Host Emily Wilson spends time with Indigiqueer multimedia artist Tricia Rainwater.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In this episode Emily chats with multimedia artist Tricia Rainwater. Tricia delves into her artistic journey, focusing on self-portrait photography and installations. Her work, seen in exhibitions like 'Allegedly the Worst is Behind Us' at San Jose's Institute for Contemporary Art, addresses themes of political innateness, erasure, and the importance of creating personal archives. She also shares her experiences from childhood photography to her impactful pieces that highlight missing Indigenous women and girls. Their conversation touches on the emotional power and societal responsibilities of art.
About Artist Tricia Rainwater:
Tricia Rainwater (she/her) is a mixed Choctaw Indigiqueer multimedia artist based on Ramaytush Ohlone land. Tricia’s work ranges from self portraiture to large sculptural installations. Her work has been featured nationally and internationally through group shows and artist features. In her work, Tricia, focuses on creating pathways to a resilient and hopeful future by centering the process of grieving and healing. She is a recent recipient of the SF Artists Grant through the SF Arts Commission.
Visit Tricia's Website: TriciaRainwater.com
Follow Tricia on Instagram: @TriciaRainwaterArt
Learn more about the exhibit, 'Allegedly The Worst Is Behind Us', currently at the ICA San Jose - CLICK HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
AIA - EP041 - Tricia Rainwater
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 102. 5 FM every Friday at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: I think my body innately is political, being like a mixed fat brown person, putting my body front and center in these photos, imagining myself in places where my ancestors were, posing the question, did they imagine me here?
Host Emily Wilson: That's multimedia artist, Trisha Rainwater, the guest on this episode of Art is Awesome.
I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the [00:01:00] arts. And I've been meeting such great people that podcast to highlight their work.
Trisha Rainwater is a multimedia artist. specializing in self portrait photography and installations. I saw her work in allegedly the worst is behind us at the Institute for Contemporary Art, San Jose. She dyed strips of cloth red and fastened jingles onto them. to represent missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women.
She'd made two mobiles out of them, and on the wall by the mobiles there are posters of 39 missing women with personal details like their tattoos and what they were last seen wearing. Trisha's work was so moving and powerful that I wanted to talk with her. Along with the show at the ICA, she recently was part of a show at Treasure Island, Doves, Bombs.
Her work [00:02:00] includes self portraits taken along the Trail of Tears and in Golden Gate Park. I went to her place in San Francisco, which is also her studio, and we talked about creating alternative records, visiting painful things in her work, and winning prizes for her photos when she was young.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: So while you'll see my awards, my first place and second place awards from the Lodi Grape Festival that we call the Lodi Grape and Wine Festival, but my mother was in the Central Valley with my grandparents. It's their farmers. And my dad gave me a camera really young. My mom also encouraged photography.
I had this little Mickey Mouse camera that I don't even think you can buy the film for it now, but I have it somewhere in my apartment. But I had a lot of film. I don't think I was great at it, but I loved it. And I spent a lot of time when I started entering the great festival, shooting photos of the clouds and trees.
[00:03:00] I really loved trees. I'm still enamored by trees. So you see that through light in my work. even when I was a kid. It's funny, I just thought of that right now. But yeah, it's really stayed, um, that love of nature and in inserting myself into nature scenes. And I have a ton of those awards and I always felt so special and cool when I would get these children's awards.
Host Emily Wilson: Trisha has loved photography since she was a kid.
I had a very hard childhood. I was freezing these moments in time with these photos. Of people, of places, of things. I would get back my film after it was developed and feel like I was transported to a moment and to a time and it felt like it was locked forever there and like it was mine.
Host Emily Wilson: Trisha wanted to make her own record of her life.
Artist Tricia Rainwater I'm obsessed with this idea now of creating an archive for myself because I'm estranged from my family. Archival work is so interesting to me and I kind of got into it like over a decade ago when I went to the Heard Museum and started looking in their archives at photographs [00:04:00] of Indigenous folks the day they got to boarding school and then the photos they took a year later.
It kind of burned into my mind this idea of really wanting to create an archive of my own body, of my own life, even if I don't have children or a family. That it's important for me to mark this moment of me surviving. I'm in San Francisco as A queer single femme without family, and that's, that's a feat.
Host Emily Wilson: Official archives are inaccurate, Tricia says.
Artist Tricia Rainwater I think I heard this quote years ago in this like stupid TV miniseries about like, the people who quote unquote win write history. So the archives are very flawed. I think it's really important that we create our own archives and we dig into these archives that are presently, like, revered and find the information that has been hidden and stolen from us, specifically around, I know I'm going on a different path here really quickly, but around queer indigeneity and being indigi queer.
Two [00:05:00] spirit, however folks identify, our ways of being queer in our communities were like taken from us. Specifically, like, I'll talk about Choctaw people, my people who are, have been so colonized and so westernized. And there's like a hunger from queer indigenous folks to find these through lines back to our ancestors, our elders who are queer.
Host Emily Wilson: A couple of years ago, Trisha followed the path of the Trail of Tears, the forced relocation in the 1800s of Native people from the southeast to the west, including the Choctaw. Trisha took pictures of herself along the way.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: I think that there's a lot of erasure of Indigenous people in general. There's a lot of erasure of Indigenous femmes.
I think my body innately is political. Being like a mixed fat brown person, putting my body front and center in these photos, imagining myself in places where my [00:06:00] ancestors were, posing the question, did they imagine me here?
