Interview with Christine Sloan Stoddard
Abby:
Hi everybody. My name is Abby E. Murray, I’m the editor of Collateral Journal. And I am here today with Christine Sloan Stoddard, featured visual artist for our fall 2020 issue. And we will have a bio on the page with all your many accomplishments, but I want to get started right away in just kind of getting to know you. Can you tell us just a little bit about yourself? Where did you grow up? With who? How’d you grow up?
Christine:
Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me. I’m from Arlington, Virginia originally. This is a military town that’s right outside of Washington, DC. It’s home to the Pentagon, Arlington National Cemetery, and a few other things you might’ve thought were in DC proper but are not. My mother is a Salvadoran immigrant, and my father is a born and bred New Yorker who has lived many different places.
I have two siblings. We’re all very close in age. I went to Yorktown High School, which is probably best known for being the same school that Katie Couric and John Glenn went to. Not the same school as Sandra Bullock. Many people ask, “Oh, did you go to the same high school as Sandra Bullock?” because she’s also from Arlington. No, she went to my rival high school, Washington Lee, which might be renamed actually.
Abby:
Great.
Christine:
Like many other schools in Virginia right now. Their names are being reconsidered, and in some cases formally changed.
Yeah, my mother is a housewife, was my entire childhood, and my father is a journalist. My parents met in El Salvador during the civil war. And that is something that I have started to learn more about recently, just doing more research about El Salvador, the war. I didn’t have much connection to the country or that point in history, because like many immigrants who leave during a war, my mom didn’t technically have refugee status, I should say, but like many immigrants who are fleeing war, poverty, other difficult situations, my mother just wanted to separate herself as much as possible from the trauma and difficult memories. So that’s my very simple origin story, summary.
Abby:
Wow, that’s a quick summary. You’ve written before that you are starting to think more critically about the impact of war in El Salvador on your own life, and also on your art. And I kind of, the question that just comes to mind is, where do you even begin? And where have you ended up?
Christine:
Yeah, of course. I think like many children of immigrants, I experienced a certain amount of shame as a child. I think especially if your parent or parents are from a developing country, a third world country, there are all sorts of stigmas about that place, that othered place being dirty, or unattractive, or even unworthy in some way. Arlington County itself is quite diverse, and it’s gotten much more diverse since I was a child. But my part of Arlington, North Arlington, was very white, American-born, protestant, very few immigrants. So in my immediate neighborhood and at my elementary school, my mother really was one of the very few immigrants. Most of the other immigrants were nannies, so it was very common for people to confuse my mother for my nanny. I don’t think they necessarily realized that that was an offensive or just rude assumption to make. But it was very common. And my father had, has, an intense career, so he was a good father, a good provider, but he just wasn’t really involved in our school life very much. My siblings and I. So people would see us with our mother, but they wouldn’t see us with our father. And again, there was just this idea that, oh, that’s their nanny.
And of course, many people upon learning that she was from El Salvador had never heard of that country, or they assumed that she was Mexican. I remember my mom telling this story, it happened when I was little. And I don’t think I was actually there when it happened, she just told me later on, maybe when I was in middle... yeah, I think middle or early high school. That she had once told a person that she was from Central America, because she learned pretty quickly, “Oh, if I say El Salvador, they’re not going to know where that is.” And that person looked very closely at her and said, “Really? Like Kansas?” Because the guy thought that she meant the central part of the United States, like the Midwest. That’s what he thought.
Abby:
Oh boy.
Christine:
And then he said, to make it even worse, he said, “Yeah, you don’t sound or look like you’re from Kansas.” Terrible, terrible. So that was just, again, just a lot of shame and confusion in early childhood about having this immigrant parent, having no close connection to El Salvador whatsoever. My family never went there. I did not go until I was in grad school. That was how much of a separation my mother and my father had put into place. My mother didn’t want to go back to visit, and my father, because he had only been there during the war, also supported her choice and said, “You know what, we don't have to go visit. We can take trips to other places.”
Abby:
Did you talk about it at home?
