Being in Studio

Halfway through my internship at the Studio Museum in Harlem, I learned that the artists in residence studios were directly above the office I’d been working in, just a short flight of stairs’ distance from where I'd been completing my intern duties. Upon realizing this fact, I remember feeling a bit strange about such a close proximity. David Hammons has been there, as has Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Kehinde Wiley; and I could continue. There is such a history to this place that for me the “studio” had nearly approached myth. It took a few steps up the stairs for me to accept that these studios actually exist.

During the Artist’s Voice discussion a few weeks back, one of this year’s artists in residence Paul Mpagi Sepuya reflected upon what it meant for him to take his own place in a tradition extending from the Studio Museum’s inception in 1968. He thought about how it felt to join the museum’s legacy, and at this particular time in its history, and at this point in his own. And perhaps there will always be that underlying uncertainty of what more anyone might bring to the Museum after Wiley, after Marshall, after Hammons.

These are all valid questions. But I’ve learned that there’s a time when these thoughts must be abandoned in favor of more immediate matters. In a beautifully candid moment during that talk, Sepuya spoke to a different kind of fear concerning place. Upon entering an empty studio, all to his own, he had to stop and ask himself a rather practical question: “What am I going to do, exactly, with all of this space?” There is the myth of this place, the myth of this place, the myth of this place, but there are only so many steps you can take up the stairs before the studio is actually there. It exists, that physical room in which you must create.

Remarkable about this year’s artists in residence is the individual ways in which each has answered that question—of what, exactly, to do with all of their space.

For Sepuya, the answer came in the form of community. His studio became an extension of a life outside of the Museum, his friends coming and going throughout his time there, his photography resulting from interactions that were never quite staged in his studio, even as they were deeply considered artworks. The products of his residency cannot be separated from their site of production, a point to which his zine Studio Work attests.

But while the studio acted as dwelling for Sepuya, the work of Kamau Patton reveals a more abstract existence in his studio space. Patton’s studio functioned as a kind of laboratory in which he could consider the subtle ways in which a person impacts her surroundings, and them her. Through linking the sensitivity of light to sound, Patton’s work reflects upon what it means to be aware of the space in which you dwell, the bearings you have on any place you tread.

Yet, Simone Leigh’s existence in the studio almost appears marked by an absence of one. A completion of her ceramic works took her to places far from Harlem’s streets, her Studio place acting as a holding ground for her objects, and presumably one among others elsewhere. Leigh’s work isn’t directly impacted by her specific Harlem room, as is Sepuya’s, or necessarily a consideration of what it means to exist in spaces, as is Patton’s. But rather, her objects appear as parts of imagined histories that extend beyond this space, and almost out of space—relics of worlds that four walls could never quite sustain.

This range of space is what I appreciate the most about the exhibition Evidence of Accumulation. That I can walk into Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s room and feel like I am somewhere close to his home, that a viewing of Simone Leigh’s objects can take my mind places that have me forgetting exactly where I stand, that reflecting among Kamau Patton’s artwork might remind me to mind where I walk.

If there is anything I have known the Studio Museum for is its untiring support of artists’ talents and by extension their spaces, its adherence to the notion that in giving talented black artists a little bit of time and a little bit of space, you will inevitably learn from what comes out of their studios.

Working here as an intern for the past summer, sitting below one of the very places that make the museum such a place, I’m reminded of the fact that the Studio Museum exists because artists do. And at the end of it all, it’s been a pleasure to have, too, existed in this space.

—Ashley James, Communications Intern