended exactly zero college sporting events, played zero games of beer pong, and set foot inside a frat house exactly once—to steal some shampoo. I was the principal flute in the Brown University Orchestra and a Managing Editor at the Indy, the Brown/RISD paper, for which we would pull an all nighter every single Wednesday night to deliver the issue to the printer on time in the morning. Once the sun was up and the issue was complete, I would drive home, sleep most of the day, get up in late afternoon in time for orchestra rehearsal, and head straight from there to a standing weekly party at a friend's house. Regretfully, that party was called 40s Night, which is what I call every night now, but for very different reasons. Anyhow, I’d then go home and sleep some more, and then I'd be more or less human again by Friday morning. There were not a huge amount of opportunities for engagement with the broader community during my time at Brown. I think I was pretty self obsessed as someone in their early 20s who really enjoyed literary theory. It was not very practical. 

TW: After Brown...you were in Saas-Fee, Switzerland? 

MKR: This is correct. I went to the European Graduate School. It was an amazing experience because I got to study with a number of philosophers, artists, and theorists who I had been reading in college. I made a very strange and very silly video "art," taught yoga—which I had no business teaching—to my fellow students and, once, to Antony Gormley, who gamely attended my "session." I took a class with Baudrillard that he conducted entirely in French through a haze of chain smoked cigarettes. I do not speak French, but it was amazing.  

TW: That time you spent at The Indy...perhaps informed your role as publisher of Outpost Journal later on? What did you learn by working on that?

MKR: Outpost was an awesome project. I had a great co-editor Pete Oyler and a great designer Jay Peter Salvas. I think we’re all really proud of what we were able to accomplish over those years, and we loved making connections with like-minded folks working in other smaller cities. In terms of what I learned: I learned a lot about the cities we were featuring and about how sometimes our assumptions as outsiders were totally wrong. I learned how to manage a team, or in some cases, how to royally f-up managing a team. I learned that there is a museum entirely dedicated to works created from human hair; I’m still not sure if I should be beyond grossed out or utterly entranced by the ingenuity of our species. No new print projects on the horizon at the moment. But I don’t know, maybe I’ll start making zines again when I retire.

Above: Providence, circa 1998

TW: Outpost had a bit of an activist tint to it, in that you were highlighting then underrepresented cities and artists. With your current work, what feels new, challenging, and a bit radical?

MKR: I’m a bit obsessed with how agriculture and aquaculture can have positive impacts on climate, as well as with the idea that everyone’s birthright is access to the natural world with all its wonders and in all its deliciousness. There are a lot of amazing organizations doing work around this both locally and nationally. At ISCO, we’re committed to sourcing regeneratively or organically grown grains, sending our main waste product of spent grains back to local farms, and working with organizations such as the Billion Oyster Project (to whom we donate a portion of proceeds for every bottle of Ostreida Oyster Vodka sold), the American Farmland Trust, Fundación Tortilla, Greenwave, Eating with the Ecosystem, and lots of others who are helping create healthier lands, oceans and food systems while taking into account the actual humans who are involved along the way.

TW: Could you go into a bit more detail on agriculture and aquaculture? 

MKR: For many years, I’ve been borderline obsessed with the magic of plants and the people who know how to grow them, the deep restorative powers of the ocean and all it contains, the sense of well-being that can come from eating well-grown, nutritious foods, the joy of creative, adventurous cooking, the excitement of new flavor discoveries, and the generous, welcoming way that food and beverage can bring people together to bond and share stories.

The food, agriculture and land use sector is responsible for nearly a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, and solutions around reduced food waste, plant rich diets, perennial crops, regenerative animal cropping, and conservation agriculture are no small part of addressing the serious and increasing issues humans face around climate. For me it was a really beautiful moment when I realized that these all these things that were super important to my sense of joy and connection to both nature and to others were not just small “me” things, but were intimately bound up in these sectors where there is both much work to be done, but also so many wonderful organizations and people working very hard to make a dent and set us on a better path.

Most people don’t think about the idea that their spirits come from agricultural products that were grown by somebody, somewhere. They do not connect what is in their glass to the land and labor that have created it. ISCO’s mission is to make delicious things made from beautiful ingredients that we source in a responsible manner, but also to help spread stories about things like why oysters are so amazing. In addition to being incredibly tasty, oysters provide excellent ecosystem services such as filtering up to 50 gallons of water a day, cleaning waterways, providing habitat for other species, and creating natural hurricane barriers. ISCO wants to share how a perennial wheat like Kernza—that we malted and are aging in a whiskey—is an incredible advance. A perennial requires far fewer resources to grow and maintain than an annual crop, which must be planted each year anew.

Above: Martha Mucha (Manya’s Grandmother), Maine Coast (cropped), circa 1980s

TW: Related to that, we read in another interview that you’re a fan of Bren Smith's Eat Like a Fish. What other texts have been meaningful in your agricultural explorations?  

MKR: Here are some other good ones

Drawdown by Paul Hawken is an amazing text on climate solutions.

American Catch by Paul Greenberg provides an engaging deep dive into the state of America’s relationship to aquaculture and fishing, solutions on how the US might not have to import 90% of its seafood from other countries.

Never Out of Season by Rob Dunn asks us to consider why we only ever see one kind of banana. Nature made a huge variety of bananas. Humans chose one to propagate. Monocropping, e.g. growing just one kind of a thing in huge, industrial operations, instead of lots of types of things, has left agriculture extremely vulnerable.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer offers beautiful lessons in connection with nature. Favorite section is when she talks about how fresh soil produces oxytocin in the human brain, eg. our hormone system is engineered to help us bond with the land around us...like, woah.

Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson. Why do Americans use forks and knives and not chopsticks? What’s up with egg beaters? Why do we call food “rich”? A cultural history of eating and eating tools across many different countries and time periods. Have I mentioned I am a giant nerd yet? Am guessing by this point I don’t have to.  

Lastly, Cork Dork from Bianca Bosker. Speaking of dorks, this is a great book. Flavor is weird. We don’t really have words for it. All about how we can train our brains to become better at perceiving flavor, but also about how so much of flavor is created with senses other than taste and smell. Really fun.

Above: ISCO Seaflow Launch, Providence, RI, May 2024

TW: Anything coming up from ISCO we should be on the lookout for?

MKR: I’m really proud of ISCO’s latest release, our Seaflow Ocean Gin, made with both local oysters and seaweed, alongside light juniper and tons of bright citrus. It’s crazy delicious and we used peaflower to give it a natural light blue hue that calls up a lazy day near the sea. And I’m also super proud of our brand new collab vodka with Myrtle! Working with friends and respected peers on creative projects is just about my favorite happy place. The vodka tastes amazing and I’m obsessed with the packaging. I hope people love it.

TW: Ah yes, thank you for that moment of co-promotion! We’re biased but, yes the Seaflow Ocean is incredible. So how about when you’re not at ISCO—what’s keeping your own spirits up?

MKR: I’m trying to paint more. I’ve always loved to sketch and draw, especially when traveling, though mostly before being a parent and running a business, which leave me with pretty paltry amounts of time for other pursuits. I find it relaxing and peaceful. My grandmother was a talented watercolorist, and my mother had gone deep into her art practice in the decade before she died. So for me painting is a lovely way to call up both my connection to the present moment and my connections to those who are no longer present.

Last Q: What do you hope for Providence, ten years from now?

MKR: BETTER BIKE LANES. More trees! More gardens. Climate resiliency. A generally higher level of prosperity and wellness. I hope it is still arty and weird.

You Are Here, with Bill Galligan

When you deboard an airplane, how do you locate baggage claim? When visiting a new grocery store, how do you find the Cape Cod chips? William (Bill) Galligan is a husband, father, and small business owner who thinks about these problems, a lot. His East Providence-based company, Wayfinder Collaborative, handles the design and installation of all manors of signage. While you might not hear much from wayfinding signage designers at TED, their work is central to how we orient ourselves in increasingly complex built environments. Here’s Bill.

The Well (TW): Hey Bill, where ya from? 

Bill Galligan: Like many, I’m a transplant to R.I. I grew up in Massachusetts with a bit of a chip on my shoulder, and a real lack of appreciation for lil’ Rhody. I relocated here when my wife started working in healthcare and over time, have fully embraced my home in Providence and Rhode Island. We’re raising our family here and have found a great community. I love the way we all cross paths; the interconnectedness here. Love the diversity and neighborhoods in and around Providence and East Providence. Hate the driving, though! 

TW: Why’d you pick East Providence as a place to set up shop?  

BG: Initially, proximity to my Jiu-Jitsu Academy. I was coming here for classes weekly and saw a sign for offices and studio spaces for rent. I called, got a tour, and it has totally worked out. I can just walk next door and take mid-day classes whenever I want. I guess I like convenience. It's in a great location for the work I do, job sites range from NYC to north of Boston. 

TW: And, what exactly are you doing over there? Designing, fabricating?

BG: I am basically a general contractor for signage. When a client has a specific need, such as interior signage for a residential development, I collaborate with them to determine all the necessary signs for code compliance and branding opportunities. I estimate all the costs and set a budget and once approved, we engage in an iterative design process to create custom signage for the project. After finalizing a design, we source the signage from our wholesale fabrication partners and supervise the installation with our own teams. We oversee the entire process. As an example, we recently completed a project involving a three-building residential development in Boston—former piano manufacturing buildings transformed into apartments. The signage there reflects the history of the buildings, while also matching the updated modern interiors.

TW: Got it. One of our favorite local signs was the Wayland Bakery one. RIP buddy. How about you—what are your favorite haunts; places you’d send a tourist friend. Besides Myrtle.

BG: Favorite bar right now is the Walnut Room; I love the vibe and cocktails there. I really like the burgers at There. My favorite pizza is Jeff’s (ig) in East Prov. right across from Myrtle.

Above: Lobby signage and sculpture for Olympus Surgical Technologies America

TW: And what are you listening to? In and out of the office.

BG: Right now, my regular rotation includes this folk artist, John Moreland. I saw him last year at The Sinclair in Cambridge and it was great! In the office, I have a running loop of 80’s new wave and 90’s alt rock. I have a functioning cassette tape player in my truck, so I've been listening to $.99 tapes I find. I recently came across The Cars album Candy-O, the B-52s self-titled album and the Miami Vice soundtrack, which is terrible, but Crockett’s Theme hits me right every time with the windows down and wind blowing. 

TW: Sunset. Waterfront Drive. We see it. OK so back to business. Why signage?

BG: No one goes to school dreaming of being a sign maker; you fall into this. I went to a trade high school for commercial art, and participated in a co-op program where I was placed at a sign shop every other week. I started doing drawing revisions, and they ended up hiring me over the summer, helping with installation and production. After college, this sign shop hired me as my first full-time job, and I spent a year there before being laid off. I went to another sign company and, after five years, worked my way from junior designer to senior designer. I then made a triumphant return to the original sign company that laid me off as a senior designer and account manager. In this role, I started to grow my network and an understanding of the operational side of the business. I stayed there for 16 years, reaching the role of Sales Leader with my own book of accounts and four salespeople reporting to me, and being part of the leadership team. The company was sold to an investment firm, and I was let go at that time. That's when I decided to go out on my own, starting Wayfinder Collaborative.

TW: You’re designing for an audience of all possible people, right? How do you think about the different ways humans orient themselves, locate information naturally, etc?   

BG: Everything we do is with accessibility and inclusion in mind. While The Americans with Disabilities Act mandates certain signage to meet specific standards, it's important to design with an even wider understanding of inclusion in mind. For a recent project, we researched colors that would be most visible to those with various forms of color blindness, to ensure that graphics like texts, maps, and directional information would be readable in any viewing condition. We collaborated with the City of Cambridge to refine the look and feel of these signs, making sure they were appealing to everyone and functional for the visually impaired. We included Braille messaging, which isn’t legally required for exterior wayfinding, but matters. When designing, we consider things like touch, feel, and sound. The more inclusive our design approach, the more successful the project becomes. 

TW: You mentioned I went to a trade school for commercial art—were you always a creative kid? What toys were your jam?

BG: I was obsessed with Matchbox cars as a kid. In addition to collecting them, what I really enjoyed was setting up cities and towns with roads and buildings to create scenarios for my cars. We had this old pool table in our basement which was the perfect blank canvas to create scenes for my cars to interact with. I would use all sorts of media from Legos and Lincoln Logs to found-objects and materials to build and set up these scenes. It was as if I were a city planner and I found hours of joy and entertainment creating these worlds.

Above: Fabricated aluminum signs wrapping in production at Mandeville Signs, Lincoln, RI.

TW: What was your own wider world like around then?

BG: The best way to describe growing up is being between two worlds. At a young age, we moved from New York to Massachusetts, and much of my childhood was spent traveling between NY and MA for family events and holidays. When not traveling I had a very rural life, growing up in a small town with a street that looks like it belongs on a postcard. Lots of neighborhood friends, summers outside, riding bikes, building jumps, playing in vacant lots, and exploring. Later, I left my hometown school system to go to a regional high school, which was the door that opened me up to a world beyond. It was the beginning of my creative journey and where I made lifelong friends who continually inspire and push me to be creative.