Christine:
There was a lot of pushing away from the subject. So when my sisters and I were little, we would ask all kinds of questions, and over the years it became clear that my mother especially was not comfortable talking about many things, even with her children, and even once we got to high school. She just didn’t want to share a lot of what she had seen, and experienced. It wasn’t until I was in college that she started to open up a little bit more, but yeah. When I was a kid, she limited the conversations more to food that she missed. And she would try cooking a lot of those things when it was possible to, because she couldn’t always find the same ingredients. Fruits especially, and vegetables. Produce in general, that was where the biggest discrepancy was. Because she could find a lot of the same seasonings at the Mexican supermarkets nearby, but some of the fruits especially were just really specific to where she was from, which I found later on when I went to visit. Like oh, here are all these mythical fruits I heard about growing up.
So she would try to pass on part of the culture through food, because that was a good memory, and she was comfortable doing that, and she loves cooking. Has always loved cooking. And as a housewife, she had... that’s part of her job, right? She knew the traditional homemaker tradition of cooking and passing on love and culture through food. She also was very happy to share memories related to animals and plants. And I think one of the reasons... there are a few reasons for that. First of all, we lived in Virginia, and even the suburbs of DC are pretty woodsy and green. It does start to get more cookie cutter, McMansion-y as you get an hour away from the city, but close to DC, the houses are smaller, there are lots of trees, you have the Potomac River, the Anacostia River. You have a lot of the historic estates that American children learn about in elementary school, like George Washington’s Mount Vernon for instance. So I grew up playing in the woods. Even in a suburb, I had the woods. I had access to the woods.
And because [my mom] was a new immigrant, she came just a little bit before I was born, just a couple years before I was born. My parents met in El Salvador. My mom came to Miami where my dad was living at the time, and they got married, and a year after that, year and a half after that, I came into the world. And they were already living in the DC area by that time. So she hadn’t been in the US that long when I was born, when I was little, and she was learning the names of all these different plants and animals, and at the same time, really the same time that my siblings and I were like, “Oh yeah, this is an oak tree, and this is a pine cone, and that’s a cardinal, that’s a magnolia, that’s a bluejay,” and she was fascinated, because she would look for the similarities and differences between the animals and plants that she knew from El Salvador.
And she just naturally, like many people, loves and appreciates animals and plants, and a good view. So that was a happy way to relate memories from her home country. Yes, some of the nature was destroyed during the civil war, but... and through some of the agriculture related to coffee plantations too, but for the most part that was a more consistent thing, more consistently happy thing throughout her time in El Salvador.
Abby:
It’s interesting that you said that she returned to cooking, and the first thing I thought was, cooking is an art form. We return to the memory... I don’t think anyone would disagree or push back that the experience of war is traumatic, and we’re not naturally drawn to trauma. We’re naturally drawn to survival, and how we survive that trauma. So turning to cooking and turning to art is really not... I mean, I guess that’s not surprising, and that’s something that I’m seeing too as well, in your work, is you’ve said before that we need to have hope through a crisis. We need to have that, and so where do you see hope in work that confronts crisis? Like war, but also the pandemic as well.
Christine:
That’s a tough question.
Abby:
Yeah, sorry to drop that on you.
Christine:
No, that’s all right. I’m just... I’m always hopeful. I think as someone who was raised by two people who experienced war, and survived it, and unfortunately knew many people who did not survive it, or survived it with much more damage than they did in a lot of material ways, I think I can’t help but be hopeful. A lot of children of immigrants talk about the expectation that you will do better than the previous generation in terms of material wealth, in terms of education, in terms of having a strong family unit that’s intact and not separated by war or other political factors or outside factors. So I always had the hope, as someone whose mom didn’t finish her schooling. And even my dad, as an American, he still had a lot of working class struggles, and did go to college, but has put himself through school, took several years to do it. I just always had the hope that I was going to go to school, I was going to achieve a stable middle class life, and also have a stable family.
