Today we’d like to introduce you to Joseph Ayers.
Hi Joseph, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I became an artist and a teacher, but it was an unlikely path getting here. I grew up in rural Florida, and honestly, I think in the beginning when I was a young child, uneducated, impoverished and somewhat abused, I yearned for a language to somehow express my experiences and feelings regarding what that was like. It might sound a little cliche to say, but I dreamt of drawing, painting and playing music since I can remember. But those dreams got buried in an avalanche of memories, and it took me half a lifetime to dig them back out.
But to answer the question directly, it was relentless sheer will that has enabled me to make it this far. That and the inspiring support from friends and teachers and family who have given me courage and encouragement to keep pushing to make dreams a reality. I was very uncertain about my purpose in life, and grew up misguided at best. But after serving in the US Air Force for 5 years I finally returned to my dream of being an artist. A friend in academia saw some small paintings I had done in my anpartment and suggested that I should study art in college. I grew up not understanding what college was, but when I finally realized that I could study art academically; for the first time I really felt inspired and focused. I enrolled at University of New Orleans and declared an art major, and I was so lucky to have faculty who recognized my potential. I worked in the department for the slide librarian, and was also a studio assistant for a painting professor, and my photography professor. I won several scholarships and awards as an undergraduate, and was able to study photography and music abroad in Prague. Those experiences were so rich and helpful. Several of my teachers encouraged me to pursue a Masters degree in NYC, and this was the decision that really changed the course of my life forever. I got to study with artists that I had read about in contemporary art history books, and being in the city gave me access to a vast treasure of artists and art works in museums and galleries. It was during my time studying at Hunter College City University of New York that I also began a teaching career, starting as a teaching assistant for some of my mentors there, and later I was hired as an Adjunct Professor to teach drawing and digital media courses. These experiences in NYC gave me a lot more exposure as an artist than I would have had anywhere else. I was lucky to get noticed by a gallery while still in graduate school, and began exhibiting my work right away. And at the same time I was able to start a teaching career that has been my foundation for 18 years now. It was really a dream come true- beyond my wildest imagination.
And it all led me to my current work as an artist, teacher and curator. I recently curated a group exhibition that is on Artsy, titled Fathæm, that explores ways that we measure distance and understanding through embodied experience. I am currently Associate Professor teaching interdisciplinary courses at Parsons The Newschool in NYC, and I continue to make and exhibit my works in galleries and art centers. I’ve been working in the arts in NYC for over 20 years now. And oddly enough, after all that I have been through to get here, both the personal art works that I create, as well as the courses I design, all reflect on those experiences I had growing up in rural Florida as a child. Time, memories, perception, and the social landscape are recurring themes in my work.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve heard several artists express this sentiment that ‘beauty comes from struggle’. And to quote one of my favorite artists, my daughter, “you have to trust the process.” There is a lot of trial and error that brings you to resolution. I really think one’s entire life is like a work of art. Every day you wake up and approach the canvas. You imagine what it can be, you mix the paint, and begin to make decisions anew. You have to just keep making, for better or worse, decisions about what comes next. I honestly feel like the biggest struggles I’ve faced are overcoming personal obstacles and dilemmas, but those are also the inspirations that fuel the work. Life as an artist is never a smooth ride; it takes time for clarity to emerge. But if you can carve out a space to stay focused and keep working, somehow it keeps adding up.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I guess my work is divided into two main areas, teaching and personal art. As a teacher I try to help students learn new creative tools to express themselves, and I encourage them to use their personal experiences and sensibilities to interpret and reflect on the world around them. I want them to understand that their unique language and perspective is part of a much bigger dialogue, and it’s important for us to all contribute to this so that we can grow, learn and evolve together. I teach courses that focus on time based media, as well as traditional drawing and image compositing. My students come from all over the world, and from a wide range of social and economic backgrounds. I feel so lucky to get to learn and grow with them. I’ve been teaching for 18 years, now, and it’s by far one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my life.
