Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd  Soul Sand. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

In honor of Veterans Day, we’re revisiting an episode of Art Works that tells the origin story of Theater of War Productions. Co-founded by classicist, translator, and now its creative director Bryan Doerries, Theater of War began with a simple yet profound concept: presenting staged readings of Sophocles' plays Ajax and Philoctetes to military communities as a means of addressing both the particular challenges veterans face and the lasting impact of war on families and relationships.  Now, with over 20 specialized programs, Theater of War Productions reaches communities worldwide, addressing not only the struggles of veterans but also broader public health and social justice issues, including addiction, racialized violence, and natural disaster. 

This 2012 conversation with Bryan Doerries returns to the beginnings of Theater of War, exploring how he recognized the healing power of Greek classics for veterans navigating challenging circumstances."  Let’s listen

Excerpt of Ajax.  

Bill Camp: Ajax, Ajax! My name is a sad song. Who would’ve thought it would someday become the sound a man makes in despair?

Adam Driver: And now I must care for incurable Ajax. His mind infected by divine madness. Caught up in thoughts he unnerves his friends as we watch his greatest acts of bravery slip through his fingers.

Jo Reed: That is Bill Camp and Adam Driver performing in Sophocles's play, Ajax. It's one of the Greek tragedies presented to active service members and veterans by Theater of War.

Welcome to Art Works, the program that goes behind the scenes with some of the nation's great artists to explore how Art Works.
I'm your host Josephine Reed.

It's often too easy to think of ancient Greek tragedy as something to endure during college—vaguely interesting but essentially dead words on a page with little to say to the living. Well, classicist and translator, Bryan Doerries is having none of that. Mindful that Sophocles was a general as well as a playwright, Doerries and other scholars hold that his military plays were written with veterans in mind as a way to help them heal from almost a full century of war. Doerries believed passionately that these ancient military tragedies would both speak to the experiences of today's service members and provide an avenue for them to share their own stories. Doerries is not just a man of vision; he's also a man of action. He went to work and the result is Theater of War.

Bryan Doerries: "Theater of War" is an innovative public health project that presents readings of Sophocles' ancient Greek tragedies about war; in particular a play called Ajax and Philoctetes to service members and veterans as a catalyst for conversations about timeless issues that service members face today, such as PTSD, suicide, and the impact of war on families and communities. The "Theater of War" is not a performance. It's not entertainment to be consumed, it's a catalyst. And its aim is to give permission to audiences, to talk about things that are very hard to talk about; to talk about stigmatized topics, and to come at it from an emotionally raw and honest place. It's really about how do we help people who've experienced the trauma of war return to our communities and heal.

Jo Reed: Where did the idea for Theater of War come from, Bryan?

Bryan Doerries: Well, I wish I could say I came up with the idea. The idea kind of came up with me. I was sort of the right guy at the right place, the right time. I studied classics in college at Kenyon College in Ohio as an undergraduate, and always believed that these ancient plays that I was studying had a larger audience to reach than the ivory tower. And when I graduated I  went on to direct some- some of my own translations of ancient Greek and Roman plays, and was sobered by the reality that there was a very small audience, if any, that was interested in ancient Greek theater. So I set out to build an audience for my plays, for my translations.

Jo Reed: But what made you think service members in particular would be receptive to these plays?

Bryan Doerries: In the 2006/2007 range when the first real wave of reports of service members and veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were beginning to hit the front pages of papers, stories in which many of our veterans were not receiving the medical care they needed, or stories or homicides, or suicides, or domestic violence, the killing sprees, stories of depression, and stories that comes back from any war, when I started to read these in the newspaper I began to hear echoes and see lines in the stories that seemed like they could be ripped from Sophocles' plays. And that's where I started to get the idea. I thought if I can put my translations of ancient Greek plays in front of military audiences, something might be unlocked in the plays, and something might be unlocked by the plays in the audiences.

Jo Reed:  Bryan, you chose to present two plays by Sophocles: Ajax and Philoctetes.  

Bryan Doerries: I did choose them, again, I felt like it's sort of the plays chose me. Until I was about twenty-six, twenty-seven years old  I felt a passion that these plays-- not just those two in particular-- but these ancient plays had something relevant and meaningful to say to contemporary audiences. But it was really Philoctetes that was the key that unlocked not just the performances we're doing for the military, but performances my company are currently doing for many other types of audiences. The play tells the story of a combat veteran much decorated who'd been to Troy to war many times before in previous deployments, and who, during the first wave, this first expedition to Troy, the beginning of the Trojan War, contracts a mysterious illness from a snake bite and is then abandoned by his own unit, his own friends, on an island, a deserted island halfway between Greece and Troy, where he lives for nine years waiting for the Greeks to return and bring him home. The play depicts extremely agonizing and violent scenes of pain and suffering. Not just physical pain, although there's plenty of that in the play as you watch the main character writhe in agony with this mysterious illness that comes in waves and sort of overtakes his body, but also the psychological suffering, the anguish of having been abandoned and betrayed by your own friends and by your own unit members in the military. Well, anyway, I was reading the stories about the Walter Reed scandal, and on every newspaper after that Washington Post story broke I saw pictures of Philoctetes. Men and women on stretches, waiting for treatment, abandoned on islands. And it occurred to me that through modern medicine we'd created the conditions to abandon veterans and individuals suffering from chronic illness like Philoctetes.