I’m married now, and I do hope to have children. And we, my husband and I, have created a pretty stable... even during the pandemic, we’ve been very lucky. We have a pretty stable life. And all of our basic needs are met. So that hope is just something that I was forced to have as a child. I remember. And it wasn’t always a good thing. I remember as a child complaining, or being negative, and immediately my parents would say, “You don't know how good you have it, you have food, you get to go to school.” My mother comes from a place where many girls, I would have to look up the rate again. But many girls do not complete their schooling, because socially you become a woman when you’re 15 years old. There’s a lot of teen marriage, a lot of teen pregnancy. And education is not a guarantee there.
There are not the requirements that you, like in most US states, you have to stay in school until you’re 16, and in some states it’s 18, unless you graduate. But they make it so that it’s not necessarily easy and it’s definitely not equal from neighborhood to neighborhood. But you have to go to school. And yeah, I was just raised with the idea that I was going to do the best that I could with all the privileges that I was given in life.
And I think that’s... education especially was always valued in my house, but also self-expression. And in many ways, my mother in particular would be seen as a conservative, traditional person, but if you compare her and her lifestyle and her views to where she came from—huge, huge change. Huge gap between where she used to be and where she is now, which is something I think she and a lot of people who come from similar backgrounds should be commended for. Because it’s one thing to be raised with certain beliefs, and just be raised in a progressive home, and have a progressive education, and move forward from there. But if you’re raised in a very closed, conservative society, and are able to move outside of that, and progress your views that... that’s a big accomplishment.
But anyways, self expression was always very important in our home, because again, my mom comes from a place where girls especially are not entitled to a lot of self expression. It’s a Catholic country, in the sense that... it’s not just that people are Catholic. No, the government is a Catholic government. It’s similar how to, in the middle east, there are Muslim governments, right? So you have this very traditional church telling women what they can and cannot do.
This 14 year old girl, this made international headlines a few years ago. Maybe two years ago? I’d have to look up all the specifics. But there was a 14 year old girl who had been raped by her stepfather repeatedly, and there was documentation of this. There was evidence, it could be proved. And she became pregnant by him and was not allowed to have an abortion. You can be tried for murder as a woman for having an abortion, even as a child raped by your relative. Extreme cases. So again, I know I’m rambling. But just with that kind of background that my mom had, and that my father witnessed, that kind of environment that he witnessed, just education, self expression, and hope were just such a big part of my childhood.
And I think now, during the pandemic, we have to be hopeful. I don’t care if it sounds corny. I don’t think it’s corny. I think it’s a way to survive. That if you don’t believe there’s going to be a tomorrow, you will stop trying. And it is easy to give in in a lot of ways. I don’t think hope needs to mean total... it shouldn't mean total ignorance. You need to be informed and hopeful. You need to... I think in order to really be hopeful, you need to... you have to be informed, so that you can make a realistic effort toward survival. And not just surviving, but actually thriving too, when that’s possible. Yeah, so hope. I’m big on it.
Abby:
Hope, I’m big on it. I think as you’re talking, I’m thinking perhaps the question needs to be reversed then. I’m asking, where do you see hope in art that confronts violence, when really it’s where do you see art in hope that confronts violence, that hope is an act of art, and art is an act of hope. And yeah, I’m starting to see that as you’re telling these stories. What about your art in particular? We’re kind of talking in a more general sense about hope, hope of nations, hope of individual families. But what about your artwork in particular, how has it developed with not just the pandemic, which I think has shaped, has really shaped artists in a way they couldn’t have predicted, but also with exploring your childhood, your mother’s life, how do we see that reflected in your work?
Christine:
I think I have started to honor a lot of things about a country and a culture that I did not have a strong connection to. And there’s been... I’ve had a lot of hope in learning more about my mother’s past, more about the history of El Salvador and the civil war in particular, hope in different immigrant stories that I’ve come to hear from others, mainly Salvadoran, but also some Mexican and Guatemalan, Honduran, where there is definitely some overlap.