TW: Are you still building jumps in empty lots? Or, what are you doing for recreation and mental health as an adult?

BG: I am able to design, create, and manage my projects better as a result of my practice of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. It has taught me how to be more present and creative in the moment; to let go of what is not working with optimism because something better will always present itself. I’ve learned to embrace the challenging journey ahead and feel that with perseverance and determination, all things are achievable. I try to train BJJ a minimum of 3x per week with at least two of those mid-day during the week. I stretch and work on flexibility regularly. I generally try to eat healthy and practice moderation for things like alcohol or sugary/starchy foods.

TW: Is there a “You gotta know when to fold ‘em!” joke here? Moving on...Where’s the biz right now? Are you in the black yet? 

BG: Doing great, I would say. I live a life of very little financial concern which for me is the goal. I don't need much to get by and I like to live below my means so as not to be working to live. I work because I love what I do and I have the means to enjoy life as I see fit.

Above: Bill with his wife, Leigh Hubbard, President of the American Nurses Association and Magnet Program Manager at Miriam Hospital.

TW: You’re pretty involved in your local church right? Give us a sense of who you are in the wider community. Or where Wayfinder meets the community.

BG: My company is a for-profit company. That is the goal, to make money. That said, I frequently work for non-profits where my bottom line is not the driving force. I like to work with groups I believe in. So when we did work for the ACLU of Boston, Helping Hands, SouthSide Community Land Trust, or Grace Episcopal Church, I found ways to offer my services at a discount and to work with these clients to ease the financial component of the job. Whether that is selling the product at cost to them or offering no charge for design I am willing to make certain cost cuts to help a good cause. I’ve also been a volunteer with Dorcas International for 3 years now through Grace Episcopal Church. There, I have been coordinating apartment clean-ups for arriving refugee families—this has been some of the most satisfying work I have ever participated in, and I love how owning my own business allows me to prioritize it. If a family of 6 is arriving from Afghanistan and needs an apartment clean and ready, that means part of my day is organizing teams to make it happen for them. The sign work can come later.

TW: Good stuff, Bill! We also want to hear a bit about SEGD and the meetups you’re working on in town.

BG: This was a fun experience. I am one of the three co-chairs for the SEGD Boston Chapter, that’s the Society of Experiential Graphic Designers. We usually organize about four events a year, most of which take place in and around Boston, but I’d been advocating for a Providence event for a long time. I wanted to invite people to come down here and see all the fun and creative work that's happening, all that inspired me to establish my own business here. The tour was called Handmade in Providence and it focused on three shops on the west side. 

TW: Any plans for future events?

BG: My SEGD co-chairs and I are working on a studio tour of SoSo, a digital firm focused on the merge of architecture, design, and technology with a specific focus on AI. We are targeting September, up in Boston.

TW: So for Handmade in Providence, where’d you visit?

BG: We started at Ogie's Trailer Park where we all met for drinks and appetizers, then made our way to Nightlight Neon. Here, we met with Nick McNight, the owner, who showed us the ins and outs of hand-bent neon and the art and science that goes into each piece. After that, we walked to Providence Painted Signs where Shawn Gillheneey talked about the history of hand-painted signage, his creative process, and some of the work he has done. Lastly, we headed over to DWRI Letterpress where Dan Wood walked us through the history of letterpress and many of the operational pieces he has in his shop. Each of us even got to create a custom print promoting the event. The response was great, with about seventeen people participating in the walking tour. My hope is that it sheds a little more light on the coolness of Providence.

TW: Quality names! Not so long ago, you transitioned from being a sole-operator to having staff. Can you speak on that transition a bit? 

BG: It was a big step to bring on staff. but I knew it was something I needed to do to grow and keep managing the projects I have. I have a great mentor who has helped me tremendously in these decisions; I cannot recommend more finding someone who has done the things you want to do, or some version of it, and ask them questions. Ask all the questions you have, as ridiculous or unthought out as they may seem. Keeping them in is not helping you. I talked to my mentor about when was the right time to bring on help, and they helped me come to the decision on my own as to when the right time for me was. It's a leap of faith to bring on help. I needed to first truly understand what I was capable of doing on my own, both output and financially, and to understand where I was spending time that was not specifically generating new work. What was left was the roles of the person or persons I needed. Once I identified that, it was easier to know who I was looking for, and it wasn't long before I found them. 

Above: Custom wall graphics produced during the initial masking phase of Covid 19

BG: What do you want for your employees? Beyond just their having a job.

BG: I believe in building and running a workplace that I would want to be a part of. One that understands we have lives outside of work and that it is a struggle sometimes to fit the life we want into busy schedules. I have a simple philosophy: I want to have a workplace that is fun and fulfilling for those that work for me. I mean, let's be serious, we make signs. There is no reason to be stressed. Any and all problems are solvable, and I am here to support and help. I don’t spend time counting the hours of the people that work for me. As long as the job gets done right, that we are doing our absolute best work for our clients, that we put ourselves in our clients' shoes to understand their needs as people, we are fulfilling the mission. I will support my employees to live the life they want, to craft the work schedule that works best for them, and to foster an environment that allows for growth and opportunity.

TW: You must get stressed sometimes, though? How do you deal?

BG: I find that honesty is your ally in business. The lesson I have learned that has helped me over and over again is not to be afraid to share bad news with your clients the moment you learn of it. It is always worse if you wait. I have made that mistake and it has never ended well. Anytime a problem arises, I am quick to share it with the client so that they are aware. From there I can work on solutions or alternatives but at least all parties are informed which always feels better on the other side of the problem.

TW: What do you think your best creative project to date’s been? 

BG: I mean, starting my business is what I am most proud of. We do lots of great work and have some amazing clients. Looking back five years—taking that initial step, believing that I could do this on my own, it’s an amazing feeling. I didn’t necessarily have the knowledge on how to do it all, but had the fortitude and determination to know I’d be able to figure it out. I look back at these last few years and see some of my most profound personal growth. I wouldn’t change anything.

Get it Together, Together, with Dailen Williams

Dailen Williams (she/they) is a lot of things: a self-taught musician, DJ, visual artist, and an educator. She is also an organizer experienced in starting arts organizations and community projects from scratch, with a special emphasis on designing and managing human-centered systems. Dailen’s latest big idea is Club:Club, a kind of experimental educational platform where anyone can learn the basics of DJing and music production in a friendly, welcoming atmosphere. 

The Well (TW): You’re pretty busy, Dailen. Give us four stories to set this up, super fast.

Dailen Williams (DW): There are many, but here’s four that come to mind. That time me and all my neighbors had a potluck and started chess boxing, complete with gloves. There’s the time I tracked down an illegal street racing crew in LA because I wanted to see them do donuts in the middle of traffic...and riding my bike through the mall during a Critical Mass—ten years ago? Almost got run over by an enraged security guard. In Alaska, my crew and I went on the water in a little skiff during a hurricane to try and keep one of the boats from sinking.

TW: And we’re off! What’s on your mind today? Lately?

DW: Space. Space to learn, space to share, space to celebrate and find each other. This is part of why I helped start Binch Press, why I helped organize Que Dulce, and part of why I insist on making music. Third spaces are in short supply locally, which is tragic because they are so crucial to individual growth and strongly interwoven communities. How are we to build supportive networks, share and celebrate moments of triumph, and learn new perspectives if we only ever make friends at work? Bars are okay, but I'm more interested in other kinds of spaces, places, and projects.

TW: Short supply is slightly better than non-existent so, what are some positive examples happening as we speak?

DW: Lost Bag and The Garden come to mind. I also advocate for other sources of community healing and neighborhood support, besides spaces and nonprofits. While nonprofits are incredible and instrumental, a lot of additional good can be done by smaller groups, open projects, and mutual aid initiatives that aren't bogged down by bureaucracy or competing for the same three or four restrictive grants. Projects like John Brown Mutual Aid, Trash City Medic Collective, and Red Ink.

Above: A seaplane near Bear Garden Fishery off Kodiak, Alaska. Photo by Dailen Williams.

TW: Can we get an example of a project you personally produced in an alternative or, third space, one that’s still with you today. Something temporary, fleeting, memorable…

DW: Years ago my friend Kit Paloma (formerly “cmov”) and I ran an experimental club night series, Approximate ≈, at Capitol Records—that’s the giant brick building at the intersection of Harris and Atwells. Details and memories are hazy, but we ran maybe 3 or 4 of them. This was probably 2015–2016. We focused on making space for Queer and Trans artists who struggled to fit the molds of what [dance] music was supposed to be. Paloma is a dear friend of mine and everyone should check out her work.

TW: For a bit you were also Booking Manager at AS220, which I think people might point to, correctly or not, as the kind of space you’re getting at. That only lasted a year, though—how come?

DW: When I first got hired, I think they and I were both really excited; I have a lot of experience building systems, connecting people, and creating spaces with others. As time progressed I realized that I was not receiving the resources I needed to create the kinds of positive change I thought I'd be able to. My time there followed the tired trope of kind and well-intentioned people burning themselves out to the point of not being able to hear the community around them nor support the workers within the organization itself. Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the work they've done, and they're definitely a fixture in this city. I just couldn't hang.

TW: What message do you think wasn’t / isn’t being heard? Not just at AS220 during a specific year but, broadly.

DW: I think a lot about the word community and the idea of inclusivity. Community is often used vaguely, or as a marketing buzzword folks use to get grants. Or worse, it gets used by people to lump together (and feel closer to) groups they actually know very little about. Whose community are we actually talking about? Black people living on the South Side? Artists with degrees? Big program funders?

When people pretend that we all exist in the Great Big Circle in the exact same ways, we end up with values and policies so banal and undirected we mirror and recreate the inherent harms of capitalism wherever we go. Now, this isn't an indictment against efforts towards inclusivity. Rather, I think that inclusivity is something we should strive for within the context of clearly defined communities. That is to say, communities can center certain experiences without alienating or excluding others, thereby being inclusive to those willing to learn and grow.

There are, of course, many points of overlap in experience from person to person, but clearly defining a community is key to actually serving its needs. In my opinion, projects that try to serve everyone in the exact same ways generally fall flat and leave most participants, except maybe the most privileged, feeling disappointed.

TW: Want to propose a solution or, maybe a first step?

DW: When we create spaces we need to be specific, intentional, and at times protective of the specific culture(s) we’re trying to cultivate. Much of that process requires vetting and educating others to be certain that newcomers in a space can come to understand and respect that community's values—not its ethnicity, not its tax bracket, nor even its goals. It all comes back to sharing values. What do you believe in? What won’t you stand for? What do you protect? When people find that they have shared values they can finally let their guards down and begin to radically heal for real, even if they find that they exactly don't want the same things.

Above: Dailen performing as DJ Caloric. Photo courtesy of Dailen Williams.

TW: Not much to disagree with there. Thinking about your values and sense of self—do you have anything like an origin tale? Memories from youth that you can draw lines back to?

DW: Well, for the first 7 or 8 years of my life I was an only child, mostly left alone to watch TV, stare at bugs in the grass, or mix dangerous chemicals together. I loved drawing, Pokémon, and taking things apart. In second grade I made some money selling custom “tech decks” for a quarter—used popsicle sticks from the cafeteria I'd color and draw shapes and symbols on. Then, during class we'd all take out our counterfeit tech decks and pretend to snowboard instead of listening. I hid all my earnings in a water jug under the sink in the bathroom.

TW: Early with the hustle. When you got a sibling; how did that impact you? 

TW: By 15 I was the oldest of 10 kids! Well, not all at once. My family—immediate and extended—moved around a bit, and when my mom and multiple aunts weren’t actively fighting each other, they'd opt to live together in different configurations throughout the years to keep rent low. As a result, at any given time I was generally responsible for at least 5 other kids, my two siblings and many cousins, as all of our parents were either always working or asleep. Most every adult was a CNA working 3rd shift multiple nights a week.

TW: That’s a lot of responsibility. Fast forward to present day—you have all these varied projects...does life still feel like a balancing act? Or art pays the bills and you’re good? Where are you at?

DW: Actually, I’m not doing so hot! I don’t talk to my family, and when I did I was the one giving my money to them. I've never been a person with a lot of financial security in childhood, or adulthood, and since quitting my job in December I have been getting by on savings, gigs, and odd jobs. More recently, I started running CLUB:CLUB and, apart from being a public resource, it seems to be something that could actually yield a sustainable living wage! Needs a bit more figuring out to get it there, though. Wish me luck! :)

TW: Club-world seems like a place where you’re maintaining this role of “person who holds it together” and in return, perhaps, are offered more of a chosen family? 

