…I am a weapon wandering the forest of motives, a machete in one hand, a mirror in the other…
- Krista Franklin, “Manifesto, or Ars Poetica #2”
We live according to myths set out for us by the institutional and societal powers-that-be: some myths are old, some are new, but they are often inherently followed until we question what it would be like to break them. Artist Krista Franklin sat down with me to discuss the myths that hover over the art world.
On a late, gray afternoon in early December, I sat down with Franklin on a foam-cushioned maroon couch at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) inside the Free Radio SAIC studio, a respite from the hustle and bustle of the school’s lounges.
What started off as a more formal interview quickly turned to a sharing and discussion of ideas amongst two women with similar takes on life. Sticking true to Franklin’s energy, she spoke with me as a peer with important questions, in spite of the obvious years of wisdom and experience that separated us.
Franklin is in her first year teaching at SAIC, instructing a class called Introduction to Writing as an Art. She mainly teaches younger students, all undergrads, who are mostly freshmen.
I was first introduced to Franklin’s work through a writing assignment, one centered around the Chicago Cultural Center, where her show Quest for the Marvelous was exhibited for four months in the Fall of 2016. I was introduced to her in the Spring semester on her first day while working the front desk in the Writing department. Just a couple of months prior, I was looking at her black-and-white collages and hair art on the white walls of the Michigan Avenue galleries in the Cultural Center. Now I was shaking her hand. I was starstruck and enchanted by the fact that Chicago’s art world seemed so accessible.
Over the course of the next nine months or so, I kept running into her not only at school, but at galleries for art show openings, at live music gigs, mostly affiliated with the Chicago poet Kevin Coval, who edited a poetry book she’s contributed to, The Breakbeat Poets: New American Poets in the Age of Hip-Hop. Her piece in Breakbeat Poets, “Manifesto or Ars Poetica #2”, is a collaboration of the art mediums she is known for: poetry and collage.
In addition to being known for those mediums, a running thread in her writing is her belief in the myth. And here’s the thing, some of these myths are true, and some aren’t.
Franklin’s current work-in-progress is called Under The Knife, and is what she describes as a “mytho-memoir”, which will be different from other work she’s done due to its longer, full manuscript form. “Mytho-memoir” stems from the idea of liberty to fill in the gaps of stories with details that might not be entirely true. “It’s a tool in writing that’s underglamourized and sometimes put to shame when it comes to certain stories,” she explained to me. In the case of the artist, this myth comes in the form of invention of the self, the freedom to change your mind.
In November, Franklin read her work at a poetry event at VOLUMES Book Cafe in Wicker Park, Parallax: Women on the Undefined. Here, she read both published poems and an excerpt from Under the Knife, which she hopes to release (or at least a version of it) by the end of 2018. The title refers to a phrase her mother uses to describe undergoing surgical procedures, as well as being a metaphor for life as a black person or a person of color: “The reality of your life is dissected every single day, in the face of systemic racism, and the dangers and aggressions that come from that, as well,” said Franklin during Parallax.
Franklin explained afterwards that Under the Knife would operate somewhat as “manicured memories”, not guaranteeing that every single memory presented would be 100% accurate to her own experience. But she does say that these accounts are “aligned with” the truth.
In our interview, it became clear to me that according to Krista Franklin, we live in a world that lives by two different types of myths: one can help shape your story to ensure resonance, the other houses some misconceptions about the lives of artists.
After my interview with Franklin, I decided to make a short list of what I’m sure is a much longer list, of what some myths are to her, in relation to art and the art world.
1. The mysterious life of an artist to a family and the inability to make money off of your art.
Both Franklin and I come from a family of immigrants who only want their children to be successful. I asked her for advice in dealing with family during the holidays who brush off your art as a career. She sympathized with them:
They really can’t see it, the worlds we live in. They don’t even know they exist. They only see the product, they don’t see how the person got there. They’re immigrants, they have a perspective of the world and they want you to be safe and taken care of. They don’t know any other kinda way to get money, they don’t have any framework for it. You can silence them with your success.
The work that goes into this success is a myth to our families, who moved here in order to attain success in line with the fed American dream. This brings me to myth number two.
2. “Inspiration is a myth created to feed the romantic lure around artists and artistry, art is thinking and labor."
This quote is from an interview Franklin did in Rolling Out Magazine with Munson Steed. When Steed asked about seeking inspiration, she said the above quote. In referencing this, she replied:
[They] forget about all the emotional labor, mental, intellectual, physical. The myths that are constructed and deployed in the world, that supercede us. ‘Artists are flighty, they're bohemian’ (first of all, nobody says that any more). ‘Artists are these people where the inspiration strikes, and it's all ethereal,’ and it's like no, that's a job. Maybe that's not a job you've ever seen before. But this is their work, to pay the bills. And it's taking a lot out of them to do it. Maybe we can't quantify it like someone who works in a factory or who goes into a job everyday, but it's a job in your own rite.
“This is our factory,” I said, gesturing toward my brain and the rest of my body.
“Your body, your ideas,” she replied.
Franklin calls herself an “active participant” in the perfect balance of study, thought, and work, making it clear that inspiration doesn’t simply find her. Like other artists, she is involved in it, actively battling demons in order to follow through with a vision.
The refusal to equate art with labor is something Franklin knows to be devaluing of artists’ work, a detrimental myth that many outside of that world perpetuate in order to reap the benefits for a lower price.