Philoctetes: My son, I am Philoctetes, keeper of Heracles' bow. Whom the generals and Odysseus abandoned. Suffering from a snake bite, they left me here, to die in tattered rags, sleeping in a cave, starving without much food to eat. I only wish the same for them.

Bryan Doerries:  It occurred to me that perhaps the play was even more relevant now than it was in its own time. And so I got this passionate idea that I would go out and find a military audience. And I knew no one in the military at the time that I got this idea, and it took about a year-and-a-half to convince anyone in the military that performing Greek tragedy for active-duty service members would be a good idea.

Jo Reed: Take me through that. It's not easy to crack the military if you're an outsider. How were you able to convince somebody there to give the okay. Which branch was it?

Bryan Doerries: The Marine Corp gave us our start and I think uncoincidental. The Marines are a values-driven organization, and some of the core values that they uphold and that they are trained and inculcated to you know, hold within them our ancient values, values that transcend time, like honor, courage, and commitment. And so it's not hard for the plays to translate for these Marine Corp audiences. Basically what happened was I spent about a year knocking on doors, sort of in ignorance, not really knowing how to go about finding a military audience, calling people, or writing letters, sending emails. Most of the doors were politely shut in my face, a few were slammed. Almost a year out  I was beginning to give up hope that I would find an opportunity to do this. This was not my day job at the time, it was an avocation or hobby. And I was reading the New York Times in January of 2008, a series of front-page Sunday articles that were featuring and describing the invisible wounds of war and the onset of violence and suicide that was returning to our shores from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. And in that article in the New York Times there was a section called “an ancient connection” in which Jonathan Shay, the MacArthur award-winning writer and psychiatrist who wrote "Achilles in Vietnam", made a series of connections which I'd heard many time before by him and others between the ancient Homeric epics and contemporary war fighting. And those are all beautiful arguments, and Jonathan's a friend, and I was delighted to see him in the article. But just below where Jonathan had been quoted there was a quote by a Navy psychiatrist named Captain William P. Nash who was the head of combat operational stress control for the Marine Corp in 2008. And the quote was something like: "I begin all of my presentations on combat stress and PTSD with the ancient story of 'Ajax'."  There it was in bright lights. I knew if I'd track down William P. Nash, Captain Nash, I might find my audience. And so I got on the phone and started dialing, and I looked up email addresses. And within about a day I'd heard back from him and he said in his email, "I don't know about giving you a big military audience, but how about presenting your translations as a plenary session for a conference in San Diego on combat stress or PTSD for four or five hundred Marines. And, of course, that was our first performance later that summer, and it changed everything.

Jo Reed: The performances are very simple productions essentially they are readings. Why this simple structure?

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, it's deceptively simple. Really there are no frills. There’s a table with four or five chairs, four or five actors in their street clothes. The actors are reading from scripts. It's just a reading, so to speak. The reading  takes about fifty to sixty minutes, depending on which program we're presenting, what cut of a scripts. It's important for us to keep people's expectations as low as possible. And in some ways the slot that we're usually placed into in military contacts, the expectations certainly couldn't be lower because most of the time that slot is reserved for deadening PowerPoint presentations about the subjects we try to address. But people come in and they expect, you know, when they hear the word reading to be bored out of their minds. But of course our readings are like readings on steroids. The actors are fully committing emotionally. They're attacking the text. It's loud, it's fast. It defies any, you know, received expectation of what a reading is or could be. And as soon as the actors are finished with their reading there's no fanfare, no curtain call. They immediately leave the stage. And they're replaced by the four members of the community in which we're performing. And those members usually include a service member who's deployed and usually participated in the conflicts in the last ten years in Iraq or Afghanistan, a veteran of the current wars or previous war,  a chaplain or mental health professional, and finally a spouse or family member. And those individuals don't come having read "Ajax."  They're just ordinary people who have lived the experiences of Ajax and Philoctetes.  And so what I asked them to do is respond from their guts in the moment to what they've heard and saw what they've heard and seen in the plays that connect with their own experiences personally and professionally. So for three or four minutes apiece in a very raw and unedited fashion they respond, and it's usually very emotional, and it usually frames the tone of the discussion that follows. And as soon as their done with their opening remarks, then I go out into the audience and I ask the audience a series of questions that we've asked audiences all over the country and the world, and the questions are about the plays, but the questions are really aimed at giving the audience permission, having seen these very emotional performances and heard these really raw and emotional responses by our panelists, to respond in a similar fashion. And so these town hall meetings are, is really the objective of "Theater of War.”

Jo Reed: How did that first audience respond?

Bryan Doerries: The first time we scheduled one of these performances, that performance for 400 Marines in San Diego, we scheduled the town hall discussion to last 45 minutes, and it lasted several hours and had to be cut off near midnight. And at one point I remember looking out into the audience and seeing 40 to 50 people lined up to come up to the microphone. And each person who came up this first time spoke unbelievably well, and almost like perfectly rhetorically structured monologues in which they had always woven in or used a quote from the play as a point of departure for their comment, as if they'd known the plays their entire lives. People felt all empowered to speak the truth of their experience. And it was then that I knew that we had stumbled across something extremely powerful and ancient; perhaps something that in spite of the simplicity of the format you know, with we performed these events, something we've lost touch with in our culture, which is the power of what theater can do.

Jo Reed: Let's go back to the plays for a moment. Sophocles himself was a general, correct?