DW: When I say that I don’t really talk to family, I mean that I am not in contact with any of the adults that had a hand in raising me. I do talk with the kids of those people from time to time, but we largely lead separate lives. After college I began living on my own, and though we all lived in the same city my mom never brought them to visit because she didn’t want my younger brothers meeting gay people. Everything was on her terms, and not being their actual parent there wasn't very much I could do. After I stopped talking to her I unfortunately had to stop talking to them as well.

Above: Dailen as DJ Caloric, in a bathtub. Photo by Julia C Liu.

DW: As for my chosen family I’ve been close to and relied on so many wonderful, kind, and complicated friends. Like with blood family I’ve found myself in pretty disastrous relationships with those I consider kin. Simply having a shared background or experience of the world is not enough. Communication and clear expectations are key to any family, blood or not, surviving and growing together in a healthy way.

TW: We want to revisit something from your first answer...Alaska?

DW: Kodiak, Alaska. I really needed money and I learned from some friends that you could make a bunch really quickly if you worked the salmon run for three months straight. This would only be partly true. When I got there I met some of the most conservative, ornery, self-reliant people I had ever known. The strangest thing was that they were so far right that they didn't even care that I was trans. They just wanted to know if I could kill a fish with my hands. I came back to Providence with a deeper and more profound appreciation for my community.

TW: Once your hands were deemed sufficiently deadly to fish, did people there get more interested in you; your history, background, queerness, etc?

DW: Not really! Mostly a “Kill fish and earn your keep” kind of energy, paired with a real lack of curiosity—the work and hours were far too grueling to confer much time for small talk. To be fair I didn’t really tell anyone about my queerness at first; my friend who also came to Alaska for similar reasons spilled the beans when they wished me a happy 25th birthday over ham radio. The wife of the captain was upset that I kept a “secret” from her, and not actually super interested in engaging with what the secret actually was or why I wouldn't be forthright in the first place. For how big a deal she made, she completely failed to make any effort to get my pronouns right after the fact.

Interestingly, I happened to be stationed with another transwoman a little older than me, a person the captain and his wife knew personally and watched grow up. It was nice to have a queer person to experience the ordeal with, even if I was the first Queer person, and Black person, that she had ever interacted with in real life. We later had quite a few conversations about how to take the theory she’d read (Audre Lorde, bell hooks) and implement them in ways that didn’t make me feel weird. I hope she’s doing well.

TW: And what’s your take on Rhode Island, generally. What comes to mind first when you close your eyes and whisper the word quahog. 

DW: Providence is this odd, left-leaning urban small town in an otherwise pretty red state. In 2014 it was crowned the least "bible-minded" place in the country, and it also happens to be where I spent some of my most formative years. I love this city, and even though it’s been making it more and more clear that it probably doesn’t love me back, I hope we can all work together to figure out a way to re-squish it into a weird zone for people to hang out, hold hands, and make art. To get a deeper understanding of my relationship with RI, read this NPR article, this Trip Advisor page on Splash at Jordan’s Furniture, and this bit on Resmini lore.

Above: Williams as DJ Caloric, during a residency at Black Sheep. Photo (cropped) by Rory Maynard-Dean.

TW: How about something you love. Besides Vegas-style attractions at furniture showrooms.

DW: Teaching! Teaching others really requires not only that you understand a subject thoroughly, but also that you’re in tune enough with your students and curious enough about the rest of the world to be able to notice and draw similarities between completely separate things. As a result of teaching others, I’ve really learned how to teach myself new things.

I also try to record moments, photographs, videos, and voice memos. I'm prone to taking notes during casual conversations, especially if it's with a new friend. It's so easy to forget small details, and at least for me it's those little things that spark sudden moments of inspiration. I'm trying to enjoy my life more and spend more time with people I care about. Also, whenever I bike by a mulberry tree in the summer months I make sure to pull over and stuff my face as penance for working so much.

TW: Can’t say we’ve ever just ripped into a mulberry bush. Will have to check that scene out. Actually…that banger jam All Around the Mulberry Bush, being a youth-tune, reminds us to ask you about your time with New Urban Arts.

DW: My time at New Urban Arts was generally positive, it’s where I made most of my oldest adult friends. I was pretty young then, and honestly, at the time I probably was not mature enough yet to be a supportive role model for teens, being only 20 or so and living under extremely unstable circumstances myself. As for my own comics, I tend to write stories about workers and working, and how capitalism dulls the imagination—even in fantastic settings.

TW: What kinds of fantastic settings; what are the storylines?

DW: There’s an anthropomorphic eggplant who raids tombs to pay off her art school loans, and an impoverished village using magic gardening techniques to fight off police knights. I’ve done comics about starving freelance banking wizards who had to spend their own money to cast spells and close deals, and militarized hospitals fighting over patients in armored ambulances. I don't draw so much anymore, instead choosing to work on music and group projects while silently working on my world-building and writing skills.

TW: On writing...We’re getting ready to hit the beach next month—what books should we have in the tote?

DW: In no particular order...Getting the Love You Want. I’m trying to get like Hellen and Harville, and you probably should too. Animal Land is a really beautiful story about community and perseverance that halfway through, becomes a bizarre action story that isn’t very good. For that reason I recommend quitting the series after you finish Vol 7. Finally, The Body Keeps the Score. The guy who wrote it kinda sucks and it comes out a bit in some sections, but the info is pretty good and it really recontextualized a lot of things for me. Be forewarned: it’s extremely dense and at times, disturbing.

TW: OK, so not exactly a Sue Grafton summer. That’s cool. What’s something coming up in the next couple of months? This is your end-of-interview promo moment.

DW: I’m doing an artist showcase with Joe Stopsign and Noizcode at Inspiria on August 2nd! I really like Creeps and Sam and what they're doing with that space for different communities. CLUB:CLUB’s social club is returning from hiatus on September 9, and finally, I'm co-planning a really big party for the end of the summer. But that's all I can say for now.

*

The cover photo for this interview, Dailen Williams in L.A., is by Maya Gutmann-McKenzie, 2023

Showing Up, with Craig Spencer

If you want to meet Craig Spencer, look for a local watering hole with a decent whiskey selection and some live bluegrass. If he’s not there…suit up and travel to the heart of an infectious disease outbreak in Forécariah. By day, Spencer serves as an Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown, and he approaches all things in life—be it learning the banjo or providing emergency medical care—with curiosity, focus, and a true respect for craft.

The Well (TW): Hi Craig. What’s brought you to Rhode Island?

Craig Spencer (CS): I'm still pretty new here, I moved to Providence with my family just over a year ago. I'm originally from Detroit, a city I absolutely adore, and moved to New York in 2008 to finish medical training—I stayed there for 15 years. During the pandemic, I was doing a bunch of work with health leaders across the country, including a group of folks at Brown. At the end of one long phone call, someone at the public health school said "Hey Craig, you should come work here!” At that point, I don't even think I knew that Brown was in Providence. I’d only been to Providence once, 20 years before, but I remember liking it. So our family came up for a weekend visit, really liked it, and decided to give Lil Rhody a shot. We've really settled in here, and absolutely love it.

TW: We’re considering letting you stay, but first you must be tested. Name ye favorite pubs and houses of entertainment.

CS: I’m always down for a visit to Captain Seaweeds (ig). And as a beer guy, I love Moniker and Long Live in Providence, as well as Tilted Barn down in Exeter. I’ve been really impressed with the great shows I’ve seen at tiny venues like Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket all the way up to bigger productions at PPAC. Most of my favorite shows were upstairs at Columbus Theater, and the closure of that space is a huge loss. 

TW: The Clam Council has voted; you may stay. So back to Detroit, the early years. What was that all about? Family, music, life, etc?

CS: As a middle child and a Midwesterner, I spent most of my time watching, reading about, and playing hockey while simultaneously playing a negotiating role between my older brother and younger sister on all family matters. With music, I was in to whatever my older brother was listening to—I remember my first time hearing Eazy-E as if it were yesterday, and knew most of the words to every Beastie Boy album. I think my first cassette was the single of Bad English’s When I See You Smile, picked up from the Sam Goody at the mall. Later I got into Nirvana—who didn’t!?—and still recall my parents making me clean the garage for buying In Utero without their prior knowledge. Pretty standard stuff I guess.

Above: Craig running the Philadelphia Marathon in 2022.

TW: Not too long ago, we spotted you at an Etran de l'air gig at Machines. That’s a departure from Bad English—when’d you discover West African shredders?

CS: I spent most of the 2010s living abroad much of the year, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and was exposed to great music everywhere I went. Early on it was the titans of Ethio-jazz; their smooth soulful mashup of Amharic and ‘Western’ scales that really intrigued me. Later, I became obsessed with the kora, a massive stringed instrument from West Africa that sounds like the marriage of a lute and a harp. I have played banjo for a long time, and I was really intrigued by the history of that instrument and how it ties back to other stringed gourds like the kora.

At the same time, I heard a lot of music from the euphoric era of independence in many West African countries, and was struck by the energy and optimism, akin to what you’d hear in the stellar Bobo Yeye collection from Numero Group. A friend who spent years in Mali introduced me to the music of the Balani Shows and I fell in love with the electronic hyperfast rhythms, and after spending some time working amongst the Tauregs in northern Niger I was introduced to the driving rebel blues of the desert. I’ve just been lucky to end up in a few different places with incredible music and great people to share it with me.  

TW: Great stuff! What’s in regular rotation at home in 2024?

CS: Guy Lobe’s Mon Amie A Moi is a fantastic 1986 album from one of Cameroon’s greatest. My 5 year old’s favorite album is Lavender Days from Caamp, I think because it’s pink. Azymuth’s Outubro from 1980 Brazilian boogie vibes with banging bass lines that just makes me smile and groove every time. Bana’s Dor Di Nha Dor is a lively 1983 record from the Cape Verdean balladeer Adriano Gonçalves. [The Well adds: East Providence, take note, as this one’s on Discos Monte Cara, a label out of Portugal]. Lastly, Julie Byrne’s Not Even Happiness—the last track is my favorite thing to spin with my last sips of whiskey before bed.

TW: So you’re teaching the kids about some cool jams—good on you. What are they teaching you? 

CS: Honestly, what I take from my kids every day is their intense and insistent wonder and curiosity about the world. Trying to explain to a 3 year old how something works requires you to not only deeply understand it yourself, but in so doing, brings up other questions that maybe you’ve never considered. Just watching two kids talk to each other and see how they interpret the world really gives me perspective for what I see as important, and what is really important to them.

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Above: Craig in China, mid 2000s. On the left, he’s at the mini Mao museum in Moxi.

TW: In Africa, when not looking for Mdou Moctar concerts and the like, you were practicing emergency medicine and related field work. Why this particular focus?

CS: When I was around 10 years old, I realized I couldn't be a sharkologist. It was a pretty disappointing revelation. I was informed that I'd have to study things like plankton and algae, which was not at all interesting to a kid obsessed with learning everything about sharks. So in social studies class, I was looking under a microfiche and saw that a cardiothoracic surgeon [content warning, images of surgery] made more money than everything else. So I decided I was going to do that. That's the reason I went to med school. That was the goal, to make Scrooge McDuck money. But during med school, I went on a trip to the Dominican Republic to see how hospitals worked there, and came back convinced that the world probably needs fewer hyper-specialized heart surgeons and way more people that feel comfortable providing medical care in nearly any circumstance for anyone. That's when I shifted to emergency medicine, and I committed to spending as much time working abroad, helping to build capacity in places around the world. 

TW: And before Africa, you spent some time in China—way back in the Hu Jintao era What was it like over there? 

CS: It was absolutely wonderful and wild. I went there because I knew absolutely nothing about the country; this was in 2006 right before the Olympics in Beijing. I took a year off of med school and ostensibly went to do public health work with a team in Henan province. But when I got there, all the research team really wanted to do was hang out, drink, and go to the night market with their strange international guest. It took a while to learn enough Mandarin to have a conversation, but once I did, the conversations I had were absolutely fascinating. Taking long train rides and just chatting with people, or meeting people at the markets or outside of the Forbidden City and just spending hours hearing what their life is like was one of the coolest experiences I could've had at that point in my life. I also met my now wife on my first day in China. She was an American from Cincinnati, and we got to spend a lot of time traveling from one end of China to the other, seeing a country in transition, just as we were in our early 20s and learning a lot about the world.

TW: Note to self: hang with researchers in Henan. OK so back to Africa—you were just in South Sudan with Doctors Without Borders. Give us a snapshot—what it’s like on the ground.

CS: The reality is that the need is pretty limitless. As an organization, Doctors Without Borders is in dozens of countries and works with tens of thousands of local staff, helping provide really crucial medical care in humanitarian crises. Given the state of the world, including the numerous big and small conflicts all over, there are still and will always be people who need access to medical care. Thankfully, we've had a massive outpouring of support, the majority of it from individual donors, and that has allowed Doctors Without Borders to dramatically expand its operations in recent years. But any cataclysmic event—bigger conflict, huge outbreak of a deadly infectious disease, and climate-related crises—bring more and more needs. In South Sudan, a few of our projects were frustrating because of the desire to do more, but it was also really heartening to see all the incredible work our teams can do in really tough circumstances all around the world. Really incredible.