3. You must be the same person, or the same artist, your whole life to stay true to your identity.
We do not have one life, we live many. To deal means living with empathy, forcing us to slip into the lives of others, which is something that we often do as artists and as educators.
In discussing Franklin’s role as a teacher, we shared our awe in the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. I asked her if there was a moment or a student who has completely blown her away thus far. After taking a long pause and a realized gasp, she told me the story of a student who turned in a paper that was in need of some help. Franklin turned the paper back to the student and told her what she thought and requested that she work on it further. She said that when the student turned the paper back in revised, she was floored by her ability to take directions and completely turn the writing around. We marveled at how parallel this was to humans, not only in character, but as artists. We have the ability to turn ourselves around, to become new people despite our feelings of despair when we end up not being the people we initially thought we would be. We both agreed that no matter your profession, you are constantly making life up as you go along. This involves accepting reinvention of the self.
“How dull would life be if we were one thing all the time? You gotta leave room for invention...that’s the richness of being a human in the world,” Franklin said.
This opened up a conversation about something we have a mutual love for: hip hop music. In particular, I brought up the way rappers have always gotten criticism when the storylines in their music don’t always match up with their history. As a sub-myth, we debunk the belief that everything said out loud must be true.
For example, both 2Pac and Drake have been “called out” by listeners and fellow rappers for reciting lyrics that aren’t necessarily accurate to their lives.
I think we should leave more room for people to explore different parts of their personalities. With 2Pac, people were always sayin’, ‘he's so hypocritical’. Everybody does that. We ALL do that. We all have multiple sides. Embrace.
Sometimes the made-up, sometimes the myth, sometimes these fictional narratives that are constructed have more resonance cuz they're teaching us something profound. It's not necessarily important that XYZ happened exactly like this. But what did you get from it? What did you learn from it. What did that person bring into your life, you know what I mean?
4. You must always be blown away by your own work, and that it should be finished at some point.
To escape from work, Franklin says that she allows herself sometimes to rest and “slack all the way off.” What does this look like for her?: Netflix, a lot of booze, and hanging out with friends, or as she likes to call it filling her “human side, woman side, the black girl” in her.
When I asked her about her process and how she goes about creating, she said that she makes sure to create for at least 15 minutes every day, even if the product isn’t something that’s clear from the get-go. “Even if nothing magnificent comes of it,” she said.
“How do you know when something is magnificent to you?” I asked Franklin.
Oh shit, I don't even know, Mallory. I think it's more about being pleased. You know when you have something that makes you happy, that's usually the feeling that I have, when I feel that something is done, or kinda done. ‘I could live with this, this has interesting parts in it that I enjoy’. For me, I don't necessarily believe is any piece of writing or any piece of art being finished ever. so it's always like this open-ended ellipses...this could be Phase 1 of its iteration. Then I'll go off to something else.
In speaking about knowing when it’s time to create, she cites the ugly side of the process, or rather the unpleasant side effects of knowing when it’s time.
The work is so much a part of who we are and what we do. I can't get too far away from it. And I began to figure out, as I get older, that when I start getting mean, or speaking harshly to the people that I love, or I'm impatient, or I don't have a lot of compassion for the people around me, that's when I'm like, ‘Oh you're not creating, you need to find something to do with your hands and your heart and your mind,’ because you're using all of that energy, you're deploying it, you're creating it in ways that are harmful.
When I'm not making, when I'm not writing, when I'm not feeding the artist inside of me, I turn into a bit of a monster.
5. Finally, the myth that breeds the hardest habit to kick: believing when you’re told that you’re not good at something.
At some point in the interview, I asked Franklin what she thought she would be doing if she weren’t an artist. She replied, “A healer of some sort.”
This rang true the most to me when we were discussing her work as an educator. I asked her, “How do you carry out your mission into your class?”
In her first year, she’s learned a lot about her many students: what their goals are, what they want from the class, who they are.
“Not everyone has the goal to be a published writer. Some students are in there because they're trying to figure out how writing or texts interface with their visual work.” Franklin explained.
She knows that not every student who walks out of her class at the end of the semester is going to attain the same exact skills or interpret her teaching in the same way since everyone is coming from different vantage points.
What she found to be the case, however — which she says breaks her heart every time — is that kids are being told by different adults in their lives that they are bad at writing, or any other skill they haven’t fully developed but have attempted.
I can't tell you how many writings I've received this year that say, ‘I'm trying to get my self-esteem back because in high school, my teacher told me I was a bad writer.’
Who's saying this? Who's responsible for this shit? Why are you telling a child they can't write? If they can't write, that's your job to teach them how to write.
Franklin emphasizes the problem with the American school system’s one-size-fits-all blanket:
What does that even mean that they can't write? That they can't put sentences together? They can't spell? Are they dyslexic? What's going on? There's so many factors at play.
And then I, as a teacher in their college years, figure out how to build their self-esteem back up so they can get back to doin’ the work they're supposed to be doin’ in the world! Now I have to UNDO the damage and the harm that you've caused by telling a young person they can't do some shit. A bad writer, what does that even fuckin' mean?
So how exactly does she bring herself as an artist into the classroom? She says that her main goal is to expand their ideas about the possibilities of the written word and the many ways it can function for us as “human beings in the world.”
“I say this all the time: my students teach me far more than I teach them. EVERY SINGLE TIME. It looks like I'm the teacher, but they're actually the teacher. And I'm their student.”
This piece was originally written for my Contemporary Art Criticism class, taught by Lori Waxman, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 2017 Fall semester.