And also hope in my development as a woman. I think one of the... I think I’ve always been a late bloomer. And maybe... sometimes I’ve said that and people are like, “No, there's no way. You’ve achieved a lot for a young person.” But I don’t think emotionally I really developed as... I shouldn’t say as quickly, because it’s not a race, but I don’t think I developed emotionally... I was on the same track as a lot of my peers. That there were some things about me even in college that were still a little bit childish. And confronting my mom’s past, going... I actually went to El Salvador on a research grant that I won in grad school, because I realized that my mom was really never going to go back. I think that as a child, I had this hope, and even disbelief. I thought, “No, she has to go back at some point. Isn’t she going... doesn’t she wonder about so many things?”
But yeah, by the time I was almost 30, I was in my late 20s, I just accepted she was never going to go back. And us going together was just not a possibility, that was impossible. So if I just stopped treating this place like a forbidden place, and all of these stories like forbidden stories, and defy my mother, which was not easy, and just go through this artist’s residency, because I knew I had to be safe. There was still a lot of violence, and especially a lot of violence toward women and nonbinary people. You hear... there’s a lot of femicide from domestic partnerships, but also the killing of trans people, killing of foreigners, and I would be a foreigner. I would be definitely considered a foreigner there, because the culture is so homogenous that even if you speak Spanish and have a Salvadoran parent, you are not Salvadoran unless you’re Salvadoran.
Yeah, I just had hope that I was going to find out more about myself in going to this place. And it took a lot of resolve. My mother was very unhappy. When I found out that I won the grant, I was conflicted, because I knew that she would feel that I had betrayed her in a sense. In fact, her first question when I told her that I was going was, “Oh, so you're just going to go digging through my past, aren’t you?” Like—oh.
Abby:
Ow.
Christine:
I mean this is... and it turned out that there were many family secrets that brought a lot of insight into my life. And so I now, in hindsight, understand some of her concern. But I did feel that I owed it to myself to find out more about who I was. And also just to do, to be a bad girl. Because so many women are raised to be good, and soft, and to say yes and to—
Abby:
That’s a challenge.
Christine:
Right. And you know what, okay, fine. You don’t want me to go? I’m going to go the safest way possible with full funding, money is not an object, I’m going to be fine. And if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. I’m sorry. And even just rebelling in that way was very powerful for me. And I had been a good girl for a lot of my life. I still am a good girl in many ways. But yeah, it was important for me to do that for myself. In isolation of everything else, just doing that, just that kind of rebellion, was very important for me.
Abby:
And did it have a really deep impact on your work?
Christine:
Yes, back to my work. Okay. Yes. Yeah, so one of the projects that I did in, as a result of my trip, was Heaven is a Photograph. It’s a book that just came out, and it’s a collection of poetry and photographs. And it’s all about... it’s para-fictional, but definitely my protagonist and I are related. And in it, my protagonist is hesitant to approach photography as an art form, because she feels overshadowed by her father’s war photographer background. And she also was raised with this idea that photography is a masculine pursuit. Which in this day and age seems so... almost foreign, because now everyone takes photographs. But even a couple decades ago, it was still seen as more of a masculine art form than a feminine art form.
So the protagonist takes up photography in secret, and this is her little taboo practice. And she does eventually make her art form public. But again, it relates a lot to my personal rebellion of just going to this place, and doing what I wasn’t supposed to do.
In the ceramic work that I submitted to Collateral, I think there’s the... there is some rebellion in the sense that I’m... I did some things with clay that I was told I was not supposed to do. Like one of the things I did was use old camera parts and old electronics to make imprints in the clay, and that’s... first of all, you’re not supposed to use stencils or cookie cutters or anything like that, because that’s considered cheating. Or it’s, in a fine art context, that would be seen more as craft. Why don’t you just make a pot? Why don’t you just look at a catalog and throw something on a wheel, and make a pot that you’re going to sell at a craft fair? But yeah, I just rebelled in the sense that I was going to do things I wasn’t supposed to do within a fine art context. And I also didn’t care about making ugly things.