TW: This is a well covered story elsewhere, but while working with Doctors Without Borders you contracted Ebola and unknowingly brought it back to New York City. Ten years later, how do you reflect on that moment?

CS: A decade ago there were numerous ‘Fearbola’ stories all over the news. Can You Get Ebola from a Bowling Ball was the hard-hitting byline from the New York Times. Despite all the hoopla, rarely was it pointed out that getting Ebola is actually pretty damn hard. At its most basic, it's a disease of caregivers. It really mostly impacts people who try to take care of others, risking their lives by providing close contact in a loved ones last moments or after their death. This is why you saw big outbreaks in healthcare facilities where providers often didn't have enough of the equipment needed to keep them safe. But even if they did, just providing that care and being present in Ebola treatment centers remained a risky proposition. I still don't know exactly when I was infected, but it was undoubtedly sometime in the process of taking care of dozens and dozens of Ebola patients. I was lucky enough to survive. But so many of the providers in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone who were also infected didn’t survive, a horribly cruel indictment of the quality of care we were able to provide to the providers themselves.

Above: Craig with some of his Guinean colleagues in Gueckedou, 2014.

TW: In these environments where transmission rates and risks are so high, how do you keep cool and focused?

CS: Honestly, there is no trick here. There is absolutely no way to keep cool and focused. But there is a way to contain it so that you can continue and struggle on. After a decade, I still find it impossible to truly explain to folks what it was like working inside a place of such sadness and death. Yes, there were definitely uplifting moments, like the day we were able to discharge one of the first pregnant women to ever survive Ebola. But most of the time, it was just tough. But I think everyone who was there, working in those treatment centers, knew that if they didn’t help out and show up, things would’ve been even worse. It’s strange what drives us, but I was really inspired by all the amazing Guinean providers I worked with that showed up day after day, even as they watched their own families and communities fall ill. Incredible people. 

TW: We read you also spent time on a MSF medical search and rescue boat.

CS: I worked as part of a team helping provide search and rescue and medical care to migrants crossing the Mediterranean, and the experience truly changed my life and how I sympathize with the struggles of others. Basically we would leave Sicily onboard a marine vessel—”Call it a ship, but never call it a boat,” I was told over and over—and head south to the Libyan coast. En route we would often find a completely unworthy boat overloaded with people from all around the world trying to safely cross the Mediterranean sea, with almost no realistic chance of survival or getting to the other side. We would then spend hours doing a really careful rescue, something that I learned from some of the only people in the world that can tell you how to get 150 people off a sinking vessel, and then we would go through all the people we brought on board to try to find the most urgent medical issues. It was always chaos. 

TW: What were the most urgent needs?

CS: People with gunshot wounds. People with nervous breakdowns. We even delivered a few babies, including one on a tiny little wooden boat right in the middle of the Mediterranean. And in our little clinic on board, we got to speak with people and hear about their journeys. It was absolutely incredible to hear what so many people had been through and the resolve and determination they carried to seek safety and a better life. There’s no way I could’ve done what so many of them had. I learned a lot from many of the folks I met onboard.

TW: Perhaps unexpectedly, your work’s led to you having an Emmy.

CS: Well, the first thing to know is that on the bottom of every Emmy, it says that “This is only being loaned out to you and remains the property in perpetuity of the Emmy Gods,” but I’m glad my home can serve as a temporary way station for one little statuette. Frankly, I only got that Emmy because an incredible team of people at AJ+ did an enormous amount of work to take some things I wrote on social media and turn them into a really compelling, powerful video. 

TW: What’d you post, exactly?

CS: During the early days of Covid, I was working as an emergency physician in New York City. At the end of every shift, I would pour a glass of whiskey and take to Twitter to share my experiences of what it was like inside the ER. I honestly didn't think anyone would read it or care, but it was cathartic for myself and other providers that were going through that. Then one day something I wrote was shared by President Obama, and AJ+ reached out about trying to help people better understand what it was actually like inside hospitals. They took a few things that I wrote, spliced them together, and over the span of a month or so we made an animation depicting what it was like in the emergency room when Covid was at its worst. Their team did all the lifting, I just drank whiskey and ranted on Twitter. That’s how you get an Emmy.

TW: Give us an update on where we’re at right now with COVID? On a global scale.

CS: Obviously we're past the worst, especially when you think about it like a lot of epidemiologists do in terms of excess mortality or how many more people are dying than should be. But there's still a lot that we don't understand about Covid, even though all of our attention was on this for such a long time. We still don't know why some people can get long-term and really debilitating symptoms after an infection. And although we should've learned in the past couple years about how inequitable access to certain treatments and vaccines can be, and how dramatic that impact is around the world, we've already forgotten that lesson and are setting ourselves up for failure in the future when the next Covid-like pandemic hits.

TW: From all this, do you have any big picture takeaways about public health; something you’d like everyone to understand?

CS: We continue to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. For most of us, we didn't see how our failures to statically prepare for scary disease outbreaks left us remarkably flat footed in 2020, but we all felt the impact of it once COVID hit. And now, in a period of pretty intense pandemic revisionism, we're seeing a pretty dramatic pushback against public health. That is despite the fact that the field is responsible for doubling life expectancy in the past century, probably one of the most incredible things we've done as a species. At the same time, and especially in the humanitarian health sector, some of this “forgetfulness” may even be intentional, allowing leaders and organizations to evade responsibility and accountability. 

TW: How can we combat this kind of revisionist history? 

CS: The fundamentals of how we keep ourselves safe haven't really changed. Understanding those foundations is critical to preventing the same mistakes again…again.

TW: What do you think motivates you to run towards crisis; to engage so directly with unknowns and—what’s gained in return?

CS: I'll be honest, I don't consider myself a big ideas person. I think what drives me is a big chunk of curiosity combined with an emergency physician’s commitment to efficiency. I really like doing new things, taking new routes, and meeting new people—but I also like to hone in on details and particulars, especially as a way to challenge myself. I love learning languages because it allows you to connect with different people in a different way, and I’ve seen what knowing even a little can do in communities in terms of building trust. And really at my core, I’m a middle-child from the Midwest—I aim to please, and in my efforts to make sure everyone feels comfortable and included, I hitch myself on to different ideas and projects, and learn an incredible amount in the process.

THERE and Back, with Stephen Mattos

Stephen Mattos is a born-and-raised Rhode Islander, experimental music maker, and librarian. When not cycling or working on photography, he cooks and gardens with his wife, artist Alicia Renadette. Since the late 2000s he’s been performing under the moniker Chrome Jackson, and he’s got a new band playing out, THERE. Previously, Stephen was a founding member of acts like Arab on Radar, Athletic Automaton, and Doomsday Student. 

TW: So you’re from here, originally?

SM: I grew up in Providence; a child in the 1970s and a teenager in the 1980s. My family moved to the East Side from Silver Lake when I was three.

TW: Do art and music run in the family?

TW: I am the youngest of four siblings, two sisters and one brother. My dad worked for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Boston, and my mom was mainly a stay at home mom. But her passion was theater and singing. She acted in community playhouses and dinner theater for many years, and sang in the church choir and in musicals. My dad was a jack of all trades—an avid antiques and books collector, book binder, minor antiques repair guy, and picture framer. I believe I got my interest and curiosity of the world from my dad, and the performing bug from watching my mom in plays.

TW: How’d the bug materialize for you; when did you start making things?

SM: I started showing an interest in music in elementary school. I really loved the clarinet as a kid—I think from seeing Benny Goodman on TV—and started taking lessons from the school teacher...playing in the school band. This extended into middle school where I played in the school and All City Band. I was a novice at best; never got better than playing second clarinet. 

Around 13 years old I started to play the guitar, after finding out about classic rock, hard rock and heavy metal. I took lessons from a guy named Rocco at Axelrod music downtown, and bought my first guitars there: a Yamaha acoustic and a generic electric. Started a band with high school friends; practicing hard rock and metal covers in the basement. We never played out, but did have one original! Around 17, I started branching out musically when I first heard Jane's Addiction. That was my gateway band. Then I started rediscovering my dad's record collection and got obsessed with his The Best of John Coltrane. That blew my mind! From there, the flood gates opened.

Above: Stephen circa 1987

TW: Do you still play the clarinet?  

SM: Kind of. I have played it at some Chrome Jackson shows over the years. More recently, I've created some loops with it for newer material.

TW: And this high school band—what was it called? Who did you cover?  

SM: Ha! Ok, so, we had three different names during high school: Persuader, Blank Stare, and Problem Child. We covered songs like I Don't Know by Ozzy, My Michelle by G'N'R, Master of Puppets by Metallica. Stuff like that.

TW: Metallica themselves are no stranger to covers. In 2018, they did a Xutos track live. So you’re Portuguese too, yeah? Do you have a strong connection to East Providence?

SM: While my relationship to, and understanding of Providence is fairly strong, my relationship to East Providence is purely geographic. I grew up on the East Side, and East Providence was right next door over the Seekonk River—but I will be honest, it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. There’s a heavy Portuguese population, and I am a quarter Portuguese, so there is a bit of a relationship to my Portuguese kin, I guess?

TW: Close enough! Unlike many, you’ve left Rhode Island at least once in your life. What’s the farthest you’ve traveled or, have what experiences have felt like you were very, very far from home?

SM: I have done my fair share of traveling as a musician. The farthest from home I've been was Budějovice, Czech Republic in 2017 with Doomsday Student. What I learned from playing in Budějovice was that sometimes sleeping at the venue you played that night can turn into one of the worst tour experiences of your life!

TW: We’ve got all day. Let’s hear it.

SM: We played this venue called Velbloud Music Bar, a dive with a small green room in the back where fans and band members were hanging out on dirty couches drinking Budvar (the local beer). People were getting very, very drunk pre-show. Very drunk. A harbinger of things to come. The show itself went really well; people were freaking out. At the end of the evening, we were unsure where we were supposed to sleep. Often in Europe the promoters are very accommodating. You usually end up with a nice place to stay, and this is usually already established beforehand between the booking agent and promoter. But there was either confusion on our part, or a lack of communication with the promoter—who was also getting shit-faced—which led us to believe we were sleeping right in the green room where we’d all been partying. The room had large bunk beds, so we assumed it was the right spot.

Above: Arab on Radar opening for Marilyn Manson in 1995 at Club Babyhead.
Photo by Lisa Gourley.

TW: Not the worst setup so far?

SM: People were still hanging around there after 2am; we were tired and wanting to sleep. So we proceeded to the bunk beds and closed the door. Not long after, drunk people from the venue started coming into the room to go to sleep, too, as if this was a normal thing for them to do. We were very confused by this; the language barrier wasn’t helping. This made things very uncomfortable. At some point, a really fucked up guy with a broken arm came in to go to sleep claiming he owned the venue; I still don't know if he actually did! We all had to try to deal with this by sleeping in the room with all these smelly, drunk people we didn't know. That morning, after no sleep, and leaving the room to try and sleep in the van, we saw one of the other bands coming out of a different building with sleeping bags. We were left thinking that we chose, by accident, to sleep in the gross room with the drunk people. It’s hilarious to think about it now, but it was a very rough night!

To cap things off, that morning, when we were loading our gear out of the venue, we found a guy sleeping in Craig's rolled up drum rug like a burrito! He was completely confused by what was going on. I learned a few things that night.

TW: Yikes! Good heads  up for current acts swinging by the Velbloud Music Bar, though? We don’t want to harp on bad times here but, you really have toured a lot—got any other notes? Lessons learned?

SM: Here’s another tour story. In 2000, Arab on Radar went on our very first European tour. At the time, we had a booking agent from Italy, but we didn't have a driver, so we did all of the driving throughout Western Europe ourselves. None of us had ever driven a car in Europe. This trip was obviously very exciting, but driving through customs checks, exchanging currencies (pre-Euro), language barriers— all very new to us. 

We were getting near the end of our tour, driving through Germany outside of Berlin, and stopped at a petrol station. I filled up the tank and we headed out. All of a sudden the van stalled out. It seemed like we had run out of gas, but that could not have been the case—I just filled the tank. It occurred to me I mistakenly filled up with unleaded gas in a diesel engine, not paying attention to the pump nozzles. It was a horrendous blunder! We stalled out on the side of the road in a very quintessential old German town, looking out at an old church, rolling hills and lots of sheep. 

Above: Stephen performing with Athletic Automaton at O’Brien’s Pub in Allson, MA in 2007. In the background from left to right: Dan Gonzales, Sarah Delorey, Matt Zaccarino, and Kevin Driscoll.

TW: Sounds scenic, at least. How’d you get out of there?

