Studio Visit | Arien Wilkerson
Studio Visit | Arien Wilkerson
Arien Wilkerson. All images courtesy of the artist.
“Artists are boring, and they talk about things that don’t make any sense.”
So stated Arien Wilkerson over Zoom. In a colorful Ganesha T-shirt from a sunny corner in their Philadelphia apartment, Wilkerson narrated the arc of their creative journey with disarming openness.
Wilkerson’s practice as an artist encompasses dance, choreography, installation, and theater, weaving elements from each into provocative performances and videos that resist categorization. Climate change, self-love, racism, and sexuality are a few of the issues they have explored through their work. Last year, they were nominated to be a Pew fellow, and they have received over ten grants — all before the age of 30.
This month, Wilkerson has curated the Radical Black Art and Performance Series, with near-daily free virtual events featuring artist talks, film screenings, and writing workshops hosted by the University of Connecticut.
If artists are boring, Wilkerson is the exception.
Our conversation began in the parking lot of a Target. As their friend shopped with their credit card inside, Wilkerson described their childhood in the North end of Hartford. There was an impromptu purchase of a phone charger and several dropped calls before they arrived home. As the connection wavered, they moved forward and backward through time, jumping from one pivotal moment to the next as the memories and people returned to them.
Loss punctuated their childhood. Their older brother died unexpectedly from complications from an enlarged heart. Other lives were lost to drugs, suicide, and HIV. Funerals became a prominent feature of their early life, and this emphasis on mortality undergirds Wilkerson’s approach to their life and practice. Wilkerson, who is Black, queer, and HIV positive, has long considered what their legacy will be when they are gone. They have also thought about how they got to where they are now.
“I owe my life to my education,” they said. By the time Wilkerson had graduated from high school, they had traveled to Africa and around several cities in Europe — all trips that had been arranged by various educational institutions. Going to Africa made them aware of how much they had, and their trips to Europe exacerbated their yearning for more.
Wilkerson remembered entering a Louis Vuitton store in Prague — a shopping trip made memorable by the absence of questioning or surveillance from the store’s clerk. A parallel encounter in this country would be impossible, Wilkerson insisted.
Wilkerson’s education was shaped by two performing arts institutions in Hartford. At 12, Wilkerson was awarded a scholarship to The Artists Collective, which had been located on the same street as their childhood home before it moved to its current location on Albany Avenue. Here, Wilkerson first began studying dance with Jolet Creary, who later founded Studio 860. Under Creary’s tutelage, Wilkerson discovered their passion for dance and choreography.
A refusal to wear tights — among other vestiges of the elitism that can characterize the field of dance — kept them from applying to The Greater Hartford Academy of the Arts. Still, they began attending dance rehearsals before becoming an official student. Their outspoken nature piqued the interest of Deborah Goffe, an instructor at the academy for over ten years who is now an Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Dance at Hampshire College. Noticing Wilkerson’s passion and precociousness, Goffe invited Wilkerson to audition for a spot with CulturArte, a youth arts residency program that brought them to Cape Verde, Africa for one month in 2008. When they returned to the United States, Wilkerson enrolled at the Academy.
Raising Wilkerson’s voice — to advocate for themself and others — and their relationships with mentors have been recurring throughout their life. Goffe, in particular, was an early champion of Wilkerson’s skills as an artist and later, a businessperson. After high school, Wilkerson briefly worked again with Creary, but before long, Wilkerson had reconnected with Goffe. Between 2013 and 2015, Goffe and Wilkerson oversaw the Invisible City Project Cooperative, a program supporting dance and performance in the Greater Hartford area.
Around this time, Wilkerson was also busy manifesting another plan: for weeks he had stalked the online presence of the Batsheva Dance Company, based in Tel Aviv. During a summer dance program at the Earl Mosley Institute of the Arts, Choreographer Julian Barnett had introduced them to the work of the Israeli dance company. “It changed what I thought I knew dance could be,” Wilkerson said.
Somehow the choreography of Batsheva felt Black to them. Throughout their adolescence, Wilkerson described feeling estranged from their identity as a Black person and a Black artist. Wilkerson has never been masculine; their femininity contrasts the stereotype of a strong and stoic Black man. Many of the works of Black dance companies in the United States did not resonate with them. Wilkerson explained that there were too few performances made by Black dance companies that addressed ideas outside of the history and experiences of enslaved people in this country. Wilkerson believed that Blackness could be explored with more complexity.