And I didn’t care about glazing, which is another thing. In fine art ceramics, you almost always glaze things. That’s an overlap you see in pottery and ceramic sculpture. Almost everything’s glazed, or at least painted. There’s some kind of color that’s added to the earth. But I was interested in leaving the work, just leaving the clay just bare, just muddy. Because I was thinking about an archeological dig. I’ve displayed these works, and I have so many of them, dozens. I’ve displayed these works in a few different ways, like installations where things are more in a pile, and sort of like an archeological dig.
And just thinking about how, yeah, when I went to El Salvador I had to do all this excavating of personal, family history, state history, government history, indigenous history, in the Mayan inspired ceramic for instance there. I was clearly looking at some of the folklore and indigenous history in the country. That’s another form, that’s another form of rebellion, and also hope comes into it, that almost everyone in El Salvador is mestizo, mixed European and indigenous, because the Spanish came and conquered and raped, and generations later we have a race that’s really a mixed race of people. But there’s still a lot of denial of indigenous roots, indigenous culture.
My mom is light skinned. She’s yellow, she’s not red brown. She has olive skin. And she will be the first to tell you that she is white Hispanic, which is a term that some people use. But she, like many people, also did one of those DNA tests, and of course the majority of her heritage is indigenous, and she was not happy about that. But that’s a big idea in that country. Almost this national lie. There was this indigenous genocide in, I can’t remember, I guess in the 30s, early 40s. There was this big state ordered indigenous genocide. In recent history. There are grandparents and great grandparents who remember this time.
And there was this idea that all of the Indians were killed then. Well, what? And there were no more Indians after that. I remember going to the Museum of the Word and Image in San Salvador, and there being this whole exhibition about how the government lied to the people about this genocide, they tried to cover it up, and when it was revealed they said, Oh, yeah. Well the good thing is we don’t have any more Indians in this country, so this is great. You’re all Spanish. Look at you, Spanish people. You white people, you.
So I have a lot of hope in indigenous narratives, learning more about that. That’s something I want to be more open about, and I’m hopeful that other people will be more accepting of those roots, and histories. And just acknowledge that a lot of Salvadoran culture, a lot of Latin American culture in general, has indigenous origins. It’s not all Spanish, Catholic this and that. So another long answer, but...
Abby:
No, that’s good. I like long answers.
The idea of really confronting the lies of sanctioned history is something that, it’s very present at the forefront of not just artistic communities but everyone really, suddenly looking at the government that they’ve been part of or ruled by and saying, “Wait, this didn’t happen, it isn’t like that.”
Christine:
Yeah, I had no idea about that genocide until I went to that museum in San Salvador. One of the reasons why the trip was so important was that, to me personally but also I think just as an American, is that it reminded me of all the atrocities that this country has committed. I mean, you cannot say Reagan’s name in my parents’ household without them getting very upset. But that, even still a lot of that, even US involvement in the civil war is not something that’s talked about a lot in this country. I think under Trump, there’s been more mention of it because of the anti-immigration policies and all the unaccompanied minors. Why are all these small children coming to the United States? Where are their parents? They have such bad parents. Okay, well, can we look at why some of these children are actually leaving, and how our country has played a part in that. And just going to El Salvador and seeing a lot of the poverty, and hearing and talking to people, and hearing about different ways their families have been broken up, even today, how their families are breaking up because of things that happened 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and the US still is not taking responsibility for most of it.
Abby:
Well, and it’s taking an active part in covering it up as well, or taking an active role in denying it. Yeah, wow. Geez. This is a lot to consider. It makes me want to look at more of your work, just because you work in such a range of... one of the things that I was really drawn to in your work was that you cross borders between mediums, between audiences, between kind of everything. Nothing seems off limits, everything is really available. And I think as a writing instructor, I often see people sort of putting up barriers around themselves saying, for example, I write novels, I don’t understand poetry, I can’t sculpt, what are you talking about? The other arts, it becomes a comfortable place to say that some of the arts are off limits. And that doesn’t seem to be the case in your work, and you will work with all kinds of art. And so that was really intriguing to me, and it’s also really inspiring.
