Can you define your practice/artistic affiliations in negative association (i.e., telling me what you’re 

)? Can you define your practice/artistic affiliations in positive association (i.e., telling me what you 

My artistic practice is not: that of an influencer or a public figure. I am not here to collect followers or vie for a spotlight. As someone approaching their sixtieth year of life, I have found living in relative anonymity in a quiet town very comforting. I do, however, see my artistic practice as remaining true to my Palestinian identity, and true to my interest in curation as activism. Gazala Projects as an art space and a studio has given me the opportunity to curate Palestinian-focused group shows, to host other Palestinian curators’ work, and to build relationships with regional allies to bring Palestinian art, cinema, and poetry to new audiences in other cultural spaces.

Forget the obligations that art may or may not have as an overall field (or what art is, or what art must or must not do in general terms). What are the obligations specific to your work?

I suppose the obligations I feel are to make work that reexamines presupposed truths. To ask why cultural spaces are often more aligned with corporations and colonization than with social justice. The questions I ask in my practice often alienate me from people and institutions that would have been helpful to my career as an artist. And I’m OK with that.

Does your practice work in service of its own continuance, or seek to render itself obscure over time?

Um, that’s a good question. When I was a community-based artist on the west side of Columbus, I felt like at that time my practice was all about advocating for a neighborhood that was feeling the encroaching violence of gentrification. Ideally, I would have wanted for my activism there to become obsolete through seeing the needs of the long-time, low-income community members being met. Like, if you vanquish the dragon, do you really need to smith any new swords?

Gazala Projects, on the other hand, is centered on Palestinian identity, and that’s currently within the context of seeing our identities and sometimes our very lives threatened. So, again, fighting a dragon. But I feel even if the impossible happens and we see liberation for Palestine, sharing Gazala Projects as a cultural space still serves a social function—for myself to connect with those who share a common background, and for others as a place of learning about Palestinian culture, past and present. So yes, as I see it, the work I do now is meant to be part of a continuum.

Mona Gazala at work on her current film project 

How does obsession shape or inform your creative work? Can you share an obsession with me?

I have an obsession with the printed word. And I have an obsession with the ways in which spoken and written word is manipulated, consciously or not, to manufacture consent for continuing unjust systems of oppression. We’ve seen blatant examples of this in the press during the aggression against Gaza, with western archetypes of irrational, bloodthirsty Arab savages being conjured to serve an agenda of genocide. In my practice, I have pulled phrases or quotes from news or social media that are generally accepted as benign truth and picked them apart because, in my mind, something was not right about them. As an example, “This Trip Is a Gift” is a digital print work of mine work that was prompted by my 2019 encounter on the Ohio State campus with a Birthright Israel poster, offering free Israel trips to Jewish students and bearing the phrase "this trip is a gift" from Birthright to them. Stunned by the problematic phrase and unable to let go of it, I created this artwork that in effect asks the question, who really did pay the price for this “free” trip, with their land and their lives? Behind bold lettering in this digital collage that reiterates “This Trip Is a Gift” stands the image of my great-grandmother, Fareeda Hishmeh, staring stonily forward at you. She is surrounded by her children and grandchildren in Ramallah. In 1938 she was murdered by an Irgun sniper. This work forces you to question what the Birthright poster posits as truth.

How does desire shape or inform your creative work? How do you know what you want?

“Desire” is a tricky word for an asexual. Do I desire money? Fame? Popularity? I think I have bipolar desires: the desire for social connection but also the strong desire to be alone. I mean, as a little kid I used to draw pictures of lonely cabins on a mountainside, and/or draw architectural plans of labyrinthian castles that I imagined I would one day inhabit, alone. In a way, landing in my own brick building in a tiny Ohio village now is the manifestation of that childhood desire. But I still have the grown-up desire for human connection, to create with others in meaningful ways, which I have done through organizing, curating, and sometimes through “radical hospitality,” like turning my Columbus home years ago into an artist residency space. I’ve gotten to know some incredible fellow artists that way. And yes, sometimes I get burned by the people I trusted with my space and my passions. And I have to ask myself at those times, “is this really worth it?” But I think that just means it’s time to take stock and ask, “how can I do this again differently? How can I protect my boundaries but not become totally walled off from humanity?”

If you could suddenly pivot and begin to do something else entirely, what would it be?