Bryan Doerries: So what we know is that Sophocles was a general. We think he was elected general twice, and in the ancient world you were in the fifth century Athenian army you were elected to be a general strategos. And he all of the three major tragedians: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, we presume had some form of military service in their background. Aeschylus, you know, on his grave it didn't say: "Here lies the greatest playwright of the western world."  His gravestone read "Here lies a man who fought in the battle of Marathon." Sophocles was a general. And of course in that time the citizen body of Athens was conscripted into compulsory service. And so it's presumed that as many as 17,000 citizen soldiers comprised the audience that watched these ancient plays. And so then it comes of no coincidence that in a century in which Athens saw nearly 80 years of war, that some of the plays that have survived, the 2,500 years' period since they were written, dealt explicitly with topics that only those who've been to war or those who'd cared for those who've been to war could possibly understand.

Jo Reed: You already talked about the play Philoctetes; would you mind telling  me the story of the other play by Sophocles that you present, Ajax?

Bryan Doerries: Sure. Ajax is the story of a extremely brave and decorated ancient Greek warrior who at the end of nine years of non-stop battle, of nine-year deployment, after losing his best friend Achilles, slips into a depression and into grief. And when betrayed by his commanding officers who end up giving his best friend's armor to Odysseus, another warrior who he feels doesn't deserve them, slips into what can only be described as a dissociative state in which he, filled with rage, attempts to kill his commanding officers and then ultimately kills animals, mistaking them for the men he comes to kill. When he wakes up from that dissociative rage he realizes that he's stained his family and disgraced his unit, and ultimately Ajax takes his own life. The play is about that, but it's also about his family, his wife, his son, his troops, trying as hard as they can to stop Ajax from harming himself when he wakes up and sees what he's actually done.

Jo Reed: I would imagine that Ajax opens up a tremendous amount of dialogue about the impact of PTSD on the families of service members returning from war.

Bryan Doerries: Yeah, the remarkable thing about Sophocles, I see Sophocles as much as a playwright and a producer as a  health professional. He brought 17,000 citizen soldiers together and seated them at an outdoor amphitheater in the center of the city of Athens during a century in which Athens saw nearly 80 years of war. And then he told them the story, the Homeric story, a version of the story, of Ajax, in which he takes us into the mind of a soldier who's contemplating suicide. And one of the most remarkable scenes in this play is a scene in which everyone leaves the stage, which is never done in Greek tragedy. The chorus leaves, and the actor playing Ajax is left alone onstage brandishing a weapon, praying to his gods as he contemplates killing himself. And ultimately he kills himself onstage, which is almost never done in ancient Greek tragedy. So Sophocles goes so far as to stage the violence of the suicide. So all these things to me support this notion that he was trying to bring attention to an issue that his community was facing.

Tecmessa: In the dead of night, when the lamps no longer burned, Ajax found his sword and moved to the door. Naturally, I objected. “Where are you going? No messengers come calling for help, all of the soldiers are asleep, please come back to bed.” He turned to me and firmly said, “Woman. Silence becomes a woman.” I've heard that before, and I know what it means, so I quit asking questions. And he left without saying a word. Whatever happened then, I cannot say.

When service members and veterans and families see this play they immediately know what it's about. The first time we did it the first person to speak at that performance was a woman. And she stood up and she said, "Hello. I'm the proud mother of a Marine and the wife of a Navy Seal. And my husband went away four times to war just like Ajax. And each time he came back dragging invisible bodies into our house. And “our home is a slaughterhouse,” to quote from the play. The war came home with him. And when someone does something like that, when a spouse gets up and speaks the truth of her experience, bears witness, it creates a space where other spouses feel comfortable doing the same.

Jo Reed: Bryan, why do you think theater in particular and art in general can serve as a catalyst for people? What do you think it enables in us?

Bryan Doerries: Well, with theater there's something direct and visceral, and I think it affects us on a just a base neurological level. In our audiences I often see people who have been made to come. You know, they say in the military when you have an audience like that they're “voluntold” to attend. And so you're looking at an audience of say 500 Marines, and they're looking at me in my arty glasses and my trim-cut suit, and I'm talking about Greek tragedy in this, you know, somewhat effete way, and I'm looking at their expressions and I can tell that they're thinking about all the different ways they might disembowel me before I finish my introduction. And then ten minutes into the performance, when Ajax comes out of his tent, or when Athena appears, or when Tecmessa, Ajax's wife, is howling for his man to come help mount this intervention to stop her husband from killing himself, all of a sudden you look out in the audience and there are 500 Marines all sitting forward in their seats, and doing what in the military is called locking on, which means staring without blinking for an hour. And there's something about live theater that is something alchemical, something neurological, something transcendent that erases and dissolves boundaries and hierarchies temporarily, something about theater that is extremely conducive to creating a safe space for people to respond in this human way. The idea behind our work is that after we've all had a shared experience of suffering, no matter who we are or what our background, once we've come together and we've had this experience of these actors performing these ancient plays, for about an hour or maybe an hour and a half afterwards, I don't know, our walls come down. And with theater, and with ancient theater in particular, there's also another great advantage which is to say with these audiences where the stakes are career ending in some instances to get up and say, "I have PTSD," or "I've been depressed," or "I've thought about suicide," or "My spouse has thought about suicide," the stake couldn't be any higher. To create an environment where people feel comfortable doing that, the ancient plays are really handy at that because one can watch Ajax and feel all the emotions of the play, and stand up during the town hall discussion and simply say, "I really related to the scene in which Ajax said, "The great man must live in honor, or die an honorable death."  That- that really spoke to my core values. The idea of death before dishonor is something that, you know, my grandfather told me about. Someone could say that. Someone could also stand up and say and step out from behind the archetype and behind the metaphor and behind the character and say, "You know, I was really moved by that because I am Ajax."  And we hear that kind of response either way 50 times in a given town hall discussion. You can simply talk about the play and everyone in the audience knows that you're speaking from a personal perspective without in any way endangering or revealing something that could be hurtful to you and your family. So that's how our format works. I think in general the arts are healing to veterans and to the communities we've visited because they tap into that reminds us of things that…a good example is we were performing at a military base, an Army base for a warrior transition unit. And these are soldiers that are being transitioned usually out of the Army and medically boarded out, but during that time they are treated at as if they're their own specific unit. And after the performance, this Army soldier came up to me and he said, "I didn't feel comfortable speaking during the discussion. But I wanted to tell you, Bryan, that I think Sophocles wrote these plays to restore humanity to individuals who for whatever series of reasons felt that they had lost it along the way. I think he wrote these plays  to restore our humanity."  And I think art has the potential and the capacity to help restore humanity, because it almost reflexively involuntarily it taps into something that reminds us that we are human.