SM: Despite my fuck up, my bandmate Craig was nice enough to go out with me looking for help. Eric and Jeff stayed with the van. We must have looked insane walking around asking random people in rudimentary German, "Sprechen Sie Englisch?", "Auto kaputt!"  We knocked on people's doors with no luck, until finally, we met this very nice family and one of them just happened to teach ESL! We felt so lucky! They called a tow truck for us. Then the four of us, and this old German truck driver we didn’t speak to, had to sit together up front in his vehicle. Back at the rental place at the airport, all they had available was a minivan and, Important detail: the previous, larger van barely fit all of our stuff. Another predicament!

We ended up taking some of the seats out of the mini van and left them in the parking lot of the car rental facility; we didn't know what else to do. It was a very shitty thing to do, but we were desperate. For the last leg of the tour, we piled equipment and bags on top of us so we could fit everything in. This was our situation for about three or four more shows, on some of our longest drives. It was ridiculous! When I called our booking agent to tell him what happened, he broke out into a very impassioned cry. He said he was kidding, but I am convinced he was serious.

TW: Lesson number two: check those pump symbols! OK enough bad memories. We want to hear about what you’re psyched about! Give us a rundown of your favorite projects over the years.

SM: I am very proud of all of my musical projects: Arab on Radar, Athletic Automaton, Chrome Jackson, Doomsday Student, and THERE. In every one of these projects—with the exception of Chrome Jackson, which is a solo project—I have worked with a host of extremely talented people: Pat Crump, Eric Paul, Craig Kureck, Brent Frattini, Josh Kemp (Mahi Mahi), and Paul Vieira. In some instances, cross-pollination occurred: e.g. Eric Paul and Craig Kureck in Arab on Radar and Doomsday Student, and Pat Crump in Athletic Automaton and THERE.

THERE is my latest project, and I couldn't be more proud of it! All of the people in this band have been good friends of mine for years, and now I have the added joy of working with some of them for the first time. We've had our set of challenges over the last three years, with life setbacks, injuries, and COVID, but the quality time that we have spent together has been so worth it to me. It’s been my goal as a musician to never stop challenging myself; and I’ve always enjoyed creating challenging, experimental music.

Above: Stephen’s class photo, est. 3rd grade.

TW: A question about the Chrome Jackson moniker. We were reading an insane story Eric Paul wrote about AOR’s time opening for Marylin Manson; he mentions listening to the 70s San Fran rock band Chrome. I was wondering, is Chrome Jackson a kind of Marilyn Manson-esque name-play? Chrome plus...Janet?

SM: First off, I was initially going to answer one of your questions by mentioning this very article! Glad you read this, it's great! But no, it actually had nothing to do with Chrome, even though I am a huge fan of that band. The simple answer is, for many years I made my own Halloween costumes at the very last minute, putting random things together and calling it a costume. One year, I painted my face silver, put on a cowboy hat, and a suit jacket and just wore that for Halloween. I saw my friend Tony out at a party or something, and he said, "Hey, look, it's Chrome Jackson!" which I thought was funny. I pocketed that name away for years.

TW: Reading about that Manson show and thinking...You've been here long enough to see clubs like the aforementioned Babyhead, The Met Cafe, the original Lupos, the Living Room, and Fort Thunder all come and go. Could you give me a list of your top 5 venues from Providence history?

SM: You listed 4 of my favorite venues already. The (Old) Met Cafe, The (newish) Living Room, Club Babyhead, and Fort Thunder. I will also add a venue that didn't last many years, Aurora, which was a few years later. The old Met Cafe was right next to Lupo's downtown. They had a lot of great bands play there in the early to mid 90s; some of the earliest Arab on Radar shows were there. Club Babyhead was such a great raunchy place! I saw Jesus Lizard for the first time there. Great place. At the old Living Room, I saw some great shows there like Guns N' Roses, right when Appetite for Destruction came out. The new Living Room was in an old abandoned restaurant, that they barely did anything to when they opened it. It was a large, raunchy punk venue. Played a great Halloween show there with Lighting Bolt, Men's Recovery Project, Dropdead, Six Finger Satellite, and many more. It was insane. Aurora was on Westminster in the Down City area. I don't remember how many years they were active, but they were around when Doomsday Student was a band in the mid 2010s. We played a couple fun ones there, and I saw some great shows, too. I really miss that venue. 

TW: Memories! Besides the bands, what’s keeping you active?

SM: I love bike riding. So I try to do that as much as I can. It has probably been my most consistent physical exercise practice that I have stuck with over the years. I also try to eat as healthy as I can. Alicia and I like to cook a lot.

TW: Providence's DIY scene and cycling have always seemed to go hand in hand. I think of people like Peter Fuller, C.F., Ian Cozzens, etc—people who approach their work with a lot of intentionality; all super into bikes. 

SM: I think punks, artists, and underground music fans have always had a strong connection to, and love of bike riding. There's always lots of bikes outside of venues at noise shows, both here, and in lots of other cities. This could be out of financial necessity, and / or an environmental decision. But whatever it is, there is a kinship there.

Above: Chrome Jackson performing at Sonia in 2022. Photo by Becky DiGiglio.

TW: Being born here, and having been active in the music scene so long...how have you gotten by, generally over the years? 

SM: I am a very practical person; maybe due to a fear of being broke and out on the street, or something like that. Not sure why I have that fear, but because of this, I never really took a lot of chances in life aside from being a musician and going out on the road. I always felt the need to keep a steady job and for years, I worked at Bread & Circus (RIP), which became Whole Foods. I spent all of my years in Arab on Radar working there. This is actually where I met Jay Ryan from Six Finger Satellite and Eric Paul. If it wasn't for that job, Arab on Radar likely would have never existed, weirdly enough. But I spent many, many years at that job. Thankfully, I was able to go away for weeks at a time working there; they were very cool about it.  

TW: So this was in the 90s or so—did you keep that gig after bigger things like the OOPS tour happened, into the 2000s?

SM: Around 2002, after Arab on Radar broke up, I kind of had a pre mid-life crisis and didn't really know what I was going to do with my life, besides music. I never made enough money as a musician to even call it a part-time job; the kind of music I make...it never seemed like a lucrative career move. So, I decided to go to college and ended up getting a Bachelor's Degree in Art History and Studio Art with a focus on photography. Not long after I graduated, I landed a part-time job at a university and proceeded to work three jobs for a few years before landing a full-time job in the library at Providence College, where I’ve now been there 10 years. I guess I made it work by making sure I had a job that would help support my passions.  

TW: We like this approach, and appreciate all you’ve done for local music! As our thanks, we’re going to let you hype an upcoming gig taking place somewhere other than Myrtle.

SM: THERE has a show at the News Cafe in Pawtucket, RI on July 17th with Chaser (NYC), Dull Care (PVD), and solo country performer, Craig Wreck (Craig Kureck from Arab on Radar/Doomsday Student/Chinese Stars), that I am very excited about.

TW: Have a blast! We’ll be here in East Providence where the DB meter will run a bit less hot that night.

Above Average Inflation, with Matthew Muller

With the first debate of 2024 presidential contest taking place this evening, we felt it important to address local inflation. We spoke with local expert Matthew Muller (he/him), a designer, builder, and co-founder of Pneuhaus. Matt’s work balances adaptation, function, and lightness, and in our opinion, is radical in all senses of the term. Matt’s also a member of the Below and Above Collective, a group of 6 artists and a botanist that build floating wetland sculptures to clean small water bodies.

TW: Hey Matt, thanks for making some time for us. So, inflatables. For readers who want to dive right in, where should they look that’s a level past the Macy’s Day Parade?

Inflatocookbook by Antfarm is the perfect DIY inflatable intro (MIT, PDF). Thomas Herzog’s Pneumatic Structures (Internet Archive) is more technical, offering amazing examples of what is possible. Also, Thinking By Modeling by Frei Otto—the importance of model making in our [Pneuhaus] practice cannot be overstated, and much of that is inspired by Frei Otto.

TW: Since you mentioned Otto...do you have a list that’s like “Our favorite Expo-style Pavilions?” 

(MM): One of our favorite contemporary groups is Numen / For Use. Their recent work Net Milan is a masterpiece. Their work is such a great balance of playful exploration of space, innovation, and technical execution.

TW: And from PneuHaus—what’s your go-to intro piece; a work that sums up what your studio’s all about?

(MM): I think we all agree that Compound Camera is our favorite piece. It takes the simple camera obscura mechanism and applies it to a double membrane inflatable. The outcome is totally transformative. Watching visitors go through the process of wondering what the heck they are looking at to figuring it out is still satisfying 7 years later.

Above: Matt in the Pneuhaus studio

TW: Maybe a boring logistics Q but, when you’re shipping works like this out of state, are you present for installations? Or does the customer manage setup?

(MM): 90% of the time we install the work. Sometimes if it's a simple piece or the client is a museum with art handlers we can send instructions. The set up is usually a lot faster than you would think. We unpack the inflatable, find our power source, anchor it, and inflate.

TW: So the studio takes on ambitious, often experimental projects and you’ve managed to make it through the pandemic. Can you give some insight on the finances here—how’s it been possible?

(MM): Because inflatables pack up so small we are able to keep our sculptures, ship them cheaply around the country and world to install them over and over again. This is the only way we were able to get started a business. Now about half of our income is from custom fabrication since not many people (especially in the U.S.) can make high quality inflatables.

TW: But where did the initial investment come from? Side job savings, other client work?

(MM): All three founders graduated from college with zero debt. This is the foundation that made Pneuhaus possible. We didn't have any large investment, but not having debt looming over us gave us the flexibility to take risks and follow an uncertain path. The first year, we rented a small warehouse and six of us lived there while the three of us started building our first Pneuhaus pieces—these jobs came in after our day job hours. I had a truck that my parents gave me and I'm sure one of our parents helped us get the first sewing machine. The first few months our parents helped supplement our income, but we really kept things lean. Then we got a couple big jobs and stumbled into the financial model of building a piece for material cost, and renting it out over the years to pay off the labor and that has worked pretty well. It took three years to get to the point where we could afford to live somewhere other than in the studio.

Above: Matt working on Below and Above: A Floating Wetland Supports Life

TW: We imagine across those first three years, not everything you wanted to make got made? What’s on the horizon now ?

(MM): We have a huge stack of unaccepted proposals, some of which should never be made, but many of which we would make in a heartbeat. I am the practical problem solver in the group so I get overwhelmed by many of our more ambitious ideas. A lot of our ideas are complex climbing structures. Figuring out how to do them in a safe way without compromising the idea is a challenge, but we will do it soon. Also, we are finally making shade structures! They are giant leaf-like sculptures that will hopefully keep people cool and make them feel like ants!

TW: Does client work ever get in the way of more general discovery and research? Or how do you balance the agency side of the studio with the experimental?

Matthew Muller (MM): Every Friday at our studio is called "Fun Friday". We don't schedule meetings, we avoid client work, and we try to foster a sense of playful exploration to develop new ideas and techniques. When we started the studio we would do this after hours, but we burned out after several years. Then when our practice felt stagnant and like we were recycling old ideas we decided to commit our Fridays to fostering exploration. It is working great and has already led to a better practice and more fun work environment.

TW: The physical conditions in-studio, compared to where your works are most often installed, are a lot more controlled and predictable. What happens when nature’s involved?

(MM): In 2017 we had a 40ft dome made of beach balls blow apart like a dandelion during Aphex Twin’s first live performance in the U.S. in eight years. It was a difficult installation and we were so happy to celebrate by watching Aphex Twin's performance. A few minutes into the set the temperature dropped 15 degrees, shrinking the air in the beach balls. A hard rain started which made the beach balls slippery, and then 40+ mph winds came out of nowhere. The three of us (Augie, Levi, and myself) looked at each other with eyes as open as they could get; we knew this storm was trouble. As we scrambled to get to the dome we saw individual beach balls rolling over the crowd. By the time we got close we saw people were treating the former-dome as a ball pit, having the time of their lives punching beach balls and rolling around. Over the next hour or two we scrambled to get people away and come and get all the loose balls under a giant tarp. Luckily it was all soft and no one was hurt. We have a great respect for the power of wind these days and have never had an injury from it. I credit that traumatic evening for our clean record sense.

Above: Matt across the years, learning by doing

TW: There is a Bucephalus Bouncing Beach Ball joke here but, not sure how to land it. What have you learned about design and fabrication by observing how the public’s interacting with your work, Aphex-disaster aside. 

(MM): Well the main lesson learned from the Aphex disaster was structural. But generally the context of the event greatly changes the audience reaction. Family-orientated public art/music events in cities are amazing. We see the broadest mix of people confused and enthralled with our work. At music festivals there is usually a mix of intoxicated entitlement that is rough on our work. Pretty much anything that can happen will happen... so we have learned to limit what pieces we expose to that environment and how to design around it. 

TW: And how’d you get into making. Personally. Were you always a builder / tinkerer?