Right now, the pivot has already happened. For ten years, I was very devoted to the idea of art that was literally created out of the ruins of urban disinvestment. I created sculpture from the discarded lath, plaster, and concrete of vacant and demolished houses in the neighborhood of Franklinton, sculptures that spoke back to the manipulated ebb and flow of disinvestment and gentrification. From that grew an entire social practice that involved both artists and long-time residents in building their own visible neighborhood identity through community-based art. It was something I was very passionate about and invested in. After a while, though, it seemed as if there was less community involvement in the practice, and artists became more enamored of the opportunities they saw offered by real estate developers. I found myself struggling both financially and mentally to maintain what I had been doing there.

So it was time to consider my next leap in life, which ended up being Gazala Projects, located in rural west-central Ohio. Strategically I chose a building that was not in a “desirable” location because it was what I could afford. Emotionally, moving to a rural area gave me a greater sense of connection to the land and the agri/natural world, which was something, as a part of the Palestinian imprint of my grandparents, that I had been craving. The leap has afforded me a practice that can concentrate on Palestine and social justice/activism, while still respecting my introverted nature.

Where did you learn to work: from whom, and how? How does that impact you and the way you work now?

That’s kind of a complicated question, and there are so many ways I could answer this, so I’ll have to pick just one. I realize that I owe a great deal of the ways in which I work to SPACES gallery in Cleveland, where I was a gallery assistant in the 1990s. The experience shaped my artistic career during my formative years. First off, I became aware of what it took to run a nonprofit there and the grant-writing needed to sustain it. I have a lot of opinions on nonprofit culture but, good or bad, seeing how it operates from the inside was an education. It definitely emboldened me to organize projects and people through “rogue nonprofits” on my own over the years. But even more importantly, working at SPACES, in the heart of Cleveland and among many experimental artists, opened me up to new methods of making. The Tremont neighborhood at that time was alive with DIY art spaces and artists who made work from the stuff they found in the streets or junkyards. There was a real postindustrial assemblage movement happening, people like Steven B. Smith, Roy Bigler, Joan of Art were all part of this “Tremont School,” as I called it. It gave me the freedom to scavenge, to collect, to recycle, and to juxtapose what you find around you in unexpected ways. I think that’s something I carry with me to this day, from creating installation art out of concrete rubble in my back alley, to reusing another artist’s painter’s tarps to fashion hand-painted text art for a rural schoolhouse installation. Even my current film project, “Trail Markers,” in a real sense is just me looking around my new Darke County, Ohio, environment and asking: How do I pull the seemingly unrelated elements of this landscape together in surprising ways, to make one narrative?

What do you want to unlearn or change about your ways of working, or about the work you make?

If we’re being completely honest here, I have to say that I’ve never made a living at being an artist or an arts organizer. There has not been a single year of my life where I’ve pulled a profit from being in the creative workforce. So the idea that I need to be constantly producing new work—that little “inner capitalist” voice that says you need to be actively working on your next big project all of the time—is something I have had to resist and retrain my brain around. Since moving to rural Ohio in a place that makes it possible for me to live off of my savings for a while, I have found a lot of enjoyment in just sitting in my old swivel chair by the window and watching entire sunsets without moving. It’s incredible! I have to remind myself that creative projects actually COST me money, even when I receive the occasional grant, and that sitting still makes spiritual AND financial sense. For someone who has spent the better part of their life as a single mother in low-wage service jobs, scrambling to keep all the balls in the air, this is quite a shift! And, admittedly, my single-mom inner voice still sometimes guilts me into thinking I need to be constantly DOING something. Climbing out of that mindset is a process.

I have this great studio gallery space, yes. But I only have exhibitions here three or four times a year, for exactly the reasons I’ve mentioned: that it costs money to do them, and the number of people willing to make the trek into rural Ohio to attend an opening is limited. So all in all, yes, I’ve been moving away from the capitalist “busy-all-the-time” working model to something slower and less monetized. This summer, for instance, I have a small number of artists/scholars coming to Gazala Projects for a residency program. It’s a barter-type model: I get to employ them for a few hours as interns/assistants on my current film project, and in exchange, they get to stay here for a week and use the studio as a retreat/research/experimental space for their own creative projects. It’s a win-win situation.

What are the questions you can’t let go of?

How did it ever become so offensive for Palestinians to ask for their lives, their human rights, and their dignity? Seriously, how did the western world get to this point? And how can we have entire academic studies of brutal colonizations of the past that we acknowledge as horrible and not connect the dots to what is happening in real time? How?

