“I didn’t want to do things that looked like what you would find on a Shit-Dominicans-Do list. I didn’t want the very obvious”. The Dominican-American and New York City native artist Lucia Hierro explores the body as a collection of signifiers that includes language, taste, and culture. Tahir Carl Karmali talked with her for Contemporary And América Latina (C&AL) about her personal artistic history, the relevance of her Dominican familiar background, and her particular views on commerce.
Lucia Hierro, For Tia – Morir soñando. Courtesy of the artist.
Lucia Hierro, Mandao 1. Courtesy of the artist.
Lucia Hierro, Andrea's Couch. Courtesy of the artist.
Tahir Carl Karmali: I’d like you to tell me about how you arrived at becoming an artist and where that motivation came from?
Lucia Hierro: I remember having an interest in art via my brother Chris who was studying at Laguardia High School, New York. He went there for art. We used to read a lot of comics together and I loved watching him draw. He’s really good at just drawing anatomy, and I’d ask him to teach me. So that’s how the curiosity was sparked.
Then he ventured into music and I kept going with art, but I moved to the Dominican Republic and there weren’t a lot of arts programs when I was there so I put it on the back-burner. But that’s the only thing that I did to keep from feeling completely out of place when I was there, I would just draw.
TCK: When did you decide to start thinking about formalizing your career as an artist?
LH: When I moved back from the Dominican Republic to New York, in my last year of high school my art teacher encouraged me to apply to the Cooper Union Saturday Program. And that program taught me everything. It was put in place so that students that weren’t in a specialized art high school were able to learn about materials so they didn’t have a shock when they got to an art school.
Cooper was my window into thinking, oh I can actually do this. We visited artist studios, and one was Miguel Luciano’s studio, Puerto Rican artist. He was young – his work was amazing, it was assemblage and sculpture and paintings and that was his life. He had this really cool studio and I was like, wow, you can do this. So from there I realized that I wanted to do that but I didn’t know how, and I knew that somehow applying to college was going to be the way.
TCK: How do you feel about your work being framed in your identity as a Dominican-American woman from Washington Heights, now based in the Bronx?
LH: I tend to look at it as everyone who is interested in narrative. People want to know the story of that thing or what’s behind that and I approach it that way where everybody wants to know what’s behind the thing. Like Picasso was from Spain and that’s romanticized in this way. And somehow the work makes sense because of it. And so I always see it that way and I feel like it’s inevitable to the work. I feel like it’s such a part of who I am and how I move through the world.
TCK: What drives you to create on topics that deal with the economy and commerce?
LH: I think the realization that you have when you grow up in a house where things are economized, economical, and rationed, you learn about the cost of things. And that everything from leisure to your new shoes, or school, to the books, everything cost something. I was told it every day and I knew that. So I think that’s where the connection comes in to the work, and also through having studied a lot of Dutch art history in undergrad. In these classes, I realized that there would be some strange fruit and a frock that was not similar, and then I’d ask questions and, well, yeah these are from their colonial conquest. I wasn’t learning about Dominican artists, I wasn’t learning about other Caribbean artists. But they’re in here. They’re in these paintings. They’re in somebody else’s lens.
That’s stayed in the recess of my brain, and when I got to making the still lives, I was pulling from things that were every day but overlooked. I didn’t want to do things that looked like what you would find on a Shit-Dominicans-Do list. I didn’t want the very obvious. It was a little more personal. A little more hidden, an embarrassment. I find that those things would speak to me in a way that was maybe preserving something.
TCK: Is it important for you to create work that relates to your community and that can speak to your experience?
LH: Of course. I think that cheesy thing of wanting to be the artists that I wanted to see when I was growing up is really important to me. This idea that museums always ask: oh how can we diversify the public that comes in? Well, show artists that they can relate to!
This is important because then you’re going to have two viewers in front of the work that are going to enter it differently, and hopefully be in dialogue. It was a moment when people came together. Somebody would see that painting that I had inside one of my bags and they know that. And then the young Dominican is like, what are you talking about? This is all the ingredients to make sweet beans. And they’re both like, wait, what? And that dialogue is amazing to watch.
TCK: Could you tell me the story behind the couch upholstered onto this mattress?
LH: I moved in with a family friend who’s older, and apparently I grew up coming to that apartment but I don’t have any recollection of it. My aunt was always there, my cousins were always there, there’s photo albums that you pulled out. My aunt recently passed away and so it’s interesting I’m living in this apartment and renting this room. And I’m looking around her house and taking pictures of everything and the couch was semi-upholstered.
I think it got to a point where the plastic was not even serving a purpose. But that couch belongs to such a particular person. Somebody came in here yesterday and said it’s always aunts and grandmas to have this couch. And these types of couches, the type of wood, because you have so much of it in the Dominican Republic. A lot of those couches are made there and brought here, and sold in Washington Heights.
I like the idea that the mattress is always in reference to domestic spaces. I have a very interesting relationship with that word because I was always moving around. We moved wherever my dad could afford a studio. So I didn’t get attached to things. And it’s interesting that she had this couch for this long.
Thinking about preserving: so many of these couches are perfectly preserved. I like this idea of preserving something that you know is temporary.
TCK: What is next for Lucia?
LH: Oh man. I think that I’ve already resigned myself to be somewhat of a sculptor or maker of objects and things.
TCK: Artist or something.
LH: Yeah. There was a real tension of that, something was looming that maybe was like, I’m going to paint maybe. I would love to do more of it. I’m looking forward to do shows and seeing how that pushes the work forward.
Lucia Hierro is a Dominican-American conceptual artist born and raised in New York City, currently working in the Bronx. She received a BFA from SUNY Purchase (2010) and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2013). She has exhibited in shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, Paris Photo, and recently had her first solo show in New York at Elizabeth Dee Gallery in Harlem and her first solo show in the Dominican Republic at Casa Quien Gallery. Residencies include: Yaddo, Redbull Arts in Detroit, Fountainhead Residency, Bronx Museums Artist in the Market program and Casa Quien. Her work is part of the JP Morgan Chase art collection and the Rennie collection in Vancouver.
Tahir Carl Karmali, who conducted the interview, is a visual artist born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, based in Brooklyn, New York.