Jo Reed: Well from that performance in San Diego, you ended up collaborating with the Department of Defense. How did that come about?

Bryan Doerries: Shortly after that initial performance of "Theater of War" in 2008 someone said you should really talk to this general named Brigadier General Loree Sutton, who at the time was the founding director of the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury.  And so we did a performance at a conference for the DOD later that year. And the conference was, you know, high-ranking officials, and many generals, and all the people in the corps deco community that were coming together to address these issues. And that went extremely well, and that resulted in a series of conversations at the sort of highest levels of mental health within the military. And you know, I don't know, maybe a couple of months after that I found myself sitting around a table with 15 or 20 people high-ranking officers from every service. We even had someone from the NEA with us. And we also sat around the table and rolled up our sleeves and said, you know, "What would it mean to take this idea and take it to scale." By the end of the meeting we were talking about, "Well, what would it mean if we did 200 performances at 100 military bases or posts across the country?"  We got a contract, and over a one-year period we did more than 100 performances at military sites throughout the country and the world.

Jo Reed: Well, you've been at this for awhile. How has Theater of War evolved over the years?

Bryan Doerries: Oh, boy. Well, so we have a number of projects now that have grown out of "Theater of War" that address pressing public health issues and social issues through live theater and discussion. And our company is now evolved, and the name of the company is Outside the Wire, and that's in reference to a military term which refers to when service members go out the parameter fence of the forward operating base into places of danger. And in some ways all of the audiences we now perform for, whether they're hospice nurses or in prisons, or service members or addicts going to clinics, these are people who live at the extremities of life and who face danger and death on a daily basis. So the exciting thing is that methodology of "Theater of War," the sort of hard-won lessons of facilitating 200 of these events and directing them, has resulted in our applying that very same set of ideas to other social issues.

 

Jo Reed: And on that, we'll leave it. Bryan, thank you so much.

Bryan Doerries: Oh, you're most welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.

Jo Reed: That was Bryan Doerries the co-founder and creative director of Theater of War Productions. You can find out about their 20 plus projects and initiatives that address health and social issues at theaterofwar.com  we’ll have a link in our show notes

Excerpts from Philoctetes performed by David Straithairn 
Excerpts from Ajax performed by Adam Driver, Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel. Both used courtesy of Theater of War

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For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

The Art Works podcast is posted every Thursday at www.arts.gov. And now you subscribe to Art Works at iTunes U -- just click on the iTunes link on our podcast page.

To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art  Works blog, or follow us @NEAARTS on Twitter. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Bryan Doerries discusses how bringing Greek tragedies to service members opens up new conversations.

Bryan Doerries: I think in general the arts are healing to veterans and to the communities we've- we've visited because they tap into that reminds us of things that…a good example is we were performing at a military base, an Army base for a warrior transition unit. And these are soldiers that are being transitioned usually out of the Army and medically boarded out, but during that time they are treated at as if they're their own specific unit. And after the performance, this Army soldier came up to me and he said, "I didn't feel comfortable speaking during the discussion. But I wanted to tell you, Bryan, that I think Sophocles wrote these plays to restore humanity to individuals who for whatever series of reasons felt that they had lost it along the way. I think he wrote these plays t- to restore our humanity." And I think art has the potential and the capacity to help restore humanity, because it almost reflexively involuntarily it taps into something that reminds us that we are human.

Music Credits: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T, from the cd Soul Sand; used courtesy of the Free Music Archive

Jo Reed: From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works. I’m Josephine Reed. Today, we’re celebrating Native American Heritage Month with a conversation with Rose B.Simpson, an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo whose work expands the boundaries of Native American art with profound and innovative sculptures, installations, and performance pieces. Rose’s creations explore resilience, cultural legacy, and our relationship with the land—reflecting a blend of traditional influences, contemporary themes, and bold implementation.

Recently, Rose was commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy to create Seed, a monumental installation that invites reflection on place and history within New York City’s urban landscape. Her deep connection to her heritage informs her work, as seen in everything from Seed to her striking clay figures to Maria, her iconic 1985 El Camino reimagined as a sculptural homage to Pueblo potter Maria Martinez, complete with a traditional black-on-black pottery design. 

