Artfully Bound With Monica Majoli

For our second installment of Artfully Bound, I had the pleasure of interviewing Monica Majoli about sexuality, identity, and art. Monica Majoli is an American Artist who has had solo exhibits and group exhibits around the world. Her collections are on display at The Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art to name a few. Monica’s next solo exhibit will be at the Hannah Hoffman Gallery, in Los Angeles, CA.

Uzomah: How can art be used to open the doors of conversation about sexuality?

Monica: Sexuality underlies all things. Unfortunately, In America, sexuality is compartmentalized and simplified due to the puritanical ethos that defines our country. Art has the capacity to elicit empathy and generate effective response because it communicates at times outside of language, yet in a cohesive, persuasive way — by that I mean it operates directly through the sensory and the symbolic. That can create a sense of shared experience and physiological/psychological resonance where one might imagine alienation and difference.

U: Can you describe how you address sexuality in your art?

M: Overtly and covertly. I’ve chosen to foreground sexuality and intimacy in my work because it charges my relationship to it and acts as a destabilizing influence in its reception, which is important to me. Sexuality and relationship is a pulse that exists in the experiential. I continue to be most invested in art that feels close to lived experience.

U: How has art helped you explore the layers of identity including your own and the realms of sexuality?

M: All art is abstract, so is sex in many ways. The surface only suggests the vastness of its reach. I have discovered through using specific and varied forms of sexual fetish as subject matter in my work, that the condition of fetish encodes and externalizes a broader shared experience through signs.

Sex is an emotional, psychological, and physical encounter and fetish encompasses those complexities through collectively understood signals — dress, props, and activities. I may not be a participant in the communities I represent in my work, but I identify with the underlying motivations.

U: How can art create a safe place for those wishing to explore their sexuality?

M: Art contains all imaginary possibilities — there is total freedom in it if an artist chooses to take risks.

I would suggest to artists curious about linking their sexuality to their art practice, that they consider that their work exists first for their own exploration and gratification and that they can share it or not with others. Their production can be as private as a diary.

U: What Is the role that art plays in society that allows it to address both societal and political issues?

M: The individual artist defines how overtly they address these issues in their work. I believe the power of art is to speak to unexpected associations, not as an extension of advertising or didactic approaches — there are other fields that serve that purpose and often have a larger platform. The ambiguities of experience, uncomfortable realities, hold great potential in our field because we’ve been granted the space as artists to disrupt cultural expectations and conditioning. Rather than acting in accordance with other forms of societal influence and communication — we can speak through invented and uncommon forms forcefully and in a nuanced way simultaneously.

U: You did a series of watercolor portraits taken from the first national gay magazine Blueboy. How important is it to preserve publications such as this?

M: For me, one of the most captivating things about the magazine Blueboy was that it encapsulated its time so absolutely — through articles on literary figures, artists and other cultural figures, political events, fashion, and even drug paraphernalia of the period. In the way I’m using it — addressing the period of the mid-1970s as Gay Liberation was blossoming and before the AIDS epidemic — the magazine, in its comprehensive approach to gay life with erotic photographic images of men central to it, catalyzed my desire to make this body of work.

Queer publications were a source of self-determination, community and identification when queer sexuality was illegal. Centers of queer archives, such as the ONE Archive in Los Angeles, functions to preserve one of the most important and visible repositories of our history. Queer archives are significant as they represent what remains for us to imagine and understand of our history due to its relationship to underground culture, criminality, and social stigma.

U: What pieces or projects are you most proud of and why?

M: I’m proud of the numerous and distinct bodies of work I’ve made over the past thirty years. I take pride in the fact that the forms change, the process of making changes, and that I continue to be deeply connected to my work.

I’m also proud of the exhibitions I’ve organized or curated: Tony Greene (co-curated with artist Judie Bamber at the MAK Center in 2014), Lutz Bacher at UCI in 2019, and an exhibition of prints selected from the Grunwald Center Collection at the Hammer Museum (upcoming September 2020). I realize that organizing exhibitions is a way for me to experience art from another vantage point. It’s become an important aspect of how I experience art in an intensive way over a prolonged period that isn’t directly engaged with my own studio practice.

U: What Is a typical day like for you?

M: Composing and answering emails, writing in the morning, reading the New York Times and Washington Post. Studio work typically begins at about 11 am or noon. When not teaching at UCI, I’m in the studio or working on aspects of production most days, ending at about 6 pm. If I have an exhibition deadline then studio hours run much longer — from 12 to 16 hours a day. Writing, reading, or otherwise working at night resumes after dinner. I prefer to work by natural light, so that period of the day when the light is most “accurate” in terms of seeing color and value is reserved for studio work as much as possible. Summer is my favorite season in the studio, as the daylight is strongest and longest.

U: Where do you hope the future of your art will take you next?

M: Into the unknown and the necessary.

You can find Monica’s work here.