Mona Gazala is a Palestinian-American artist living in rural western Ohio. She holds a master’s degree from the Ohio State University in studio arts, with a specialization in city/regional planning. Her practice, which is multidisciplinary and often socially engaged, explores and exposes dynamics of power and systems of oppression that often manifest in the built environment. This includes what is visible as well as what has been hidden and erased in structures, neighborhoods, and geographies.

Gazala is the recipient of numerous grants from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, Franklinton Arts District, Puffin Foundation West, Ohio Alliance for Arts Education, Decapital, and the Hishmeh Foundation to undertake creative work centered on community-building, social justice, and activism. Her 2021 film short, "Closeness to the Land," has been screened regionally and internationally, and was included in the Arab Film and Media Institute's 2023 "Palestinian Voices" film series.

Website

Mona Gazala

The questions I ask in my practice often alienate me from people and institutions that would have been helpful to my career as an artist. And I’m OK with that.

Another Way

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will do.”

I don’t know where I first heard this saying, somewhere near my Blue Ridge Mountain home, but I suspect it was from the fellas up at Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. It made sense. As a theater artist, I’ve been joy-struck by the untamed imagination of “let’s just play around and see what happens.” The discipline of maintaining no attachment to outcome is based on a trust that you don’t have to go looking for inspiration; it comes to find you. Any road will do.

 know where you’re going (or at least in what direction you’re headed), there’s usually more than one way to get there, and some traveling advice can be useful

: Watch out for that big ditch on your left

, it’s easy to fall into a tangle of mission creep.

People who have traveled various paths before us have wisdom to share. These “multiple knowledges, perspectives and approaches”

 not only guide our successes, they can also expand our appreciation of the journey itself: 

Be sure to stop at the bend, turn around, and look back at that patch of trillium blooming on the hillside.

But choosing a path means more than having a sure and certain destination. The choice of which path to take (or forge) is rooted in your values and vision: What is most important to you, and how do you want to be in the world? When I was younger, I’d drive home to Tennessee and my father would invariably ask me what route I took. He was always surprised that I didn’t take the interstate. He never quite grasped the appeal of the alternate route, which offered whimsies, vistas, curiosities—but that’s what I valued about the drive. If I had valued predictability, convenience, and speed, I’d have chosen a different path.

One value I’ve finally come to embrace is accepting the detour with grace and gratitude. 

: the funding didn’t come through. What pivot will move you forward? 

: a key collaborator withdraws. What new sights or insights might a detour provide? What mysteries are there to explore?

We’ve all experienced a huge detour with the COVID pandemic, and things are not as they were. We’re in new terrain, informed by 

. Our landscape and familiar markers have shifted, or disappeared. More than ever, we need to be asking questions, sharing perspectives, and A Blade of Grass (aBoG) is rising to this moment. For one thing, they are seeding conversations between mentors and mentees—people who have worn the path smooth (if not easy) and folks just setting out. Those conversations, these maps, will confirm some of what we already know; others will challenge our most dearly held practices. These dialogues will make visible the skills, strategies, and attributes needed for making art in, with, and for a community.

So, set forth on the journey, in your own way. Let aBoG be your traveling buddy. Enjoy the trip and send us a postcard.

Kathie deNobriga served as Alternate ROOTS’ executive director and planning/development director for ten years. Raised in Kingsport, Tennessee, deNobriga holds an MA in Theatre (Directing) from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a BA with honors in Speech Communications and Theatre Arts. Her early employment includes directing and managing community theaters in Smithfield and Sanford and working in the acting ensemble of the Road Company, Johnson City, Tennessee. DeNobriga was a visiting artist for two years for the NC Arts Council, and a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program and in the first Rockwood Leadership Institute's program for arts leadership.

Kathie is now a consultant, specializing in strategic planning, building organizational capacity, staff/board retreats, and creative conflict engagement. She studied mediation at the Justice Center of Atlanta, and is a board and founding member for Alternate ROOTS. DeNobriga served two terms as council member, and was mayor for the City of Pine Lake, Georgia, from 2012 to 2015, where she still lives as an advocate for and practitioner of arts and community development.

Kathie deNobriga

What new sights or insights might a detour provide?
What mysteries are there to explore?

As the A Blade of Grass team imagined new programs to support artists, we connected with independent curator Risa Puleo. Risa’s deep and significant work with practitioners demonstrates a vision for the field that inspires us

 Her recent work as co-curator of the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial complicated the medium of public art by presenting ephemeral and immaterial forms to, in Risa’s words, “create an exhibition that does not replicate occupation and can also evade surveillance.” Her 2018 exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System

, curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and later hosted by Tufts University Art Gallery, mapped the relationship between museums and prisons while untangling the prison-industrial complex from the problem of mass incarceration and highlighting artists who make strategic interventions to these systems in pursuit of abolition. Her 2017 exhibition 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 conceptually redrew settler-imposed boundaries to reconnect the Americas as continuous Indigenous land.