 Rose B Simpson is joining me to discuss her art, deeply rooted in her role as a member of Santa Clara Pueblo and how cultural heritage and artistic exploration intersect in powerful, transformative ways. Rose welcome—thank you for joining me.

Rose B. Simpson: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Jo Reed:  You were invited to create large-scale public art to help mark the 20th anniversary season of the Madison Park Art Conservancy—a season that received funding from the NEA.   You created Seed—and it was an installation in two parks in Manhattan is in two parks, Madison Square Park in lower midtown and Inwood Hill Park at the top of Manhattan. Will you describe that public installation is before we talk about it?

Rose B. Simpson: So, there's seven 18-foot tall steel and bronze sentinels that are encircling a bronze larger-than-life bust who is sort of planting herself in a grouping of indigenous plants. Her eyes are closed and she's holding herself and then there's another part of that installation up at Inwood Hill Park and there's two bronze miniatures-- so, they're only seven feet-- of the sentinel forms that are facing in towards the natural environment and then out and towards like sort of the man-made world.

Jo Reed: What inspired the use of such large-scale figures, and I'm thinking about Madison Square Park, those seven, in such an urban public space?  And how do they connect with the history of that land and the Lenape people?

Rose B. Simpson: I often take my inspiration from actually being present in a place. So, I couldn't have my concept or my idea come to me until I actually visited Madison Square Park and spent some time there and so, I went to go visit that space and sit in the space and ask the space what it needed me to tell, to speak for it in a way, like what it needed me to convey through the tools that I have and one of the main things that stood out for me was that the park itself is sort of a haven in this really intense city. I'm not a city person. I live in Northern New Mexico in Santa Clara Pueblo and it's pretty rural. So, cities are really intense for me and so, the park itself becomes sort of like a respite from this intense, man-made, energetic vortex that is the city. So, I see things as sort of vessels. So, our bodies are vessels, our vehicles are vessels, our homes are vessels and the park itself has these walls and then this floor and it represents as this vessel. So, I wanted to recreate that feeling of the monstrosity of architecture and how you enter into this space to let go or release in a place where you're on all the time. So, that was kind of to make it in situ, it sure doesn't look monumental because of the nature of the city itself, but it really is. Eighteen feet is really large, but it had to hold its own space and, in a sense, the sentinels reflect that architecture and mimic the way that the park itself feels. In a place like New York, I know that there's millions of stories and not just of our generations, but all the stories that came before of the original inhabitants of the places whose ancestral homelands are under those buildings, to the enslaved and degraded people throughout time who have been a part of the making of that place and their difficult stories and lives and I think about those things and I try and close my eyes and feel them. Because we can't heal if we forget how to listen to something bigger than human voices and sounds we make. And I really believe in that and so, in those moments where we can let go and find that reconnection to something that's bigger than us, then we can begin to heal.

Jo Reed: I wonder how the experience of working in two very different New York City parks, one all the way uptown, the other one downtown-ish, how that might have expanded your vision for Seed, especially considering Madison Square Park is so urban and believe it or not, Inwood Hill Park for Manhattan is really kind of natural. It's a natural space. So, I'm curious how that expanded your vision or challenged it.

Rose B. Simpson: What was really cool about Inwood Hill Park was that I learned that Inwood Hill Park has some of the last remaining natural formations and landscape that's there in that area. So, that was really special to me. I always wonder when I go someplace "What did this land look like before we turned it into a city, before it was colonized, before we subjected it to capitalism and our current values and world?" So, a place like Inwood Hill Park really showed me some of the beauty that once existed below Manhattan, below the city. So, I think instead of the sentinels being these protective elements there, they became, for me, a reflection and the way that they stand shoulder to shoulder, one facing into the woods and one facing out over the park and the river, that they're in a state of reflection and state of consideration about what we've done and what we're doing, where we come from and where we're going. And then to have that generational accountability is super important. So, as we reflect and consider and attune ourselves to sort of a deeper consciousness of what's going on, that we can also lead and demonstrate how to do this for the next generations, so that we can survive what might be coming our way.

Jo Reed: Well, I want to know a little bit more about you. You come from a long line of ceramic artists in the Santa Clara Pueblo. Tell me how art was part of the woof and the warp as you were growing up, just so braided into your life.

Rose B. Simpson: So, my mother is ceramicist, my grandma was a potter, my great-grandma was a potter, my great-great-grandma, etc. So, through my matrilineal side, I was given access and shown clay and when I was a kid, every mom that I knew, every grandma, every auntie were working on pottery. They all did pottery and I remember being in the tribal day school and we had to talk about what our moms did for a living and one of the kids said her mom was the manager at Sonic and I remember it kind of melting my brain. I didn't think moms did anything but pottery. That was like the way things are. In the small, intimate history and delicate nature of this cultural perseverance that we're in, it really is special and I think it's incredible that we're still a part of this lineage and we're still walking in the hills behind our homes and seeing the pots, the shards, the broken pieces of the pots that our great-great-great-great grandmas made right there. all those layers of history and connection are still really apparent and vibrant. I've studied in Japan and I did some exchange work in South Korea and if you really think about the history of ceramics in that area, it makes us look like we're really fresh to ceramics when we don't have like our 13,000-year-old pots. But it's still a very vibrant and imbued dedication because clay is not just something aesthetic. It's actually a person in our world. It's a being. It's someone and that someone grows our food, that someone is our home, that someone is the vessel that we eat out of and then we pray with. So, because we're in the high desert southwest, the earth is visible and she's an active participant in our reality in so many ways.