So you run Quail Bell Press and Productions. You paint, you sculpt, you draw, you write, you perform. Do you recall, where... I get asked this question a lot and I never know what to do with it, so I apologize for doing it to you. But do you remember which art expression came first, or how you sort of entered into an artistic consciousness?
Christine:
Yeah, I think drawing technically came first, because my mother was always drawing and my siblings and I would draw together. I didn’t go to preschool. That was something a lot of Central American parents don’t want to send their children to preschool when they come to the United States, because it’s not something that really exists in their home countries. So there’s some adjustment too. And I think also because my mom was taking English classes and trying to achieve her path to citizenship, she likes learning with us. She likes kind of studying with us, reading with us, watching things with us, making things with us.
So writing came next. Writing little stories, making comics, writing plays and songs and performing them for my family, or even with my family. Doing my own radio show when I was a kid. And I think writing more than anything has informed my different approaches to artwork. Yeah, so drawing first, then writing, and writing is probably what has stuck throughout all of it. And I think that just goes to storytelling, my interest in stories and language too, because of the English and Spanish backgrounds. Just always considering translation is something that has interested me since I was a kid.
In terms of just approaching so many different creative forms of expression, I think again it goes back to learning many things around the same time that my mother did. Because again, she didn’t finish her schooling. So once she was in a comfortable middle class American environment and had the privilege to spend time with books and art supplies and documentaries, and different kinds of... this was in the days of cassettes, right, so lots of different tapes and tape programs.
She would come across something, and she would immediately want my siblings and me to come listen, or see, or do it, because she was excited. She was so excited to learn. And she would always encourage us, too. Like, “Oh, you should try that. Or have you ever thought about...” She’s a very imaginative person, and I’m so sorry for the ways that she was stifled at an early age, because I think she had, has, a lot of potential to express herself in other ways that she’s really only been comfortable trying in front of my siblings and me. The home was a safe space where she could come up with her own jokes, and ideas for plays, and books, and films. But she would always encourage us. Like, “Oh, have you ever thought about what would happen if a theater curtain could speak?” I remember her actually asking those kinds of questions, like what do you think a theater curtain thinks about all day? If it had a mind, what sort of thoughts would run through its head?
So just having a very imaginative, playful mother who had the luxury—because our dad worked hard and was lucky to be well-compensated for his work, she had the luxury of staying home with us, and just trying different things with us. I mean, definitely I have been discouraged by other, outside forces. Rejection is definitely a thing. But I’m not interested in mastery. That’s something that I’m still learning how to articulate it, but I’m just interested in creative expression. And there are so many hierarchies related to mastery, because it’s almost always white, protestant, able-bodied straight men who have been recognized as the masters, and their approaches to technique and to expression set the standard for what is mastery. I don’t care about any of that. I can enjoy some of that work, or some of that work can resonate with me, but I don’t see why my work has to meet the same standards or should meet the same standards. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t, and I’m fine with that because I don’t fit into that box. Most people don’t fit into that box. Most of us are outside of that box.
I think everyone should try new things. It doesn’t mean that it has to be a lifelong commitment. I do think that art and creative expression is a lifelong commitment for me, and I think those things should be open to everybody throughout their whole lives. It doesn’t necessarily have to be the job that pays the bills or what you study formally in school, but it should be something that everyone feels open to try.
One of the things I love about El Salvador’s art forms is that folkloric art is really respected. It’s not seen as this lowbrow art form. Like La Palma style is this little, it was technically developed by one artist and based off of kind of like this faux indigenous narrative. He did run with a lot of things and make up a lot of stuff for the sake of his art form. But that style is beloved throughout the country. Whereas you say folk art in the United States, and a lot of people get snobby about it, or there’s still this whole tension between fine art and craft.
Or in literature, you do hear about highbrow and low brow. In theater, same thing, in film... really in any art form, there’s this tension between those things. And I just don’t care. I think as I get older, I care even less.