(MM): Looking back, it is definitely the 'forts' or 'huts' we would build at recess and in my backyard. Throughout my childhood I never saw how those experiences would play into a career since it was just fun and effortless. Throughout my high school years I thought I was a 2D artist until I got to RISD and met people who found 2D art as effortless as I found building.

TW: In your early fort-building years, did you have a lot of support around the arts? Good programs at school, etc? 

Matthew Muller (MM): I was terrible at [high] school and would get in a lot of trouble coming up with ways to entertain myself in the classroom and out. As the youngest in a family of high academic achievers my parents were bewildered, but incredibly supportive. Once they saw how much I loved to create they filled my schedule with extra art class, gave me materials and encouraged me to follow my interests. I still do not know if they understand the extent I cheated to graduate high school though.

Above: Matt wearing an inflatable watermelon in support of Palestine

TW: What made school so challenging, and how’d you overcome it to get into a leading arts college? 

(MM): I just don't learn well through abstraction. I'm very tactile, I learn best when I manipulate things and observe the results. Luckily, my elementary school was Montessori so I did thrive there, but my highschool was classical Latin and I didn't stand a chance. I had a C average and a decent SAT, but my portfolio is what got me into RISD. I credit my parents for all the art academy classes they put me in after school or in the summer. My dad, who is an architect, also had a hobby of painting so all that exposure helped me build a large body of work to pick from.

TW: With family, friends, or professionally—what’s the furthest from home you’ve traveled? What did it teach you? 

(MM): Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. It was a complicated decision to accept the job given the political situation there and I would not do it again, but I am grateful for what I learned there. It is the only time I have been to a predominantly Islamic country or Asia at all. Growing up in a post-9/11 America the Islamophobia baked into our media is so pervasive I found myself confronting subconscious Islamophobic thoughts. The best example of this is the first time I heard the call to prayer I realized I got anxious. The only times I heard that growing up was in films or tv shows about the "war on terror". I cannot think of a single show I watched growing up that depicted Islam without "terrorism". After a few days of hearing the entire city pause for it, I was able to rewire my brain and slow down to hear it for its beauty.

TW: In Riyadh—what was the actual project executed? 

(MM): Grove was installed at an art exhibit indoors for 3 months. We installed it and came back to pack it up at the end.

Above: Pneuhaus’ dome for Aphex Twin; the calm before the storm

TW: If Riyadh was a complicated decision politically, what works have felt more aligned with your own values? 

(MM): Inflatables are great for protests! We made an inflatable vulva for Nadya Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot) which they took to the Indiana state capitol. We have made inflatable abortion pills for women's rights activists, an inflatable Textron missile with blood to protest RISD's connection to the arms manufacturer, and an inflatable watermelon for pro Palestine protests. That one has been used many times in Providence, and was a staple at the Harvard encampment and commencement walk out. We made a couple dozen inflatable seats/shields that were sent to other student encampments around the country, too. When we see injustice in the world we often think what an inflatable could do to help. Usually the answer is nothing, but we do what we can to help.

TW: With all of these inflatables and their many uses...a constant is plastic. Any parting thoughts on that?

(MM): At Pneuhaus we work with plastic and I can't picture a way that could work without. Our view on sustainability is focused on lightness and striving to use specific polymers that have a lower impact. We use minimal material and energy to produce, transport, and install our work. Biology is always optimizing for these things and we find endless inspiration for our work in the living world. For now it is mostly structures, but someday we will figure out how to eat our sculptures when we are done with them. Until then, we will emulate biology in treating all our material as precious.

TW: Thanks, Matt, we appreciate your time and projects!

Readers: We didn’t have time to go deep on Matt’s work with Below and Above, but we really suggest following up to learn more. Eco RI News has a great piece on their entry to the Art on the Trails project.

Polyglot Adventure Time, with Keith McCurdy

Born and raised in North Providence, Keith McCurdy (he/they) is a songwriter and singer for the gothic folk ensemble Vudu Sister. Growing up in an artistic family, Keith spent time at Crescent Park and fairs around New England, picking up a wide range of interests along the way. They’re a French citizen, Romani, and a self-described Classicist who loves to dive deep into myth and lore. Get pulled in tomorrow night, Friday June 14th, as Vudu Sister plays Myrtle.

The Well (TW): Hey Keith! We wanna pick up on something you told Rhode Island Monthly about a year ago, that “The “Sister” part is important. I don’t really love the Vudu part.”  Can you elaborate on that; why not just switch it up all together? 

Keith McCurdy (KM:) The “Vudu” was something left over from a previous band I was very proud of, and there wasn’t much thought when that part of the name carried over. It’s difficult to build momentum in this business and maintain it. I have a long list of possible alternative names that I might consider when the timing is right, but it could be really tricky at this point—it would essentially be re-branding, which sounds really icky for most musicians, but you need to look at your band as your business if you’re at all serious about pursuing this as a career.

TW: And, for those new to your work, tell us about the Sister side.

KM: I often write from women's perspectives. I call it a creative androgyny, where I feel most comfortable exploring this part of myself. I don't feel masculine when I write and have related more to the feminine perspectives in the art that has inspired me, whether it be the music of PJ Harvey, the Riot Grrrl movement in the '90s, or the poetry of Emily Brontë. It always resonated with me when I was a lonely kid discovering my artistic voice. My collection of Latin and Greek songs, Burn Offerings, features songs from the perspectives of women and goddesses from classical mythology. I consider a lot of my writing to have feminist leanings, which isn't something I think is overtly apparent to people.

Vudu Sister trio: Diane O'Connor (front), Isabel Castellvi (left) and Keith (right)

TW: Can you speak a bit more on mythology and points of inspiration?

KM: From a young age, I loved fairy tales, Tolkien, medieval literature, mythology, and Dungeons and Dragons. This led to my study of classical languages and literature (Greek and Latin), culminating in Burnt Offerings. I am also a big fan of gothic literature, from Poe to Shelley to Lovecraft.

One of my other interests—not wholly unrelated to this literature is my fascination with religion and spirituality. I have been a longtime fan of Joseph Campbell and that branch of Jungian interpretation of myth and religion. I am much more interested in exploring these "big" concepts rather than themes that are too uncomfortably topical.

I write a lot of poetry and often consider myself someone who uses music as a vehicle to play with words in ways that interest or amuse me. Much of my writing is informed by the literature I have studied over the years rather than rock band lyricism.

TW: The way you approach lyrics—from classical literature, as prose—makes us think of Kate Bush, John Cale, Celtic Frost, etc. Who are some of your favorites? 

KM: Of course, early influences were grunge and alternative rock in the 1990s, people like Kurt Cobain, who had a knack for irony and expressive, poetic lines woven beautifully into his song melodies. I chisel away at my lyrics once I’ve been satisfied by the sounds of certain vowels, alliteration, assonance, etc. I’m a big fan of slant rhymes. I’ve borrowed approaches from Old English poetry like the Seafarer or The Wife’s Lament, I’ve lifted from Sappho (7th century archaic Greek poet), Ovid (late Augustan Roman poet), fairy tales, ghost stories, and medieval verse. 

Above: Keith age 7 with his dad (left); Keith shredding at 10 (right)

TW: This feels like a good point to ask for some recommended reading. Let’s talk summer beach reading, introspective goth-folk edition.

KM: Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) by Neil Postman is a great book examining some heavy epistemological problems that have become increasingly relevant today. He makes an excellent examination of the sort of vatic nature of books like 1984 by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It is nearly polemic insistence that Brave New World is a more accurate cautionary tale than Orwell, basing his arguments in the history of education, entertainment, and general epistemology.

I always recommend Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell for anyone searching for meaning in their own hero's journey. Once they've graduated from that, I strongly encourage reading his book Goddesses, which is highly indebted to one of Campbell's mentors, Marija Gimbutas. Gimbutas was a famous archaeologist instrumental in many studies about the Great Goddess figure and the early cultures who still venerated her. The Language of the Goddess is one of her most notable works.

I recently picked Orlam by PJ Harvey. It's a long-form narrative poem in which she uses the West Dorset dialect. It has magic realism, folklore, linguistics, and Polly Jean Harvey.

TW: You mention having been a lonely kid. What was growing up like?

KM: My mother is a French national, and my father was half Sicilian, half Romanichal gypsy. They met and fell in love in the 1980s. My parents were both artists, and we made our living by traveling to fairs around New England to sell my mother's hand-made jewelry. My dad was a bass player, and music has always been a part of my life. I grew up very poor and deeply struggled socially and academically at school. Due to the pressures and anxieties from severe bullying, I dropped out of high school early sophomore year before eventually getting my GED. I started my first band around that time, which probably saved my life.

Keith performing live, age 17

TW: We don’t want to ask you to relive traumas here so feel free to pass, but with respect to bullying—with time, have you been able to empathize with or forgive people who brought negativity into your life? Or, any advice for young Well readers?

KM: My experiences in school were pretty horrific. I’d be reluctant to give advice, but I would encourage anyone to find healthy ways to channel their rage, fear, and pain. I was lucky to have music in my life, and books. I don’t spend much energy thinking about my former tormentors, but I don’t hold grudges. There is always some room for hope in your heart. 

TW: Cheers to that, Keith. Thank you. What was your first instrument?

KM: I grew up in the 90s, voraciously consuming the grunge and alternative rock music brought to you by Generation X. I watched my young father play in bands, and when I first held a guitar, I knew it was all I ever wanted to do. I began writing silly songs immediately after being comfortable enough to pluck a string.

TW: You recorded with your dad too, right? Later on.

KM: I have some fond memories of making our second album, Household Items, with my friends Damian Puerini, Alexander Garzone, and my father, who played bass on that album and has since passed away (in 2018). We spent a magical week in October getting stoned and playing the songs live. It was a fun, aggressive, punky/grungy album, and I’m glad I got to make something like that with my father and that there is a record of it. 

TW: Great record! We also wanted to ask about Mortis Nervosa, which you recorded over at the now defunct—but maybe coming back someday?—Columbus Theater.

KM: Mortis Nervosa represented a real shift in my songwriting and musical direction, I consider it a liminal album in that I was starting to change my attack in my singing and still coming out of this belting, aggressive approach but moving toward being gentler and allowing my tone to grow and become richer. It’s also a great representation of how I usually sound live, defined by the sound of Diane O’Connor’s violin playing and we were playing with our friend Amato Zinno on upright bass a lot in those years. I might have Amato return soon for our next record.

Francesca Caruso (The Infinity Ring) and Keith playing in Matera, Italy

TW: You also did something related to, or at URI? 

KM: My Latin and Greek songs, Burnt Offerings—it was a fulfilling challenge and a unique project that synthesized my academic work at URI (my alma mater) with all my work as a musician. I was lucky to have been awarded a small grant to help with some of the costs, and I was lucky to have the guidance of my good friend and mentor, Dr. Daniel Carpenter, who is head of the Classics dept. at URI.

TW: Where else are you finding community? 

KM: I have been a long time resident of AS220, the non-profit beacon of light in Providence. They have done much to help artists, especially young artists, have a safe place to practice, live, and perform. They have been a tremendously positive force in my life, and I greatly value their role and mission in our community.

TW: We also saw you pop up on The Public’s Radio recently—Rhode Island to the core! Ever make it out?

KM: I have traveled all over Europe. I started to make it overseas after my father passed away;. he had always encouraged me to travel. I formed friendships with fans overseas who had started reaching out to me over the years. This led to my first concerts in Sicily and Paris and, eventually, my first couple of European tours.

TW: Any good tales from your most recent tour?

KM: The most recent was when I was staying in Fiumicino, the city outside Rome that supports the airport there. I had toured for four weeks this spring and had one night to myself before flying to Paris for one last concert. I checked into the hotel and met some Māori Kiwis (indigenous people of New Zealand). They were there to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the WWII battle of Monte Cassino. We hit it off well (there was an increasingly larger group as the hours went on), and we passed guitars around all night over dinner, singing songs together (they all sang a few Maori tunes, and it was lovely). There were some older women covered in beautiful Tā moko, the traditional tattoos of their culture. It was an unexpected, magical evening.

Māori Kiwis performing in a candid setting in Rome.

TW: Staying in Europe for a minute, can you talk a bit about the Romani people?

KM: I am part Romani, the "gypsy" culture. They are an ethnic people without a country who came to Europe from India 800 to 1000 years ago. They continue to be persecuted to this day and often live in abject poverty. My grandfather was a dyed-in-the-wool Romanichal; he spoke the Romani chib (language), grew up in a vardo (wagon), and did blacktopping (asphalt paving, a common Romani profession) his whole life. At the same time, his sisters practiced dukkering (fortune-telling). It's a beautiful, unusual culture that continues to face discrimination, violence, poverty, and racism while at the same time is fetishized, romanticized, and appropriated by gadje (non-Romani).

TW: Thank you for that. So today, you’re not blacktopping. How are you getting by?

