The Art of Luzene Hill
K Art’s represented artist Luzene Hill recently accomplished a two-month residency with Township10 alongside fellow Cherokee Nation contemporary artist Brenda Mallory. Nestled in the Blue Ridge mountains of western North Carolina, Township10 offers artists, writers, and art professionals an intimate, private retreat to deepen their creative practice.
Hill, a multi-media artist, known for socially engaged conceptual installations and performances, spent the fall season creating new work relevant to a past project. Located at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in MA, she staged Revelate, a performance on and around Jeffrey Gibson’s outdoor sculpture Because Once You Enter My House, It Becomes Our House.
This past November, I had the pleasure to interview Luzene during her stay.
How is your residency going, and what have you learned during your time in North Carolina?
The residency at Township 10 is going very well! The setting is wonderful - rural, quiet, and low-key. I love being here and realize how much I love the mountains of Western North Carolina. This area is part of Cherokee original homelands, and I definitely feel "at home" here.
This residency is allowing me to reflect and work on whatever I want to. There is no requirement or expectation for a finished product. That atmosphere is very freeing . . . and I feel it promotes productivity.
My goal for this residency is to allow myself time to draw, work on a new site-specific installation and reflect on the last couple of years. Since the pandemic began, I actually have participated in more art exhibitions and residencies than ever before. Participating in those required that I spend a lot of time traveling via car and living for two-three months away from home.
*In 2021 alone, Luzene has exhibited her work in our inaugural exhibition More Than a Trace and was one of four participating artists in our second exhibition, Brought to Light. K Art has also displayed her work at Art Toronto in the fall alongside Edgar Heap of Birds and G. Peter Jemison.*
What is one misconception about your work?
Because I've done a number of large installations about violence against women and violence against Native women, I sometimes feel people expect all my work (including my drawings) to be about that subject. It isn't.
"Revelate" was about pre-contact philosophy and female energy and power. The 2-D work I'm hoping to make here at the residency will be on that theme.
*The concept for Revelate is informed by early goddess sculptures from South America and asserts matrilineal societies, pre-contact culture, and feminine energy. Performers clad in reflective Mylar capes will dance on and around Gibson’s installation. Hill uses Mylar emergency blankets to call attention to the human rights crisis of asylum seekers along the US/Mexico border. Wearing capes of this reflective material, the performers evoke explosive bursts of female energy that are being uncovered and released from patriarchal colonialism.*
Her ink drawings, which utilize items such as tea, often take on ambiguous shapes. She later writes, …
Well, as an artist - especially one whose drawings are often "Untitled" - I can't complain if people see things in the work I didn't intend. That actually IS the reason I often don't title the abstract expressive drawings. I don't want to put a meaning to them because I feel strongly that people respond to art from their core. If an artist makes the work from her core, then the communication happens with no words.