Batsheva’s pieces had the nuance they craved from dance. Batsheva felt contemporary to Wilkerson. The dancers wore ordinary clothing — no tights, no frilly tutus. The music was electronic. Everything — from the choreography to the costumes — felt alive and fresh.
There was one Black dancer in the company at that time, too. Shamel Pitts had trained at Julliard, where he is currently an adjunct, and throughout his career, he has received some of the most prestigious awards for an artist including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020. On a lark, Wilkerson reached out to Pitts, who invited them to come to New York to attend a “Gaga Intensive” workshop.
Soon after, Wilkerson had booked a two-week trip to Israel. As with their previous travels, their time in a foreign country magnified the possibilities of dance as an artistic medium. Before the trip, Wilkerson had imagined staying beyond their return flight, but a comment made by the director, Ohad Naharin, stuck with them. Going home is the best way to measure one’s artistic progress, Naharin had said. Soon Wilkerson found themself back in Hartford, expanding the creative limits of their work.
Their experiences with Batsheva and their relationship with Goffe altered Wilkerson’s view of dance: Wilkerson dreamed of tackling big topics and reaching bigger audiences through their work. Their layered performances increasingly relied on elaborate sets. Wilkerson gathered a team of collaborators to realize their ambitions — a network of skilled artists and artisans. Each work was the product of many coming together, housed under the support of Wilkerson’s collaborative multidisciplinary company called Tnmot Aztro. (The pronunciation of the company’s name is deliberately unclear, intended as an entry point for conversation, stated Wilkerson.)
Still from Black Boy Jungle, Town and Country Club, Hartford, CT. 2015.
The next several years in Wilkerson’s hometown were prolific. Performances created during this time — Black Boy Jungle and The Projector Series, among others — have since been re-worked and re-staged in different venues with grander backdrops. Wilkerson was transcending the milieu of dance, embracing a conceptual practice as an artist. Wilkerson’s environments — many fabricated by Joe McCarthy, the artist responsible for an ongoing found object art installation in Middletown called “Wild Bill’s” — began to have the capacity to live on as installations, independent of any live performances. McCarthy said, “[Wilkerson] is one of my favorite artists to work for because… [they] have a persistence of vision that is so rigid and sharp yet they are somehow, at the same time so malleable.” McCarthy added, “They do not simply choreograph pieces, they become them.”
McCarthy and Kevin Hernandez Rosa, another artist within Wilkerson’s sphere in Hartford, began to reinforce the idea that their work was more sculpture than dance. Moving into new territory as an artist opened up what their work could become. “I knew I wanted to make installations because I was obsessed with the idea that I didn’t want dance to be on stage, seen as something ordinary,” Wilkerson said.
A seminal work during this period was The Projector Series. Inspired by the idea of sensory overload, this piece was also the first show produced by Tnmot Aztro. With projectors mounted around the space, the dancers wore all-white clothing. Viewers were transported into a chaotic digital tableau. The Projector Series was an unexpected and resounding success. In January 2016, The Projector Series sold out all three of its showings at Real Art Ways in Hartford.
Next was Black Boy Jungle, a meditation on death following the loss of Wilkerson’s grandfather. During the summer of 2015, the performance premiered the night before the funeral at The Town and Country Club, formerly the Theodore Lyman mansion in the Asylum Hill neighborhood. Five years after white women were granted the right to vote in 1920, a group of 400 women established Hartford’s first private city club. Almost a century later, The Town and Country Club became a meaningful backdrop for Black Boy Jungle, which grapples with the intersecting themes of ancestry, personal identity, and race. The following year, the piece was performed again at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum with repeat performances at The Town and Country Club as well.
Still from The Projector Series, Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT. 2016.
This success of both shows was formative for Wilkerson as an artist and a manager. Performances such as The Project Series and Black Boy Jungle involve large crews of people. Throughout their career, Wilkerson has lobbied for fair payment for everyone on set, but small budgets for big productions have led to strained relationships. Wilkerson has previously gone on the record about engaging in risky and self-destructive behavior to support their practice. Wilkerson has been overworked and underpaid — as have his collaborators. Such is the reality for a visionary such as Wilkerson.