KM: I am a full-time, working musician. I play a lot of long, two and three-hour brewery and bar gigs to pay the bills. I occasionally supplement my income with part-time work here and there —on and off done private tutoring for children in subjects like English grammar and Latin. It is hard, and I make a very modest living; sometimes it's a real struggle. I used to work horrible full-time jobs, which left me utterly burnt out. I leaped into doing music full-time a few years after working in group homes for developmentally disabled people for a long time, a job I fell into after having only worked at places like gas stations and fast food joints. It was a soul-sucking, underpaid, miserable job that destroyed my psyche for a while. I am much happier and more fulfilled pursuing my art as a career and no longer pretending I don't want to do this for a living.

TW: How do you work through, or live with moments of struggle? 

KM: I prioritize rest. I try to stay more organized than I have in the past, and I am unapologetic about my ambitions. I try to surround myself with people who are optimistic about creating art, doing great work, and encouraging each other in all of our respective pursuits in this crazy realm. 

I also think it's important to collaborate with other artists. There is no single genius. You get better and do better work when you share ideas. I have been blessed to work with some great musicians, like Diane O'Connor (violinist), Isabel Castellvi (cellist), and most recently, Francesca Caruso, the violinist for The Infinity Ring, who accompanied me on my European tour this year.

TW: What’s something coming up in the next 2-3 months you’d like to have on peoples’ radars?

KM: I'm working on new songs using acoustic baritone guitar, a fresh and exciting new direction for me (I'm highly indebted to Emma Ruth Rundle). I hope to track some songs starting in July. We'll assemble some new releases this year as we work on the next album. In August, I'm heading back to Italy for a few concerts,, and in November, I may tour in France and Spain.

*

Vudu Sister plays Myrtle tomorrow night, Friday June 14, 2024

Soup’s On, with Kate McNamara

Kate McNamara (she/her) is a curator, educator, art administrator, and mother based in Rhode Island. Kate wears many hats: running the East Providence exhibition space ODD-KIN, acting as Executive Director for the nonprofit My Home Court, and teaching at RISD and Sotheby's Institute of Art. We chatted about her journey from the 90s all ages ska scene in Boston to helping issue Warhol Foundation-funded grants via Interlace. 

The Well (TW): Hey Kate! Do we have this right, that prior to founding ODD-KIN you were involved with the beloved Brooklyn gallery, Cleopatra’s (RIP)?

Kate McNamara (KM): Yes! I co-founded Cleopatra's in 2008 with Bridget Donahue, Bridget Finn, and Erin Somerville (ig). We were working in galleries and museums and felt like we were not seeing spaces supporting the work, ideas, and artists in our communities—so we all went in on a storefront in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. When I was a part of Cleopatra's, it functioned more as a curatorial hub: we hosted exhibitions, readings, talks, performances, film shoots and music shows in the early years. I then moved to Boston to run Boston University's Art Galleries and shifted out of my role at Cleo's. It was a formative experience and certainly one that has impacted a lot of the ways I have approached exhibition-making and community-building. 

TW: So Cleo’s formed right around the economic crash? How’d that work?

KM: It was a really exciting moment to be in the arts—many alternative art spaces that served a range of communities and practices were opening up and that carved out new ways of participating and engaging with artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians. I was working at Participant Inc and later [MoMA] PS1—which was less buttoned up than it is now under MoMA's partnership—and spending a lot of time in the gallery scene blowing up in the Lower East Side.

2008 is a year that really stands out to me. Yes, the economy crashed which was just awful, but it flipped the way access worked in the art world. You had museums who could no longer afford to take on high production exhibitions turning to the immediate communities around them, Blue-Chip galleries taking on museum-quality exhibitions (which you could see for free!), and then all of this commercial space was on pause and freed up—which is why we were able to start Cleopatra's. A slew of other projects and spaces opened up in these empty buildings. It was both a crisis moment, as well as one of momentum, care, and accessibility. 

Installation view of Jungil Hong's "The Time Being" at ODD-KIN. On view through July 21, 2024

TW: Having a foot in the door via MoMA PS1 likely helped, too? How did you end up with that gig? What was it like there 15 years ago?

KM: It was my first job out of grad school (The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard), and I was invited to interview to be a part of the curatorial team at PS1. I remember the interview with great clarity—the notorious founder of the museum was still there, Alanna Heiss, and she asked me inspiring questions like “Do you smoke cigarettes and drink?,” which were apparently qualifications for the gig! PS1 was still wild then—every inch of the building was an opportunity for exhibition-making, including the boiler room and bathrooms. There was not a formal curatorial structure (senior curator, assistant curator, etc), and instead Alanna would select a handful of folks involved in the arts from around the world who would meet once a year and everyone would pitch exhibitions. It was an alcohol-fueled all day affair with yelling, tears and cheers. It was a wonderful and insane place to work and exposed me to so many artists, curators, musicians and writers, but we were all overworked and severely underpaid. I took many odd jobs throughout to supplement my income, like writing press releases for galleries.

TW: This could become a whole other interview re: creative labor exploitation, but for now, let’s leave NYC. Let’s talk about East Providence! Why are you here?

KM: I grew up in Boston and found myself going to Rhode Island throughout my youth for music shows and museum exhibitions. It has always been a hub for creative endeavors and alternative/DIY spaces. My partner Jim Drain (who has moved to Providence 4x!) and I moved to Rhode Island almost 7 years ago from Los Angeles and it has been a welcoming home, community, and source of impactful cultural engagement. Rhode Island is a small but mighty state and through my work, I have had the privilege of getting to know many creative communities and stakeholders within the city at large. As someone who got into the curatorial field via alternative art spaces, Rhode Island has an incredible history of these kinds of spaces and platforms. It has been exciting to find ways to feed into and reimagine what new models of artist support look like today here in Rhode Island.

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Above: 2/4 of Cleopatra’s co-founders, Bridget Finn and Kate (left); an early gallery fundraiser flyer (right).

TW: As a music venue, we’re curious to know what shows were you checking out in Boston as a kid? 

KM: Boston also had an amazing all-ages scene and as a teen, I went to concerts almost every night of the week. I basically lived at the Middle East and TT the Bears and saw everything from Mr. Lif and Akrobatic, to Dinosaur Jr, Letters to Cleo, The Pixies, Big D and the Kids Table, The Allstonians, etc! I was so thankful to have these spaces as a teen and definitely feel like that this has inspired a lot of my practices today.

TW: Can’t believe you mentioned Mr. Lif and Big D in the same sentence. Proof positive you’re from the Bean. So you’re a curator; what’s an early memory of curating something?

KM: I remember having to present an inspirational figure in 5th grade, and I chose Andy Warhol, who was a household name in the McNamara home. The presentation planning became a collaboration with my mother, who was very invested, and we spent a lot of time buying cans of Campbell's tomato soup and figuring out which Velvet Underground album I should have playing in the background. I don't know if this was the "ah-ha" moment, but it is a formative memory for sure and tapped into early curatorial/context-making skills!

TW: Let’s stay in the McNamara home for a minute; your parents got you into the VU?

KM: I was very lucky to grow up in a household where art was championed. My parents are former New Yorkers and sought out art and culture throughout the city of Boston. They went out of their way to bring my sister and me to museums, dance performances, theater, and music shows. My mom would hold art shows of our childhood work in the kitchen and have "openings." It is no wonder I turned out the way I did! In high school, I took a lot of art classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and had my first taste of what art school might be like. I also grew up going to Maine where my extended family of artists, carpenters, and poets live, which further propelled me into the arts, with a deep consideration for "craft."

TW: And how about going far from home? A memorable trip.

KM: When working at MoMA PS1, I traveled for an exhibition I had worked on at The Garage, a contemporary museum in Moscow run by the wife [Dasha Zhukova] of an oligarch. It was a quick trip and I was mostly stuck inside overseeing the installation of the exhibition, however, I remember meeting a handful of performance artists who had been making work in the 60s and 70s who spoke of the great risks they took to create visibility for politics and advocacy. I do not think The Garage has held an exhibition since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and I can't imagine I will be visiting Russia again in my lifetime.

TW: Oligarch-related question: As someone involved in the capital A art market, how do you balance keeping the lights on and getting artists paid (revenue) with the reality that a lot of Blue-Chip galleries, fairs, and museums are funded by highly questionable cash (Sacklers, BlackRock / Geo Group, etc)?

KM: To be clear, ODD-KIN is a curatorial project, not a commercial endeavor. It is neither a commercial gallery—although I am happy to facilitate sales on behalf of the artist—nor is it a non-profit, which means I am unable to support the space through grants. It has been a self-funded project; a bit of an experiment. I have built in a fundraising edition which marks each exhibition and all the proceeds go directly back into the ODD-KIN pot to support programming, pay for installer fees, artist fees, shipping, and a gallery-sitter, etc. I am excited about reimagining a more hybrid model that will actually sustain ODD-KIN and will be spending the summer doing just that. 

Regarding questionable sources of income—I think there is a hopeful moment right now in which many museums are being asked to reevaluate how and who they receive funding from, mostly thanks to artist advocacy and protest. Nan Goldin is a prime example of this; her activism around the Sacklers has been powerful.

Above: Kate and family

TW: The concept of a “curatorial project” or “project space” isn’t one all readers might be familiar with. What’s that mean, respect to ODD-KIN?

KM: ODD-KIN focuses on supporting and featuring intergenerational contemporary artists and practices that bridge regional and national scopes. By providing opportunities to reimagine what art can be and do, ODD-KIN plays an important role in expanding the rich creative communities of East/Providence and beyond, nourishing space for critical conversation and community care. It serves as a site for convening and engagement, existing outside of a formal institutional model. As a project space, ODD-KIN is nimble and able to support artist-driven projects and ideas that may not fit within traditional museum or commercial gallery models. This model has allowed me to engage with artists I have been in conversation with for decades or just months, and I am excited about continually reimagining how ODD-KIN can evolve.

TW: OK, so no oligarchs here. More like Kate and Friends.

KM: ODD-KIN represents a culmination of efforts from the last 20 years working in the curatorial field. It has the potential to change, to meet a moment, it also can be a space for rest and mentorship. I love how O-K changes with every project that takes place, and is informed by every person who walks through the door. I am already hatching new programs that I hope will continue to push the idea of "oddkin" in an expansive way!

TW: You’re highly invested in access and equality, but Odd-Kin has pretty limited public hours.

KM: It’s basically a one-woman show, so at the moment Saturday's are the only day with open hours and I also open by appointment if someone cannot make it on a Saturday. If I win the lottery or ODD-KIN's model shifts to accommodate my being able to take off a hat and make more room to open the space, I will do so. At the moment Saturday's are the day I have off from work and my family doesn't mind :)

TW: Perhaps helpful here, there seems to be a rise in the number of grants, residencies, and opportunities available to parent-artists. Have you noticed this / experienced it? Or, how does being a parent impact your own approach?

KM: I have noticed and experienced it and also want more of them! I really appreciate the ways residencies have geared opportunities to families and caretakers—I do think there could be more for curators and writers. So many are long-term time commitments, it would be great to see curatorial residencies that follow a more family-friendly/caretaker model. It’s something I have been thinking a lot about. As a parent who runs a project space it has been really important that the space reflect my life, so openings have been major family affairs: food is available, chalk, bubbles, soccer balls take over the large parking lot. The idea is that intergenerational folks can come see an art show, but actually spend time and hang out. That has been an essential part of ODD-KIN from day one. We just had an opening the other week for Jungil Hong, who is also a parent, and we had over 300 people of all ages hanging out at the gallery for almost 5 hours, it was beautiful!

TW: When not curating, teaching, parenting, etc—what are you getting up to? Or is the plate full enough as is?

KM: Body practice! I have always struggled with "staying in the moment," and wearing many hats; being a parent means time is syrupy, swift, and strange, so intentional movement has always been an important grounding part of my life.

I have also taken up disposing of rat poison boxes found in public spaces thanks to my dear friend, Sheida Soleimani, an amazing artist and advocate for birds. Her incredible work at the Congress of the Birds in RI has shed light on some of the awful ways in which these pest prevention tactics really hurt birds and the larger animal ecosystem (not to mention the rats and mice they’re targeting). As someone who thinks deeply about interspecies relationships and oddkin, I see this as something that ties into some of the work and thinking I’m starting to put towards the project space.

Above: Polanco Courts made by Jordan Seaberry and Joiri Minaya for My Home Court

TW: You are called in many directions. This kinda freelance life can be highly rewarding, but unstable. How are you thinking about finances?   

KM: I wear many hats because I love it and I am a general yay-sayer, but also because I need to support myself and my family. All of my jobs contribute to and sustain both my projects and my family’s livelihood. I am acutely aware of financial disparities in the art world and make it a point to address this in all of my classes. I also prioritize equitable compensation for every artist I work within a range of contexts. I feel fortunate to be part of a rich community that values care, which is an invaluable resource in this wild world.

TW: Related to that philosophy is your work with Interlace. How did you get involved; what's been learned through doing this project?

