heal as you conceal | the dreamcatcher series
suzanne broughel. artist. sculptor. photographer

+ all images copyright 2004- , Suzanne Broughel

Nat Creole: Tell us a little about your personal development as an artist. When did the idea of becoming an artist become a reality for you?

Suzanne Broughel: Like many artists, I've been making objects and images since I was a child. I'm fortunate that I'm from a family that supported and encouraged this creativity.  American society, though, doesn't really support the arts as a profession, so you really have to be committed to it.  I took a circuitous route to it—left school for awhile—but that interval turned out to be a good thing.  The real life experience, which included working at a foster care agency with social workers, informs my artwork today.  Eventually, I stopped fighting myself and accepted that I'm always going to be an artist and I did the MFA program at Hunter College.  Prior to that, I remember being tremendously inspired when I saw Gabriel Orozco's work in the 1997 Whitney Biennial.  That moment helped solidify for me that this is what I want to do.

NC: You are also well versed in the literary arts.  How has your literary background impacted your work in the area of visual language?

SB: I'm from a family of writers, and writing has always been important to me.  In my early body of sculptural and photographic work, made during my undergraduate art studies, I used text on clay, plaster and other material—text that was either illegible or backwards so that it could only be read in a reflection.  Looking at this work now, I realize I was feeling muffled in speaking my voice.  As I got braver in talking about racial issues, the text in my work gradually became legible. 

Interestingly, my work keeps getting chosen for shows inspired by literature. In 2006, I was in an

exhibition at P.S.1/MOMA titled Bearable Lightness...Likeness, where curator Franklin Sirmans drew inspiration from the book "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."   And this year I was in Things Fall Apart at Rush Arts Gallery—curator Derrick Adams' take on that classic Nigerian novel.  

But eventually, I developed a need for a non-verbal, visual vocabulary in my artwork.  Words are so strong—and words about racial identity?!—Many viewers shut down…put up a wall.  So I wanted to become more subtle, go under people's radar.  I still use text occasionally, and am drawn to artists, such as Glenn Ligon, who do use text successfully.  I also get my writing fix in making up titles, the titles of my works are very important, and give clues to the viewer.

NC: Growing up in Yonkers, New York, you were raised in a racially polarized environment yet much of your work deals with issues of white skin privilege and white guilt from a very personal perspective. Why do you think you internalized your environment differently from others in your community?

SB: That's such an important question.  Part of it will always remain a mystery—why do some people remain complacent and why do some react?  Part of it has to do with sensitivity, I guess.  In my own case, I can point to certain experiences which particularly impacted me.  I was literally caught in the middle of the segregation issue in Yonkers. If I had lived on the opposite side of the street I would've been in the "white" school district, but as it was I was just within the "black" school district—with a father who could've been the real-life model for the television character Archie Bunker.  In the fourth grade, he pulled me out of the elementary school I loved and sent me to a horrible, all white Catholic school.  I was so miserable there that after a couple of months he sent me back to my old school.  But when it was time to register for junior high, he had me lie about my address so I could attend the "white"

junior high school.  I am drawn to the memory of having to lie.  Every time I had to fill out a school form and put down that false address, I felt compromised and complicit.  White skin privilege was no longer a vague force "out there"—I was a participant.  And it made me see how white skin privilege is dependent on lies, and a threat to the humanity of the white participant.

I might not have understood it in these terms at the time, since I was a child—but I did take it all in.  And this change to the "white" school district separated me from all of the black students I had gone through elementary school with, so that in junior high, we were in the same city but totally different worlds (most of them I never saw again until high school and by then we were virtually strangers).

I do feel lucky that I attended that predominantly black elementary school and got to know those kids as individuals. Personal experience triumphed over racist stereotypes I might hear in the white community.   

My "Dreamcatcher Series" is an ongoing series that takes white society's fetishization and appropriation of black culture and turns it in on itself.  My first "dreamcatchers" were modeled after butterfly nets and I needed to cover the handles.  That's when I first looked at band aids as a material because they so reference skin color.  That opened me up to a whole body of work using band aids.

Another reason for using these household items as art materials is to personalize the meaning.  White folks often talk about race and racism in very removed, generic terms but I think the autobiographical voice is the strongest.  Band aids, soap, t-shirts, bed sheets—these are items that we put on our bodies, wear and sleep on.  So even though they are commodities, they enter a realm of intimacy. 

NC: While some remain optimistic about the future of race relations across the globe, others believe tribal differences will forever adversely dictate the nature of human relationships. What is your take on this subject?  

SB: Well, it kind of depends on which day you are asking me.  I strive to be an optimist but you only have to pick up the newspaper to feel otherwise.  In some ways, I feel we are going backwards.  My particular focus is on white skin privilege - especially in the U.S.  I am interested in the idea of "multicultural normalization," as put forth by the writer Kobena Mercer.  When Mercer talks about "multicultural normalization," he refers to the way in which global capitalism has co-opted diversity while severing it from the socio-political demands of its origins in the Civil Rights movement.  He uses Benetton ads as an example.  This is very dangerous.  It makes inequality more stealth. 

I do see some cause for optimism in the recent activism of students and others in the cause of the Jena 6 in Louisiana. 

NC: What projects are you currently working on or have lined up for the future?

SB: My next exhibition will be the group show "Material Culture" at Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx, running December 5, 2007 through February 8, 2008.

I am also working on a new piece referencing David Horowitz, the white, former left-wing radical who was a confidant of Black Panther Huey Newton—and who is now a right-wing extremist (with seemingly racist leanings).  I'm using David Horowitz as a lens to look at myself—and my worst fears–-and the ability of white people to retreat back into the sanctuary and power of their whiteness at will.  The piece is one of my "fake tan" tie-dye pieces, made from self-tanning skin lotions and skin bronzers on white fabric.  I like using fake tan as a metaphor for how being "down for the cause" can be so utterly temporary. The dark hues on the fabric can be beautiful but superficial and purely decorative.  And they can be washed out in an instant…The white fabric returning easily to its original whiteness.

Suzanne’s work has been shown in New York at Onishi Gallery, JCAL, Galeria Galou, Denise Bibro Fine Arts and Chashama Artspace, among others.  Her international exhibitions have included Alliance with &nbsp Collective in Paris, the Dieppe Biennale in Dieppe, France, and America vs. America—a traveling exhibition that toured alternative artspaces in Norway, Sweden, and Iceland.  She was a 2006 Creative Capital fellow at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, New Jersey where her work was included in the Emerge 8 exhibition.

Next on tap for Suzanne is Material Culture, an exhibition at the Longwood Arts Project in the Bronx. For more info on the exhibition, go to http://www.tartnyc.org/, http://www.geocities.com/saucenine/, and http://www.bronxarts.org/lag.asp