Abby:
Well I definitely see that in... I mean, even in Collateral and the writing that we publish, there’s definitely a sense of who has the right to be impacted by violence, who has the right to be impacted and to express that impact? And there is definitely a sense of certain people feeling like they know who has the right and who doesn’t have the right. And I do think the response to that is, I don’t care.
Christine:
Yeah, why? Why? So I went to BCU Arts, which is a public art school in Virginia. It’s tied to Virginia Commonwealth University, and they love to brag about how US News and World Report ranks them as the number one public art school in the country, and blah, blah, blah. And we had a lot of professors who had been big names in New York and LA and London back in the day, and definitely in art school there was a lot of, “You can't make that. No, don’t do that. These things are off limits.” Why? Why?
Abby:
Yeah, well it sounds like your approach is really taking, to go back to what you were saying just a couple of minutes ago, is that your mom would feel comfortable in the family and at home being imaginative, asking questions. What would a theater curtain say, think, or feel, and this is your approach to art really is making the world that family safe zone, where the whole world, the entire artistic audience is a place where you can ask questions like that.
Christine:
Yeah. I think artwork definitely should be, it should provide a space for asking questions and considering possibilities. That’s one of the things that I love most about making art, looking at art, reading art, experiencing art. Just really letting your imagination go wild. And sometimes it does have very real life implications, too. It doesn’t mean that everything has to be pure fantasy. One of my favorite Salvadoran artists, who I’ve learned a lot more about over the past couple years, is Simón Vega. And he takes a lot of trash, what most people would call trash, and he makes spaceships. They would fill a room, that scale, and he’ll do drawings and installations around these spaceships. And a lot of his art deals with what it was like to grow up in El Salvador during the civil war, which was kind of the cold war, the broader global cold war, and also watch science fiction, read sci-fi as a kid. And how as a third world country, El Salvador wasn’t part of the space race, or it was left behind. Very, very behind. So for him to see what the US was doing, just it made, all of just watching the news coverage made space travel seem even more fantastical than what it was in the imagination of a lot of American children who were growing up at the same time.
So at first glance, his work is very playful. Like look at these spaceships, so fun. And they are fun, they look great. You want to get in them or do something with them. But I think the real world implication of that kind of work is just, so how do we get our country to compete in, not necessarily the space race, but in anything? How does a third world country catch up with the rest of the world? At what point are we allowed to do those things? Why is it that predominantly white countries get to do X, Y, and Z first, and then when it’s our countries, our brown or black countries’ time to catch up, that kind of industrialization is considered bad? But we never had a chance to do it in the first place. Yeah, pollution is horrible, right? But why is it that a first world country gets to benefit from factories and all that stuff, and a third world country didn’t even get the chance to reach that point?
So I think art can definitely have a lot of real world implications. I was telling you before our official Zoom recording that I did this residency at Annmarie Sculpture Garden in Maryland, southern Maryland. And when I wrote my proposal and submitted my designs, I kept it very open-ended. They told me, “You can do almost anything you want with the recyclables that we have in this recycled art center, and you also get access to anything that our volunteers collect from the grounds, but you need to make something that’s going to educate the public and get them excited about the nature of the Chesapeake, of Chesapeake, Maryland.”
So I ended up making these 11... the sculpture series of 11 pieces, each one made out of junk that came directly from the site. And it was everything from corkscrews to random little LEGOs to pennies, bottle caps, whatever. I had a crab, a deer, a raccoon. 11 different Chesapeake animals. And the naturalist onsite, because this was a Smithsonian center so they had, like most Smithsonian places, they have an arts team and they have a science team. And the two will collaborate. So the naturalist actually started to use the sculptures in her public programming to educate people about the different animals on the grounds, and the kinds of trash that people have left behind, and the way that trash harms the local wildlife.
So there, my art work did have some kind of real world implication. Yes, it was very fun and fanciful, but it did try to move toward a solution, help the community move toward a solution, very basic, “Stop throwing stuff on the ground and in the water.”
