When I ask people on book dates my first question is always, where do you go to buy your books? With New York having so many bookstores the answers often vary, but for the first time, I had a repeat and it was the same bookstore as the last one! This time, I went on a date with interdisciplinary artist Turiya Adkins who I met at a talk she gave about her show More Than A Notion at the Hannah Traore Gallery. She was in conversation with Camille and they talked about her artistic process and how to know when a work is finished. That talk blew my mind open and helped me better understand my work in progress. Anyway, we headed to 192 Books in Chelsea and talked about poetry, art-making, and her JSTOR habit. Read about our date below.
Content warning: Mentions of suicide as it relates to Turiya’s current research.
Can you state your name for the record?
Oh that’s a fun middle name.
I know, it’s not after Shakespeare. It’s my great aunt’s maiden name. I love it.
What do you do?
I’m a painter, an artist, a printer, a screen printer. An interdisciplinary artist.
Where are you from?
I grew up in Brooklyn and still live there. Clinton Hill. My mom still lives in the house I grew up in. In terms of Black ownership it means a lot but also in terms of my personal history it’s very special to me to be able to go sit in my childhood bedroom.
How has being from Brooklyn shaped you?
I got a sense of independence from a very early age, which I really cherish. It wasn’t until I went to undergrad and met so many people not from New York that I and realized how much my parents blessed me with raising me here.
Have you ever read a book that feels like home?
The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke. Those are very much my home. It’s a book I can come back to. I use different colored pens every time I come back to it. I have a little key of my annotations from high school, college, and end of college. It's interesting to see the way they interact as well as how my understanding of these elegies changes in regard to what I'm researching at the moment. Right now I'm doing research on black suicides and the history. I now have a new understanding of this concept for ‘How Every Angel is Terrifying’ relates to the rhetoric around suicide within the Black community.
What are your earliest reading memories?
My favorite book when I was little was Yoko. It’s about a little cat that brought sushi to school and no one wanted to eat it and this one boy ate it with her. It’s a really cute story about trying new things. I made my mom read it to me every single night. After that, my earliest reading memories are a lot of poetry, art catalogs, and magazines. The Studio Museum magazine is something I always had in my house. I loved to collage with the images. I would read and then cut it up. In high school it was Topdog/Underdog. Then the Eva Hesse diaries. It’s more than what’s inside the book. I got my first copy at the Frieze gift shop when I was 13. I used to go every Mother’s Day. It tracks her relationship with her art, which I feel like we don't have enough of.
How many books did you read last year?
Probably not enough.
Do you have a favorite book from last year or the current one?
Last year it was Impossible Stories on the Space and Time of Black Destructive Creation by John Marillo III. That book really changed my outlook on my show on More Than A Notion. It's about the fragmentation of Black life. It's about destructive creation and creative destruction and kind of what that means for Black folk. It really deepened my understanding of my own material investigations. My understanding of when paintings are finished definitely changed in terms of destroying some of my creations to find new creations and to find what lies underneath. So I look a lot at my old work or work that's been complete for some years and think about what it would be like to go back into them through this kind of creative destruction and destructive creation. This year it’ll probably be Black No More by George Schuyler. It’s about this scientist that figures out how to turn Black people white and the book follow’s the main character’s experience becoming white and how he's able to navigate the world differently. It's a little bit sci-fi and really beautiful.
Who in your life has the best reading taste?
Probably Camille [Bacon]. When I met her and we started talking she started throwing out references and I was like okay this is crazy. She’s like JSTOR. I could have a conversation with her and by the end she’s given me four or five book recommendations. And then the next time I come back and I tell her I read that one, she gives me more. I was also able to organize my boss’s library, which was outstanding. I got to take photos of a lot of different books. In February I read this book about Francis Bacon and it's actually just the transcripts of his interviews with David Sylvester. I've seen the videos on YouTube, but to have it in writing was really amazing. My favorite line of that was when he was talking about his paintings and the way he approaches them and he said, the will to lose one's will.I think about that a lot when I'm in the studio. Letting go of your intentions. He made me want to become a painter. I was super little and I saw one of his Pope paintings and I was like, wow, the way that he's able to manipulate paint is something else.
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