Jo Reed: Well, you chose to stay in New Mexico. You went to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and then the Institute of American Indian Arts. But then for graduate school for an MFA, you decided to go to the Rhode Island School of Design. What informed these decisions?

Rose B. Simpson: Actually, I was the valedictorian from high school and I got accepted to Dartmouth and I remember thinking that "If the world ended, I couldn't walk home from Dartmouth." I just had this really sinking feeling that if all the infrastructure and the government collapsed and all that we knew and took for granted, phones and cars and trains and planes, if it all disappeared or stopped working, that I couldn't find my way home. My great grandpa went to the Indian School in Albuquerque and Albuquerque is about, I don't know how many miles, but I think it's over 60, but it's like an hour and a half drive from my home. And he used to run home on the weekends and he would run up the river and sometimes he would sleep in a cave and I always thought "As long as I know where the Rio Grande River, our main river here is, then I know where I am and I know I can get home, no matter what happens." I think I was too young, and I needed to know that I still had that connection to home and that if anything happened, I could follow the river north and end up in my pueblo, where my family is and my context and what's most important to me. So, I chose to go to UNM in Albuquerque because of that and then I ended up at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe for undergrad, which was really important. I think that going to the Santa Fe Indian School for high school and then the Institute of American Indian Arts, I made some of the most important friends and connections in my life. That kind of community that we build, even though it might be remote or on the internet, or that we're traveling this path together, in a sense. We're co-creating what is Indian art or this idea of who we become, in a sense. I think artists oftentimes are the explorers, are the trackers of the future and we're trying to do this together and with agency and accountability and responsibility and awareness of each other and support. But when I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, I couldn't walk home from Rhode Island and I think that I was ready to find home inside of me, and be able to take that with me and have that kind of faith in that which I carry within me, which actually led me to study in Japan. And I can't walk home from Japan. So, that set me in a really vulnerable space. But I think that vulnerability really pushed me to learn the most and so, I'm super grateful for those times that I was brave enough to journey into my discomfort.

Jo Reed: Tell me about more about that journey and what you learned?

Rose B. Simpson: I think being at RISD was really, really, really important for me and that was because I was exploring the process and as a metaphor for life, in a sense, that compassionate process, mostly because I held such a critical view of growth and healing and learning and evolving and that if I could explore uncomfortable states in my creative process that expresses and manifests visually for the outside world to see that I can have compassion and patience and care for that same process within my heart, within my soul, deep inside. And so, I feel like graduate school was super, super important to allow me that journey into the unknown and the scary things around process and I think that if you go to graduate school, and you don't do what scares you, then you're kind of wasting your time, personally. So, I think that exploring different ways to build with clay, playing around with size and scale and how that feels and then really digging into performance art, studying performance art, writing about it and then being in a place like Rhode Island and falling in love with somewhere that wasn't home and also, as someone who has lived most of her life on my ancestral homelands, in my tribal community, to be an outsider, to be someone who's not from a place, to be a guest and to figure out how to navigate that respectfully, that's a very, very vulnerable state to be in when you're aware and conscious that you are a guest in someone else's home, changes the way you be. And I think, being in Japan, there's no way I can fake it, to pretend I'm from there. I don't speak the language. I don't look right. So, that was an incredible experience in that vulnerability and that discomfort of an outsider and that, I think, is incredible. If I could sit with that suspended disbelief as long as possible, I think it would grow me the most.

Jo Reed: Was it in Japan where you began to intentionally leaving imperfections in your work visible—for example intentionally leaving thumbprints, showing seams, -- not having this flawless finish on your pieces, so the process is clearly visible. 

Rose B. Simpson: I think I already started exploring that. I had a couple incredible teachers. One was Shannon Goff and the other was Linda Sormin, who really pushed me in my practice to go outside of my comfort zone. But by the time I got to Japan, I think that process was becoming holistic, where I understood the compassion. They talk about “wabi-sabi” and finding beauty in the broken, finding absolute serenity in showing the process of something. I think that I found in Japan and actually in my studies in relational aesthetics and aesthetics of the everyday, that there was a deep correlation and connection between Japanese culture, or what I saw of it as an outsider, and our ancestral belief systems and relationship to land and place, that I was really trying to define and be able to communicate to people who didn't fully understand that. I was finding in Japanese culture, a lot of the references and resources I needed to explain that, which I was trying to convey about where I was coming from and what I was trying to communicate. But I ended up going back to school for a second master's in creative nonfiction, intentionally to write that scholarly text on indigenous aesthetics that I felt was missing from what I needed as a reference in graduate school.

Jo Reed: You also went to an automotive school,which I think is amazing.

Rose B. Simpson: Yeah. (laughter)

Jo Reed:  What compelled this?