Abby:
Yeah. Well really seeing art as not just... I’m reminded of Audre Lorde. “Poetry is not a luxury.” Seeing art not as something that you do if you have time, but art is something that you do because we don’t have very much time. I think that’s important to remember. You mentioned Vega’s work, so I really wanted to ask what artist... I always ask poets, who are you reading? But what artists inspire you right now?
Christine:
Yeah, I’m glad that you said “right now” because— [laughing]
Abby:
Yeah, I’m not going to ask you who your favorite is.
Christine:
Yeah, because even a week from now my answers would be different. So right now I'm reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids. I’m late to the game, it’s my first time reading it. But something that I admire about her really lifelong practice is that she is also someone who expresses or has expressed herself in many different creative ways. She’s written poetry, she’s painted, she’s made jewelry. Everyone knows about the music, but she’s done all sorts of things too, and she was just, at least in the book she portrays her early life as being this scrappy individual, being extremely resourceful. And that’s something I admire about others in general. Anyone who’s able to do that, to do a lot with very little. It’s how I was raised. Just do what you can with what you got, or what you can get access to.
I like a lot of Shelley Jackson’s different hypertext work. I think the mix of, yes, the fiction and poetry with photography and illustration or collage in some kind of web-based, or I guess CD-based, some kind of digital work, is very interesting. And it allows... I just love the idea of giving the audience some kind of control over a work. Or not even control, but just power within a work. I think that’s interesting. I love Romare Bearden. Romare Bearden has been, ever since childhood, I’ve always loved his work.
Abby:
So I could’ve asked that years ago, and the answer still would’ve been—
Christine:
Yeah. No, I think that, I think he will, week to week, be on the list, because I love the way his collages tell stories. And I also like how his work shows how he was a very resourceful person, taking all kinds of scraps of everything and making new stuff. And I also like Kukuli Velarde. She does, in relation to ceramics work, she does a lot of weird things with ceramics. A lot of self-portraiture, and also looks at different kinds of indigenous narratives, national narratives, and plays with those.
Abby:
What do you have up next? What do you have on the horizon? I mean, it’s hard to... I don’t know about you but my horizon looks a lot different than it did in January. But what do you have coming up that people can look forward to?
Christine:
Yeah, sure. So I did mention Heaven is a Photograph. This is available from Clash Books now, and as I said, it’s full of poems and photographs. So anyone in the world can order this. I have a new short film, it’s called Bottled, and this is a narrative, also para-fictional film. And that’s available through Amazon Prime as of August 3rd, as of yesterday. And for anyone in New York, I will be participating in a socially distanced, very safe show on September 10th. It’s going to be at New Apostle Gallery, and... nope, now that I think about it you’re publishing this in October, aren't you?
Abby:
November, November 15th.
Christine:
November, November 15th. So that, yeah, who knows what’s going on in person, so scrap that. So two online things you can experience. But I also update my website, World of Christine Stoddard regularly, almost every week. I will add virtual events, and just things that have been published or showcased in some way. And a lot of that work is accessible anywhere you have the internet.
Abby:
Okay, well very cool. Thank you so much for your time today. I'm going to go ahead and turn off recording.
Christine:
Yeah, thank you. Okay.
Christine Sloan Stoddard is a Salvadoran-American artist whose creations include books, films, plays, installations, and other imaginings. Her latest book is Heaven is a Photograph, a collection of poetry and photography about an art student finding power behind the lens. Her film Bottled, which premiered at the New York Long Island Film Festival (NYLIFF), is now available on Amazon Prime Video. In Summer 2020, Stoddard was an AnkhLave Garden Project Fellow at the Queens Botanical Garden and installed her piece “Rabbit’s Storytelling Throne”. Stoddard discusses her inspiration and process for the piece in the new documentary Artists Unmasked. The book Two Plays, which contains her play “Mi Abuela, Queen of Nightmares,” is now available from Table Work Press. Find out more about Stoddard at WorldOfChristineStoddard.com.