Risa served as an advisor to aBoG’s team this year and worked with us to envision this publication project and bring together contributors. Risa joined aBoG Program Director Lee Heinemann to reflect on the collaboration and her work, and to answer questions from Chloë Bass’s commission for this issue.

To give some history to our readers: My colleague Ixtzel and I met with you while we were conducting a series of informational interviews and developing what A Blade of Grass would do in its current iteration. We felt so excited by what you had to share and we enlisted you as an advisor before we knew exactly what we might do together. During this period of finding our form and voice as an organization, you've been an incredibly helpful sounding board to share ideas with. A kind of funny example of you seeing us and getting what we're trying to do is your edit to our acronym for A Blade of Grass—from ABOG to aBoG. Somewhere in your notes, you had written ABOG as lowercase 

—aBoG. Lu noticed that and had a moment of being like, “oh, this feels better.” Then Ixtzel and I saw and were like, “wait, that's actually cute.”

Amazing! I’m so glad this resonated. This really makes me happy. This suggestion was a happy accident. I think I was just accustomed to uncapitalizing articles and prepositions when abbreviating the names of museums, like MoCA or MoMA, for example; it seemed the natural way to abbreviate the organization’s name. What is the difference for you between lowercase aBoG versus the all-capital abbreviation?

We're trying to be an organization that is for and by artists and works in solidarity with our peers. When A Blade of Grass was founded in 2011, socially engaged art was less recognized, and this organization was an authority. It is a different time now, and the small change to refer to our org with this jumble of lowercase and capital letters feels better to us in that way.

I'm always thinking about uncapitalizing my name; descaling and situating myself as one amongst many who is supported by a larger field is central to my work. Thank you for sharing that with me and thanks for a fun conversation and a fun collaboration.

Yeah, this has been so much fun. We definitely couldn’t have done it without you! We took you down a bit of a winding path that resulted in our collaboration on this publication project. Where we arrived seems to call upon some of the interesting experiences that you don't always get to work with.

It's true. Our collaboration has tapped into some of my lesser-known past lives. If I am known at all, it is primarily for being a curator. But there was a moment where I was known for my writing, and before that, I worked briefly at a granting agency. But I started by making exhibitions at alternative spaces and working in editorial capacities for nonprofit online and print publications in Texas. I bring these experiences into all aspects of my work. Writing is a practice that informs and structures my curatorial practice. Curating and editing, at least how I practice them, have a lot of things in common.

Your life as an editor has been extremely helpful to us as we're trying to figure out lots of things and how we communicate them to a larger world. You also have a life as an educator, and something that I've thought about throughout our time together is something I heard you say in a talk to students about an abolitionist framework not being punitive or disciplinarian. Through our work together, I've seen you demonstrate this as we took time to figure out what we could do together.

Drawing on my research for the exhibition 

Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System 

(2018), I teach a class called Keywords: Art and Justice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. If students only take away one thing from my class, I hope it’s the idea that being an abolitionist requires moving away from hierarchies and disrupting our learned tendencies to discipline. We spend a lot of time in class analyzing how all institutions are set up to discipline—in all senses of the term but especially policing—people into individuals through surveillance and how external surveillance is internalized into a self-disciplining that turns into policing of others.

This political position of abolitionism begins with a personal practice that I navigate within myself. I understand the deliciousness of anger and how yummy and good righteousness can feel. But also, how it can consume you and quickly tumbles into punitiveness. On topic with this issue’s theme of mentorship, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work has shaped my understanding of the physical space and social life in the United States. And I had the amazing opportunity to be in conversation with her as part of the Counterpublic Triennial. Last year, at the symposium for her Whitney retrospective, Jaune said something that has stuck with me about how she has made anger her friend, which I took to mean she can access it and use it as a tool, direct and shape it, in ways that don’t take over agency. For me, abolition is a daily practice.

That is also part of what I mean about when I talk about the everyday embodied practice of abolition as one that moves away from disciplining. It’s an extension of Audre Lorde’s “master's tools” logic. You can't dismantle what you're trying to build with the same tools.