Rose B. Simpson: So, the town that's adjacent to my homeland, my reservation is called Española, New Mexico and that's like our town. It is the lowrider capital of the world and so, I grew up really-- my youth culture was really embedded in lowrider culture and Chicano culture. So, when I was studying performance art, I was thinking so much about the example of relational aesthetics or aesthetics of the everyday in a lowrider car. That here is something that's not considered art necessarily. It's a car. But it creates and conveys and produces an aesthetic experience where the moment becomes the art itself. And I became so caught by that which I absolutely adored and loved about being from my town and what's so interesting is like the cruise line was so important in my town as a teenager because we didn't have cell phones yet and so, in order to have a social life, you needed a car to drive up and down the road and to find all your buddies because they were also all driving back and forth on the road, building sort of the social environment around cars. And so, because of my study in performance art and relational aesthetics, I got really excited to go back to school and learn how to do paint and body for automotive. So, I went to Española Community College at the time and Northern New Mexico Community College and studied automotive science and auto body specifically which was like basically collision repair. But there, it was more like lowrider building and classic and custom car design. So, I studied there for three and a half years and. At that point in my life, I was like "I'm going to get my degree in automotive science and then I'm going to run this program," because I saw how much the program offered to the valley. There's a lot of issues in my town-- that's a long story. But I felt like relational aesthetics and the car culture that the town provided really had-- it was like "We have the healthy option. We have what we need within our culture to heal us already." I wanted to, more from a philosophical perspective, to run that program and make it something really incredible for the youth of the Valley. So, that's kind of why I did that, but also, to gain the skill set and knowledge to do classic car customization, basically.

Jo Reed: As you did with your piece, “Maria”, which is an homage to the great Pueblo potter, Maria Martinez, using a black-on-black design on an El Camino. Talk about that car. It's an extraordinary thing to see.

Rose B. Simpson: Yeah, “Maria” happened because of that program. The first day of class, they don't care your degrees or where you came from or your story. They just want to know what car you're bringing to work on. So, I bought this '85 El Camino –it was really ugly--and started driving it to school because it drove and I would work on it and work on it and work on it, this idea that the more I fixed it up, the more I could get out of the body and then it started growing on me. My mom has a non-profit organization called Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, where she grows out our indigenous seeds and teach classes on sustainability and cultural preservation and so, she has different places where she grows out our indigenous seed and the end of one summer, we had harvest and my brother's kids were young, like five, six, seven years old, and we needed to go into the field and harvest. She had beans, chili, melons, squash and we would have gone out there with baskets and wheelbarrows. My mom said "Let's take that ugly thing." And we parked it out by the field and the little kids could reach over the side of the bed and fill it with all the abundant harvest and as we drove the El Camino back out of the field and into the front to unload it, where we were going to process all that, I realized she was this vessel. And she was a part of the community and she was providing assistance in this really beautiful way. And the edges and curves of her bed were very much like a pot and that was when it really hit me. I knew that a car was a vessel and that there were layers to this and in that moment, I was like "Wow, she is really someone.”  I decided to paint her as a pot and turn her into pottery. At the time, I was doing a residency at the Denver Art Museum and I was setting up to do a performance, which I started calling “Transformance” because of how the intentionality of the moment transforms not only the participant, but also the viewer and so, I decided to get this car, quote-unquote, "done" to participate in this in this parade that I was putting together for the Denver Art Museum that would be about sort of taking up space and deconstructing gender roles and empowerment. So, I got her running well and finished the paint job and I put a bunch of subwoofers back behind the seats and then I blasted a heartbeat through it because when I was a teenager, I bought my first car when I was 12 and the first thing I did was put in 12-inch subwoofers because that was the late 90s and that's what you needed in your car was to totally blow your eardrums and everyone else's. So, that was kind of a natural thing to have this bass through this car and that was the first engine. She has a new engine since then.

Jo Reed: You’ve mentioned Maria was included in a performance piece. I’m curious how performance art may be different for you than your sculptures.

Rose B. Simpson: You know, it's terrifying to perform. It's terrifying to put yourself out there in the world. It's one thing to make a piece of art that is an object in a sense and you talk to it and you say "Go out into the world and do the work that you're supposed to do and I have faith in you and I trust you." But they're the ones going out there and doing it. It's another thing when it's your own body and it's your own being and it's active and there's the fears of messing up or doing something wrong or being seen in a way that I don't think we're generally aware or conscious of. So, I think that the act of performance or transformance has really imbued my intentionality and taught me a lot about who I am and where I'm going and where I'm coming from.  Because I've done quite a few transformances since then and they've transformed.(laughs)

Jo Reed: I do want to talk about your current show at the Cleveland Museum of Art called “Strata” and that brings together clay and metal and concrete in monumental figures and it's positioned in an expansive, light-filled atrium. So, there are a couple of questions I have and the first is how do you see the figures interacting with the architectural space of the atrium?

Rose B. Simpson: Again, I waited until I was in situ to ask the place what needed to be made or said and "How can I help?" One of the things that I was aware of was that atrium is profound. It sort of stretches between sort of an older architectural style, which was the original museum and then the modern, more newer wing or building that's to the front of the museum. I guess it used to be an open space, but they managed to stretch this incredible glass ceiling over both buildings. The shadows that it left on the ground and the way that a museum can sometimes take you out of the present in ways because there's no natural light. There's no sort of awareness of time. But the atrium brings you back into a consciousness of the weather, of the time of day, of our relationship to the natural world and where we are on this planet, right? So, I also considered the scale of that building in that space and I realized that I needed to do something incredibly monumental. I think at the time when I saw there was these Ai Weiwei pieces that were in the atrium. I measured them and they were 14 feet tall and they look so tiny and I was like "Oh, no, I have to make something large." So, part of it was this idea of the shadow it casts and how a shadow, especially if it's made by the sun, is a sort of a timepiece and a reflection of our influence and our experience as beings in this world and in my journey to remind us all that the inanimate is listening or what we have deemed the inanimate has consciousness, this is yet another way that I can somehow try to relay that message through these two pieces and I've dealt with the duality of two pieces. I did, I think it was in 2015, Site Santa Fe had this 20th anniversary show and I made these two 11-foot-tall clay and steel figures and I set them in this 60-foot room alone. I was playing around with the tension between these two pieces. So, to walk between them as they stared at each other, it was almost visceral, the energy that they sort of created in the space between them.