Host Emily Wilson: The title of the show at the ICA, allegedly the worst is behind us. comes from a line in an Amanda Gorman poem that suggests dealing with trauma rather than ignoring it.
In the show, curator Zoe Laztar talked with the artists about using their art as an archive of personal or family history. That's what Trisha did with her installation about missing Indigenous girls and women.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: I hand dipped these fabric pieces to represent a person. Each ribbon represents a person. I made this once before, which I really want to point out, and I was in a relationship that was quite tumultuous and quite abusive.
When we ended, they threw away the piece. The piece before was One hundred of these ribbons that I dip dyed, and I had hand stitched the names of people into them. So the [00:07:00] throwing away of this piece felt very violent, and to remake it felt very empowering, and also very hard.
Host Emily Wilson: A lot of her work, Tricia says, is staying with the horrible things.
She and other indigenous people have gone through as a way to heal.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: With that piece, I really wanted people to be able to know about this issue that is happening today in cities, not just on reservations, not in just Indian country, it's all over. And I wanted people to be able to move the ribbons and make sounds with the jingles to like call back.
And I will say like before I, before I moved it out of my apartment, my apartment felt very alive and heavy. These ribbons were hanging all over my apartment. It just, they represent people. Tricia talked about why she made mobiles. I think that trauma can sometimes hang over us. And I started thinking about like mobiles and how they hang over cribs of babies and this way that like it can be passed to you like [00:08:00] it's your inheritance.
Trauma but also like healing can be passed to you like it's in your inheritance.When I was in college in Phoenix and working with Native youth, I started to see firsthand these things that were happening, and I started to then, through a really wonderful professor at Arizona State University, learn about what's going on. My place in all of this, like the stuff that had happened and was happening within my family was not just something that had happened.
It was part of this larger issue. I have a friend who said something the other day about like not wanting to be a statistic. I think about that a lot, like not wanting to end up as statistic. I'm careful what I say about this, but I've experienced some big losses in the past few years of friends being murdered and going missing.
And I feel very protective of them and their families, so I'm not going to say a [00:09:00] whole lot, it was just a very traumatic experience. I had been watching these Facebook groups, there's Facebook groups, there's Instagram groups, that monitor and kind of like, let people know. community know when someone goes missing. And the posters go out on Instagram or Facebook and people share them.
Host Emily Wilson: This made Tricia decide to put posters about missing women in her installation at the ICA.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: I really wanted people to have access to what it feels like to be met with these posters. And there's like the perfect sweet spot in that installation when you're standing in the middle and you're looking at the posters and you can feel these people next to you, because those ribbons are people and you feel held and you're forced to look.
And it kind of is this interesting juxtaposition with my work as well. My photos of people. My body forced you to look, whereas if you were walking [00:10:00] past me on the street and you don't like what you see, you don't have to look at me. But in the gallery, I'm in control and I'm in that installation. I feel like I'm forcing people to look at something they don't want to look at.
Host Emily Wilson: In her work, Tricia tries to go back to what she calls pain points.
Artist Tricia Rainwater: While I was on the trail and in these other moments, I think that these areas, Where harm, great harm has occurred, are often ignored. They're not taken care of. The cemetery where the treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was signed is like overgrown.
And that is where my people's fate was like put into, you know, like they were, they said that they would, They would walk then they would walk this trail and it was it was not a good thing and going back there having my body there is revisiting these moments and I believe opening up a pathway to healing.
Host Emily Wilson: This is three [00:11:00] questions the part of the show. Where I asked the artist the same three questions, when did you know you were an artist? What is some work that had an impact on you and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Tricia Rainwater: I knew I was first an artist when I was standing. At the grape and wine festival with my mom and getting this first place ribbon. This big tall guy came up to me and gave me this ribbon. And I just was like, Oh, this is what it feels like. This is the moment surrounded by other big artists in this room.Just knowing. That this would, this would be my path.
I've mentioned Jeffrey Gibson and Ann Golden, of course, and, um, Lara Aguilar. Oh, Lara Aguilar's work, uh, which I'm really excited I'm going to be in a show with her archive this next year, um, in LA, but I, but I wanted to [00:12:00] bring up this art piece from this art group called Post Commodity. Do you know Post Commodity?
Oh my gosh, I was out with friends last night. We got drinks and ended up at a Thai restaurant, and I talked about post commodity for like half an hour with my poor friends. But they have a piece where they, um, slaughter sheep in a bathtub at a hotel outside of Navajo Nation. And it is really about the commodification of Navajo culture.
It is a beautiful touching piece and it is hard to watch and it is in your face and it is everything I want my art to be. Um, and it's, it's heavily inspired me. It was made in 2011, but I I've been coming back to it a lot lately, um, in my mind. And then last night I looked it up and was like, it's still on the internet.Yes, so go look it up if you want post commodity,[00:13:00]
Gosh, it's nature. Honestly, it's probably the places I've shot in Golden Gate Park. And they're painful. They're hard to go back to. I think those places that, I mean, this is the through line of my art, right? Like, going to the painful places. But it's, it's where I shot with my spouse when we were married.
It's where my love of self-portraiture photography came back. Um, and was, you know, Awakened again, and, uh, it was a hard place to be, uh, I think we realized we weren't in love anymore there. And also we're like finding photography together and it holds all those things for me. So there.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. And thank you so much to our guest, multimedia artist, Trisha Rainwater. The piece she talked about is in allegedly. The worst is behind us at the [00:14:00] Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose. It's up until February 23rd.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Incompetech Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome Podcast or visit our website. Till next [00:15:00] time.