Can you talk about this framework and how it enters your work?

 for a Texas audience required me to enact this logic. 

was part of a series of exhibitions I made as test runs for 

 to practice how to engage people who might have a different set of politics into a conversation about complicated topics, like questions of mass incarceration and border politics. How do you create a field to invite people in rather than tell them that they're wrong for believing what they believe? I try to use the exhibition platform to seduce people into seeing the beauty, but also the obviousness, of the prison-free or border-free world by creating spaces that manifest this as a vision.

Another set of mentors are the curators and art workers who organized the first A Day Without Art in 1989—an event in which 800+ museums, galleries, and art organizations closed for the day to bring attention to the government's inaction around the AIDS crisis. The event succeeded in changing conservative narratives around the epidemic and getting it back into the headlines of newspapers in a moment when it was actively being erased from public consciousness. So I think a lot about what practices build the solidarity that’s necessary for mass mobilization. I try to use the exhibition as a public forum and a platform for bringing people together. Publications, and the sharing of information, can function in this way too.

Our team was so excited to dive in and start bringing artists into the project, and you, very reasonably, led us to actually begin with some of the formats and structure for the publication before inviting others to contribute.

It's interesting to hear that reflected back because the process we enacted for the publication is what I do in my curatorial practice. I don't invite artists until I’ve surveyed the larger field I’m investigating and I have a historical grounding. I then stage some kind of intervention in that field and invite artists who are asking similar questions to be in dialogue.

It is worth noting here that y’all’s goal for this first issue was to celebrate a lot of different artists who contribute to the expansive field of social practice. What do celebrations entail? In their most basic form, celebrations are some sort of party. How do you stage a party on a page? Celebrations can also be gatherings and gift offerings. And so we prioritized offering the artists we invited something that would be fruitful for them.

The theme for this first issue was y’all’s idea, too! I thought y'all came up with a beautiful idea to introduce this publication through a lens of generationality. Putting cornerstones of the field who have been practicing for decades in conversation with younger artists they have long histories with to begin to show the longevity of social practice and build out a genealogy.

Many of the contributors to this issue are cornerstones to us personally. So many of the practitioners here have contributed to my development as an artist and administrator.

It's an amazing group of people. And to be able to celebrate their contributions within the larger worlds in which they operate, and see the passing down of that knowledge.

Now that we are talking about the riches of these conversations, both Mary Patten and Avram Finkelstein are incredibly important to me and in very different ways. I have long identified Mary as—I think Mary would say that it's never a singular person, it's always a set of relationships—but I think that her life and her work, and she herself, are so remarkable. It's always really wonderful to celebrate her. And then the contributions that Avram Finkelstein has made to our understanding of the field, and his work as a graphic designer and one of the engineers of the Silence=Death Project changed the world, literally. Those posters initiated a radical shift in how we conceptualize, think about, and care for people who are HIV-positive, and our own imperative to speak out.


Chloë Bass is someone who thinks about care for others beautifully as a practice in her own life and work, so it's great then to share a conversation between Chloë and her former student, Ari Wolff. As a chair of the Social Practice Queens MFA, she brings her own long, rich history, as a mentee of Lorraine O’Grady, and is passing that wisdom down to younger voices.

These conversations are the features in this issue. Can you talk more about the formats we came to together for commissioning contributions?

We all wade through the news. We are constantly inundated with information. In this daily practice, the kinds of published information that I find particular joys in lately are advice columns, book reviews, or editorials—established forms with changing content. These formats have come to feel like safe spaces of reading in a news stream full of complications and came to inspire our design for aBoG’s publication.

We have a fairly standard division between features, which we described as “related content,” and columns. The features are thematically driven and allow readers to go deeper into topics that feel of the moment.

The columns function as containers, what we called “repeated forms,” for holding different content. In thinking about how to translate these repeated forms to aBoG’s mission, we tended toward practicality and transparency, thinking about how aBoG’s publication could provide a service to artists and art workers. In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.

This resulted in columns that invited artists to create a how-to guide teaching something from their practice and a process diary reflecting on the creation of a recent project. We also began highlighting practitioners through a series of questions crafted by Chloë Bass.

Chloë is really amazing at asking questions, which is why we commissioned her to write a series of questions that could be asked to a number of different people. Within her questions is a sort of understanding that language is just like an iceberg. You're only getting a certain bit. How can a question then allow you to navigate an unknown field—in this case a practice or a person in a way that's organic to them?


Well, now I can’t resist but to ask a few of these questions to you. 

Where did you learn to work, from whom, and how? And how does that impact the way you work now?