Regarding my personal art, to be honest I have a hard time defining it. As I mentioned, my work is somehow used to reflect or express those memories I experienced growing up, which have a tendency to be distorted and confusing; very vivid, but often difficult to clearly comprehend. And because of my diverse background my approaches to art making are invariably eclectic. It’s not something I think about consciously, but struggling to interpret those past memories is something that consistently comes through no matter what medium or subject I engage. For example, there is a recent series of multimedia works I have made that at a glance may seem disconnected, but they all reflect on past memories, and how seeing my own face, or reflection, is impossible. The series is called The Face I Can’t See. For example, one iteration is a sculptural form, and like most of my work, it is a bit of a process that involves unplanned chance, and intuitive risk. It started as a terracotta clay head self portrait, and at a point I decided to make a mold to pour a clear resin transparent 2 sided head. On the one side of the head there is a wide-eyed Kafkaesque self portrait, and on the opposite side, the loose suggestion of this downtrodden daft fellow with closed eyes. This is in a way a reflection of the split between two sides of myself: the quiet, effeminate, uneducated and abused boy growing up in a misogynistic rural Gulf Coast culture, and the educated, liberated perspective that I grew into after serving in the armed forces, and then studying art in New Orleans and New York. Inside the head is this memory that the boy recalls, but which he didn’t have a language to express or understand. The boy heard the men in the rural area from which he was raised, always discussing sports hunting and trophy fishing with the same language that they used to denigrate and objectify women and people of color. Inside the clear head I placed another sculpture that is half woman, half bird. A common sight along the gulf coast was the black cormorant: a bird that the men referred to as the “N-word bird”. But as a child I was fascinated with them, watching the birds swim in the crystal clear shallows around the shrimp docks as they searched for fish underwater, surfacing and striding along with the water beading down their sleek necks. But If I was idle or distracted from whatever tasks the men gave me, and they caught me watching the birds, they would belt out derogatory slurs of race and sexism aimed at both me and the birds. It’s really sad to recall, but to be quite honest, that kind of language and general sentiment was very commonplace in those rural, poor and uneducated white communities. I was thinking about this when I started making the lady/bird sculpture. The clay moved around in my hands very intuitively, and early on it just happened to have this double feature of the female figure on one side, and the black cormorant bird on the other. Somehow these two sides of the lady/bird seemed related to the self portrait head sculpture, and I had the idea to place the water bird inside the head when I did the resin pour. So I made a cast of the water bird sculpture, and made a two-part pour for this piece: The Face I Can’t See (memory of a double crested black cormorant)
What’s interesting to me is that both parts of the sculpture are self portraits, and yet both represent objects that aren’t easy to see or understand. The transparency of the double head, and the distortion of the two-sided water bird inside, represent me trying to make sense of, or see, my own facade, which I have grown to realize is not really possible. I don’t intentionally try to create works about this condition, but over time I can see that it’s a pattern that comes through in my works regardless of subject or medium.
I also write poetry, paint and draw, and make video installations. I recently did an artist residency at Savage Wonder Art Center in Beacon, NY, and created a site specific video and sound installation inside this 1929 bank vault. The piece, Safe and Sound, remarks on the history of the site, and the way narratives are created to control those histories; It also had an interactive community painting component that encouraged visitors to help in rewriting the narrative by painting over the NYC Seal, which proxies as another kind of safe. The piece is a little surreal and fragmented, so to help explain it I wrote a reflective poem as part of the installation:
Safe and sound
Sealed away
The stories that are unheard of
Unheard, like the light of day
Unsung, like bards of gay
Untold, like a truth that gets shoved away
And buried deep, unsure
The buried weep, unheard
And this seal of fate
Erases time
It turns the narrative into nursery rhymes
They are written to keep you safe
But the seal itself is a lie
A deceitful twist of fate
How do you think about happiness?
Having time to enjoy life makes me happy. Being immersed in nature, teaching, making art…these all make me very happy. But nothing compares to seeing my daughter cultivate her creative talents and explore life, and sharing all of life’s joys and struggles with my life partner who is also a brilliant artist. My family brings me so much joy! Again, to go back to the sentiment I mentioned earlier: beauty comes from struggle, and family and friends are who we share our struggles with. It’s always a work in progress…
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Josephayers.com
- Instagram: @ayers_joseph
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-ayers-8376a7190
- Other: https://www.artsy.net/partner/beekman-arts-club/artists#joseph-ayers