Jo Reed: That leads me really nicely to this question because I'm curious how you see the viewer's role in completing the story or the energy of your work.

Rose B. Simpson: Recently, someone told me that my installation at the Whitney Biennial that had four larger-than-life clay figures facing each other-- so, they were at four corners and staring in-- that in a sense, the viewer was witnessing the work conscious of itself. I think that is super important to me because I make these hollow eyes, the eyes are hollow, the figures are hollow, they have these clay walls, they are vessels and there's something in there that's aware. There's something in there that we can remember has the potential of consciousness. And I feel like in this world where we have been so incredibly entitled and independent in a sense and we think we know best. And I often wonder if something that is personified, a piece of art that is a human, that is anthropomorphic, and it's watching, it has consciousness, it's watching and whether it's watching us or if it's in relationship or conversation with another one of its kind, that we can begin to recognize consciousness in that which we have deemed inanimate. And I feel like the viewer, if they spend enough time witnessing the witnessing that the piece is doing, that maybe they'll get the chills down their spine and they won't see the world the same.

Jo Reed: That's so well said. Your work challenges Western art hierarchies in many ways by embracing cultural techniques and ideas that have been passed down through the generations of your family. I'm just curious about some of the challenges you face in sort of maintaining that balance between a tradition, but a tradition that you want to expand, and innovation. It's a bit of a balancing act, I would think.

Rose B. Simpson: Absolutely. Actually, this summer has been a really big contemplative moment for me. As someone who is an active participant in my community, there is a lot of responsibility in being a community member and a lot of accountability to the decisions you make in your life and I feel like I take a lot of risks being as innovative and outside of the box as I am as a Pueblo person who is still part of my community, a community that is incredibly conservative. There's lots of things that I can't say and mostly because it's not my place and because I know why, then I don't want to cross those boundaries. It's not my place to speak about. It's not my place to make work about. And because of that, it's forced me, I think, to almost be more innovative and more abstract in certain ways. How can I convey that which I'm trying to say without being disrespectful, without being extractive, and without taking any cultural shortcuts in my work that could   represent my people in the wrong way? Because as an active community member, what I do reflects on my community and I make tons and tons of mistakes. But I'm also learning and having to choose constantly between what I feel needs to be said, what I feel is healthily conveyed, and how I can be in my integrity in what I'm doing and check myself constantly if I am letting any kind of mind trip or entitlement that is outside of the integrity of my values and the values of my community slip into my practice. It's a really, really sensitive and tenuous experience to navigate this kind of thing. I will always make mistakes. But that I make the least amount of mistakes because the most important thing is that I love these people and I love this place and I need to be a good team player for the future of our people. And I know that there are people in my community that are invested and dedicated to cultural preservation and then there's someone like me who spends my life trying to figure out how healing can happen in a larger way, that if we can make this healing happen outside and inside our community, what does that look like? How can that happen? How do we question why people hurt each other and why we would continue hurting each other? Why do I drive a car and use fossil fuels? Why do plants and animals give their life every day to sustain my body, to make these choices I'm making and how am I being accountable to that equation and how can I be conscious of that equation and make the most informed and conscious decisions so that I am a better community member to this planet? It's based on my experience of being a community member in a small place like a Pueblo. But because of that experience, I can see how we're all community members of this planet, of these towns, of these cities. We all have communities and how do we be conscious and careful and not be sloppy in our decisions as we move forward? And then have compassion for those moments where we are complicated and that process isn't always exactly what you wanted it to look like. Because if we can't love ourselves, we can't have any compassion or love for anything else and I think that's one of the hardest things.

Jo Reed: I think that is a good place to end it, Rose. Thank you so much.

Rose B. Simpson: Thank you.

Jo Reed: That was Rose B. Simpson, an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo. You can keep up with her and see images of her work including Maria at rosebsimpson.com. You can find images of her installation Seed at the website for   Madison Square Park Conservancy and her current exhibit Strata, at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s website. We’ll have links to them all in our show notes. You’ve been listening to Art Works, produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. If you like the pod, then follow us and leave us a rating. I’m Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

Rose B. Simpson: So, my mother is ceramicist, my grandma was a potter, my great-grandma was a potter, my great-great-grandma, etc. So, through my matrilineal side, I was given access and shown clay and when I was a kid, every mom that I knew, every grandma, every auntie were working on pottery. They all did pottery and I remember being in the tribal day school and we had to talk about what our moms did for a living and one of the kids said her mom was the manager at Sonic and I remember it kind of melting my brain. I didn't think moms did anything but pottery. That was like the way things are and in the small, intimate history and delicate nature of this cultural perseverance that we're in, it really is special and I think it's incredible that we're still a part of this lineage and we're still walking in the hills behind our homes and seeing the pots, the shards, the broken pieces of the pots that our great-great-great-great grandmas made right there and all those layers of history and connection are still really apparent and vibrant.