KM: Thanks for asking about Interlace! For those who do not know, Interlace Grant Fund is a Warhol Foundation-funded regional regranting program for visual artists administered by Dirt Palace (shout out to Pippi, Xander, and Jori!). Interlace's Project Grant gives around 4–6k to 8–10 PVD-area artists annually. Artists apply and are then reviewed by an outside jury. Interlace also has a modest monthly Emergency Grant which is meant to respond to emergency needs such as medical expenses, utility shut-off, etc. Interlace also recently started a grant writing mentorship, which I am really excited about.

I got involved with Interlace at the very beginning as a co-administrator. It has been a remarkable project that has broadened opportunities to fund artists in the PVD area in a range of ways. I think it functions to do so many things: creating cohorts of creatives who may not know one another; offering greater visibility to artists who apply for the grant. The outside jury is a very considered group of folks with the idea that Interlace is getting PVD artists in front of curators, artists, and other art administrators nationally; as well as creating opportunities for really creative collaborative projects to take place and flourish in and around PVD. I highly recommend artists apply for a Project grant and I am always happy to support in any way! The project grant opens up this July and there are many info sessions in-person and online! Accessibility is a priority! 

TW: Speaking of opportunities and projects...the land area Odd-Kin's located is undergoing major reno. Do you have any insight on the city’s plans? 

KM: I don't really have the skinny. I have been in a few meetings with East Providence's Arts Council and it seems like they are enthusiastic about some of the shifts which are making way for more art access, which I see as a positive thing.

TW: You wouldn’t possibly have any free time to be reading, would you? If so, give us some of your must-reads.

KM: Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway; How to Install Art as a Feminist by Helen Molesworth (essay); Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler; and also just read the amazing novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

TW: Thanks for all this, Kate. Let’s roll out the red carpet for you. This camera, that camera—tell the people what you have going on in your life. 

KM: I am super excited for the next ODD-KIN show with the RI/NY artists Ryan Cardoso and DJ Chappel (ig)! I first met Ryan and DJ through my work at Interlace, a few years ago when Ryan was an awardee. Ryan is a photographer and DJ is a fashion designer and they often collaborate on each other's projects. This exhibition will be an opportunity for a more intentional collaboration, which will transform the space of ODD-KIN into an installation. Opening September 29th!

Candace Williams Keeps The Fire Burning

Photo: via Alice James Books

Candace Williams (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and continuous learner who nerds out about a lot of things. Among their accolades, Candace has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2017), was a finalist in the National Poetry Series competition (2018), and their most recent collection of works, I AM THE MOST DANGEROUS THING, has received praise from Book Riot, Vogue, and Morgan Parker, among others. In the summer of 2020, Candace moved to Providence with their partner—educator and visual artist Laimah Osman—to take up a teaching job. We chatted via email.

The Well (TW): Hi Candace. You’ve lived in Seattle, NYC, and elsewhere; how’s Rhode Island working out so far?

Candace Williams (CW): Rhode Island has so many opportunities to connect with nature. I love going on walks, hiking, and trying activities that are new to me like kayaking and paddle-boarding. We go to Goddard Park, Colt State Park, Lincoln Woods often. I’m excited for my summer. I’m learning to run and swim, so I hope to find new running trails and try open water swimming.

I’ve also enjoyed meeting artists who are working hard to create inclusive spaces. For example, I’m learning DJing and music production at The Nest’s Club: Club (ig) DJing and music production can be the opposite of inclusive, but I’ve been able to meet like-minded people, be a beginner, and try new things in a safer space.

TW: Quick organic plug: DJ Caloric (Club: Club’s founder) spins at Myrtle on June 28th! On the subject of being a beginner, how’d you get started with poetry?

CW: In seventh-grade English class, my teacher assigned awesome creative projects including a poetry collection with 10+ poems featuring a variety of forms and topics. I remember I saved all of the work until the night before it was due, but I put a lot of time and effort into writing and illustrating a poem where I personified weather elements to depict a sunrise. Sadly, that would be the last time I wrote a poem until I picked it up in my late-20s.

TW: Two parter: Why’d you put the pen down and, is there imagery—like the weather—that you find yourself returning to?

CW: In school, I wasn’t exposed to environments where I was expected to write creatively. When I left graduate school, I didn’t have the time, space, or money to write. For most of my time in New York, I had unstable housing. I didn’t even think of writing a poem until I had a safe studio apartment and enough money to access good food, stable housing, and the space to think. 

My poetry features a lot of abstract concepts borrowed from my old physics, econometrics, and mathematics textbooks. I love the process of taking a specific term from a field of study and applying it to contexts that aren't expected. For example, in studying DJing and music production, I realized the concept of volume in audio literally refers to the volume of air displacement created by sound waves. I definitely put that in my back pocket.

The Well’s note: We also love Candace’s work with erasure as a creative process. It’s omitted from this interview because it’s a well-covered topic elsewhere. We highly suggest “A Black Queer Poet Takes a Dagger to White Supremacy and Capitalism” by Mandana Chaffa for Electric Literature.

Black Sonnet, poem by Candace Williams, print collaboration with Laimah Osman,. Paper lithograph on Rives BFK paper , 8 1/2 x 10 1/2 inches, 2018

TW: Years ago, you talked at Eyebeam (NYC) about a range of related topics like surveillance capitalism, encryption, and privacy—could you speak to that a bit, in relation to creative work, being seen, etc?

CW: When I write or make any kind of art, I’m trying to see myself. There is a flow that happens when I write a poem or make something new. In the flow, I encounter thoughts that are new to me—maybe they were in my subconscious and it’s the first time I’ve been able to work with them on a conscious level.

Survival is important, and often, survival requires outrunning the search light or hiding in plain sight. If anything, producing art can be dangerous because my thoughts can be cataloged and analyzed outside of their original context. I’m constantly learning how to be myself in the face of danger. 

TW: With it in mind you’re learning to DJ, that answer calls back to the Black and queer origins of House. Could you talk a bit about your own musical history, tastes, and what you’re exploring.

CW: I grew up in a household that helped me appreciate all kinds of music. Between my mom, dad, and older brother and sister, you’d find anything from pop, soul, funk, and disco, to jazz, rap, hip hop, R&B, folk, and classical music playing in our house and cars. I took guitar and piano lessons for a few years as a young child and played clarinet and bassoon through high school. When I moved to New York, I got into dance music, opera, and many subgenres from around the world like reggaeton, bomba, and dancehall.

In terms of DJing and music production, I lean toward many house subgenres. 70% of my setlists are jackin’ house, deep house, and tech house. I also like to work in adjacent genres like minimal techno, acid techno, big room / club, and nu disco. I try to stay open to new influences, understand what people are dancing to right now, while also bringing my unique perspective to the floor.

Right now, on the electronic side, I’m listening to Green Velvet, Honey Dijon, Ronald Clark, Frankie Knuckles, Fred Again.., 070 Shake, Todd Terry, Carl Craig, Theo Parrish, Target Demographic, Ultra Nate, Mau P, Caribou / Daphni, Purple Disco Machine, Peggy Gou, and the Chemical Brothers. 

Candace at the opening for Spells for Black Wizards. Photo by Seze Devres for Ace Hotel New York.

TW: You just went out for Coachella, right? Quick scene report?

CW: Immaculate vibes. Incredible music. Sun for my melanin.

TW: Nitty-gritty time! As a poet, an aspiring DJ, a traveler...can we ask how you’re affording a life of creative exploration? 

CW: I've had a dual career in teaching and technology since my mid-20s. Now, I work for a healthtech company based in California. In my late 20s, I got into a MFA program, but decided to keep my full-time work and creative work separate because I saw a lot of friends struggling to make ends meet with their art and I worried that being tied to an intellectual institution would put my creative freedom at risk. At that time, I left my tech job and returned to K-12 teaching. Teaching is a lovely, generative experience (and I used my summers off wisely). In 2022, I realized I was burnt out after teaching during COVID and returned to tech.

I'm privileged to have full-time employment. It definitely costs money to be creative. Before COVID, I was making a decent amount of money doing poetry readings and talks at universities and non-profits. I did that alongside my full-time middle school teaching career. Now, I tend to spend more on writing and music.

TW: That feels very balanced; is the practicality coming from your family or just a path you found on your own?

CW: I grew up in a household where we struggled to stay in the middle class. My mom worked full and part-time jobs with 70+ -hour weeks to make sure that I had stable housing, food, and opportunities. My mom and dad encouraged me to try new things (and paid for all of those endeavors). When I wanted to go to a private high school, my mom put in even more work (thankfully, I had partial scholarships to help). In my first year of private high school, I got invited to study in the Czech Republic the following summer. The trip cost $2,000. She didn't tell me that she had overdrawn her bank account but sent me on the trip anyway. I learned that she won a few hundred dollars from a lottery ticket and that allowed her to pay for the trip.

My mom taught me about hard work. The opportunities I've had have required a lot of luck, but hard work has helped me make space for luck when it arrives. When I got to college, I worked four part-time jobs. When I learned that we didn't have to pay for each class or credit, I made sure I took 1-2 extra classes on top of the typical course load (I finished five years of school in four). I took advantage of every opportunity I could. The first week of classes, I walked into the debate union and said "I heard there's free travel if I do debate". My college paid for all of my international travel and even gave me stipends so I could work summer internships at the non-profit in India, for my local congressman, and in a day reporting center tied to a juvenile detention facility.

These early experiences shaped how I approach life now. I'm financially stable right now, but I know that can change at any time; my financial stability has fluctuated my entire adult life.

I AM THE MOST DANGEROUS THING, 2023. Order a copy here.

TW: Awesome mom! The visit to the Czech Republic, was that your first international trip? What kind of impact did it have on you?

CW: My mom worked for an airline for many years. She took me to Mexico for a week when I was very young for a vacation. The trip to the Czech Republic was the first time I traveled outside of North America, or without my parents. I was there for a month with a group of high school students studying economics and international relations at Palacký University in Olomouc. Out of the 30-40 students there, only a handful of us were from the United States. My biggest memories are walking everywhere (I grew up in suburban car culture), being the only Black person until I went to Prague for the final week, and going to clubs for the very first time. The Czech Republic has an incredible nightlife scene, and I can’t believe I got to dance in discotheques when I was a teenager.

TW: The legendary status of Czech discotheques is very real! How about other trips since then; maybe the farthest you’ve trekked?

CW: During a summer in college, I was invited by a university in Xian, China to run a debate program. I went to China for two weeks, flew home to Seattle for three days, and got back on a plane so I could fly to Delhi, India for a month of work at a non-profit. China and India taught me that the world is a diverse, complex, and interesting place, and that I can be pretty tough and self-sufficient when I need to be.

TW: You mention being invited. Can you expand a bit on what that means, exactly?

CW: I chose Claremont McKenna College (CMC) for my undergraduate studies because the school invests a lot of money in its students. They had grants that I could apply to each summer. The first grant I used funded my work at a juvenile detention facility. The second grant enabled me to intern for my local congressman in his re-election office, and my last grant gave me the money to find an internship abroad.

When I decided to apply for the third grant, my school connected me with an alum who was very well-connected. He floated a few ideas by me, and we decided that since I had an interest in human rights work, that I should work at the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in Delhi. That summer, my debate coach invited me to join a trip to China. A few universities in Xi’an wanted to expand their debate programs into the format we used at school. CMC paid for the trip.

TW: Thank you. For folks who haven’t traveled with the assistance of grants, mentors, school clubs, etc—the process can feel really mysterious. From all your travels, you got any wild stories?

CW: Not that I can write here.

TW: Hah! Fair enough. How about, not-wild stories? Up at the top you mentioned learning to swim and getting on trails more.

CW: After a few years of chronic pain and inactivity, I've gotten to a place where I'm training for a 5K and (an ambitious) SwimRun race (Google 'SwimRun' - one word...I had no idea this event even existed). I run, swim, and strength train 5-6 days per week. This past January, I also decided to transition to a whole food plant-based way of eating. Early on, I realized that one of the coolest and biggest challenges of changing how I eat is exploring how to create flavor without relying on animal products, oil, and salt. I've learned a lot and am enjoying the process.

TW: Very cool. How about some Staff Picks?  

CW: I've returned to this Rich Roll podcast episode with Ellen Langer multiple times. I like her latest book, too. [Also] Song of my Softening by Omotara James and The Butterfly's Burden by Mahmoud Darwish (translated by Fady Joudah).

TW: Given your range of practices this might be an unanswerable final Q but, is there a particular project you feel most proud of? 

CW: The work I'm most proud of isn't the end product—the book, song, lesson plan, DJ set, or 5k. It's the work behind that work—the process of learning new things and building community around ideas I really care about.

On a more personal level, I'm proud of myself for being myself.

Candace and Laimah are part of Awesome Foundation Rhode Island, a monthly micro-grant Myrtle also supports. Learn more at awesomeisland.org.

For more on the origins of House, check out Do You Remember House? and our interview with author Micah Salkind.