But there have been moments when their success and dreams have aligned, and 2018 was monumental. That year, Wilkerson was awarded five grants totaling close to $25,000, and they were on tour with the production of their show, Equators. Made in collaboration with artist David Borawski and lighting designer Jon-Paul Larocco, Equators — the performance as well as the accompanying film — investigated the theme of environmental justice through the lens of racial equity. Borawski said, “For a young person, [they were] so focused and determined. The artform comes first, but the promotion and the business end are there too, and [they have] it all covered.” Equators was first performed in 2017 at the Housatonic Community College Theater Arts Black Box, with follow-up shows around New England.
Following the hype of Equators, Wilkerson created Universal Womb, which focused on the needs of women of color. Written by and co-directed with Azua Echevarria, Universal Womb borrowed from the life of Courtney Van Ward Gardner, a Hartford native and activist who died in 2008. Sourcing Gardner’s journals and other personal writings, the performance considered the weight of the individual inside a collective against an immersive, multimedia installation.
The set for Lovepiece. Designed by Joe McCarthy and Arien Wilkerson.
The personal and intimate tone of Universal Womb lingered in Wilkerson’s next work. Several years after the demise of a toxic relationship, Wilkerson made Lovepiece. With lighting design by Jon-Paul Larocca, Lovepiece was conceived with Wilkerson’s friend and longtime collaborator, domsentfrommars. Their website describes the work as “about the work it takes to build a healthy relationship with yourself using movement/sound, to uncover the process of healing from rejection, hate, poverty, and humiliation within black/brown queer romantic relationships.” Wilkerson explained that the shame queer people feel about loving other types of people originates from childhood lessons about love.
Lovepiece marked a shift in their career. It was one of their last live performances before the pandemic, and the work coincided with Wilkerson’s move to Philadelphia. Rampant systemic racism in Connecticut and strained relationships with former collaborators and cast members were among the reasons for the change of scenery. Soon after they settled into their new city, the pandemic began to shutter venues.
More recently, Wilkerson has turned to video. Live performances have still been almost entirely halted because of COVD-19, with many artists incurring significant financial loss as a result. Wilkerson hopes to return to performance, either virtually or with a small group of dancers and very strict safety protocols, but for now, working with video has also allowed them to broaden their audiences.
The subject of the experimental 35-minute film titled Vault Mixtape — a collaboration with Marisa Williamson, Nicholas Serrambana, and Kevin Hernandez Rosa — is a familiar theme for Wilkerson: the overlap of environmental justice and racism. Over the past several years, several schools around Hartford have been under investigation for toxic levels of the chemical called PCBs.
“Vault is for the kids,” Wilkerson joked. Wilkerson sees this work as a way for speaking on behalf of the children whose schools were deemed unsafe. They also believe this work is appropriate for younger audiences, unlike some of their other works with more sexual or taboo content.
The intent of Vault Mixtape is to provoke a viewer’s “hyperawareness of life,” said Wilkerson, and this hyperawareness matches the fast pace of the work. They filmed their improvisational movements mostly outside near several different public monuments, touching on the evolving national conversation about public art. This footage was then sent to Serrambana, who designed the score and edited the video.
Still from Vault Mixtape. 2020.
Vault Mixtape anchors the concept of public spaces —in this case, a condemned elementary school — to this country’s struggle to eradicate racism, while The Sis Uprising blends personal experiences with the chaotic and disturbing events of the past year. Footage of the protests following the murder of George Floyd clash with dreamy scenes of Wilkerson dancing. The film, made with the photographer and filmmaker David Norori, hints at how the pandemic has disproportionately affected black and brown people, but Wilkerson shows how there have also been glimmers of tenderness and love, especially for them.
Wilkerson shared that they were falling in love at this time, and many of their choreographed movements in the film exude the softness of a new romance. In one scene, Wilkerson dances in a gauzy purple costume, vulnerable and precise in their movement. At another point, a couple in Philadelphia recreated the iconic dance scene from Dirty Dancing. The footage, which was captured on social media, was incorporated into the film. Wilkerson believes it is important to highlight these moments of joy and evidence of Black love from these harrowing times.
With vaccinations ramping up throughout the country, there is hope on the horizon, but the restrictions of the pandemic will continue to impact Wilkerson’s output. They are plotting their next works, but no one knows when galleries and other venues will begin to allow audiences to gather en masse.
With so many variables, Wilkerson mentioned one certainty: they will return one day to their hometown. “I’m not running away from Hartford,” Wilkerson said. “I’m on a long voyage of self-discovery.”
Follow The Radical Black Art & Performance Series on Facebook to register for events. Arien Wilkerson is on instagram.