I loved this question and I had an immediate, visceral response: My mother. My body. And the land. Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply, I recognize the continuity between my three teachers.

My mother is a Virgo, and when I told her I was working in the arts, she empowered me to follow my own path as long as I learned actual, practical skills. I think I rise to that mandate by thinking of complex questions—in what ways can we utilize the public platforms that we have to generate common language to move in certain directions?


My body teaches me about limits. Having spent the past twelve years navigating chronic illness, I use my own body as a metric for understanding and articulating my own passage through the world. The things that I do to move in and around and over and beyond the limits that the world imposes on me.My attention to my body’s limits also frames my ethic toward limitations where there should not be. My ethic makes space for ideas of trespassing or shoplifting, or smuggling—navigating into places that are closed off.

And then the land has been one of my biggest teachers because so much of my practice has been about the specificities of place, and the specific histories embedded within. I am trying to bring attention to how human-centric our thinking is about the greater field in which we all share, and that is a reorientation into place.

Now that I’m thinking about it more deeply beyond my visceral response, I recognize the continuity and connection between my mother, my body, and the land as three of my most important teachers.

Does your practice work in service of its own continuance? Or seek to render itself obsolete over time?

Both/and. The work generates itself. So, I'll make a show. It'll have a set of questions. I'll propose answers that generate more questions that lead to different places that allow me to be in conversation with people asking similar questions. It self-propels.

Institutions give back new opportunities, and there's always a sort of perfect synchronicity.

I left my role as co-curator of Counterpublic asking what it would look like to dismantle all the dams along the Mississippi River as a thought project. When Mass MoCA invited me to be a curatorial fellow, I discovered that they have a river. So I asked to help dismantle the flood chutes around that river.

At the same time, I’ve long held a belief that the best use of any power I have is to give it away by empowering others and sharing power. I think that I’m always working to dismantle the systems that determine what is useful and what is obsolete.

I think we would all have to be a little obsessive to keep doing this, right?


One way that I tend to work is by putting things in the back of my brain. So I'm always thinking about a project and not thinking about it directly at all times. In the same way that bird songs are always in the background of our home in Chicago.

During the pandemic, birds really made themselves apparent to me. It was an aspect of the world that was insistent on presenting itself. It turns out I live in a major bird-migration zone, but it took the enforced quiet of quarantine for me to notice them, after having not for forty years. Now I can’t not hear them and try to work outside with them. Thinking through the lens of bird-watching helped me realize how the type of looking that happens in the biennial/triennial model is a practice very much akin to surveillance. So I have been developing a method of anti-surveillant or abolitionist bird-watching that is about engendering a kind of quiet that makes space for birds to present themselves.

My contribution to Counterpublic was guided by this new obsession. I once stopped a site visit because a northern flicker joined our group; it felt momentous. I had a particular experience with a violet-green swallow that inspired the Counterpublic work. As I write about in the essay for that show, swallows are very hard to see because they are very fast. This particular swallow hovered in front of us for about thirty seconds and showed us how it was able to be so covert: its little body had coevolved with the place where it lived so that it could shift in and out of view as it wanted. And so, it was making a decision to make itself apparent. What an amazing super power! And I immediately thought: If an artwork or a person could do the same thing, it could be uncapturable. This experience inspired me to make an exhibition that could not be captured or surveyed. My contribution to that show was an attempt to articulate and describe this fleeting and ephemeral moment of magic.

My obsession with birds took on new proportions when my wife and I spent much of our quarantine road-tripping to national parks, which is its own obsession. We’ve now been to 54, and after this summer we will have been to 63 of 64. The real obsession is to always be moving. This gets me back to the land as a teacher, the value of place, and the road trip as a method of investigation. aBoG’s support is helping me get to the Arctic, where I am going to meet the Alatna River—a wild river, meaning it hasn’t been dammed or intruded upon by human intervention and its waters can flow along its meandering paths as it needs—as research for the turn in my work toward water.

Risa Puleo is an independent curator based in Chicago and, currently, a curatorial exchange fellow at Mass MoCA. Risa was part of a team of curators organizing the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition 

 was curated for the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. 

Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly

 was curated for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator in residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, and the Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York City, and more. Risa has master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, AsiaArtPacific, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and other art publications.

Risa Puleo

In our social and professional worlds, we are all navigating tricky terrain while advocating for ourselves and our work. We hoped that aBoG could play the role of crowdsourcing and collecting different kinds of approaches to questions that we all navigate in this field.