Celeste Chan (CC): Mattilda, you’re an amazing artist and activist, really both intertwined. You’ve been so prolific – you’ve written 6 books of fiction and nonfiction, and you’ve created and edited 6 different anthologies (which is a lot of work!). Could you speak about some of the first sparks for creating Touching the Art?

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (MBS): Absolutely. Yeah, I think that in a way, although I didn’t know I was going to write a book yet, the book originated when I went to my grandmother’s house after she died in 2010. And that’s when I spent time in this place that meant so much to me as a child, when going into her studio was the one place where I could dream in everyday life. I could imagine a creative life because I was living it with her. When I was a child, she nourished everything that made me different, and queer. After she died, I spent time in that studio with everything still there, in her house with all of her art and her inspirations.

That was when I realized how much it would have meant to me if she could have engaged with me as an artist. Which is something she refused to–as a child, she nourished everything, but when I came into myself as an adult and my work became overtly queer and political, everything was vulgar to her, right? That was the word she would use, and she would say why are you wasting your talent? Over and over. I always engaged with her work as an artist, and she respected my critique. But my work to her was beyond the pale. 

Spending time at her house after her death, I realized how much it would have meant to me for her to engage with my work. But she was dead and so that would never be possible. And even though I didn’t start writing the book for 7 years after that, in some ways I think that’s the genesis. And this question about our relationship; in some ways it was the most formative relationship of my childhood. And she was the person that allowed me to imagine being an artist, right? Her abandonment of me, you know, when I was like, 19 or 20, 21, 22, and really coming into myself, is something that I circle around in the book. And so I’m asking that question about both childhood inspiration, like what makes us into artists. But also about familial abandonment. And what art can and cannot do. So touching the art for me means touching everything, right? We’re always told we can’t touch the art, that art is something pure, it might get damaged if we touch it, it might no longer be valuable. And so for me, touching the art means going into everything that we’re not supposed to talk about or not supposed to say, and saying everything.

So I start with literally touching her art. That’s how I started writing the book. I didn’t know what I was writing exactly, I just knew I wanted to write something about our relationship. And so I started by touching her handmade paperworks, her collages, her paintings, and really feeling into what came through. And some of that was about the art itself, going into her studio and watching her making these pieces. Some of it was about our relationship. Some of it was about trauma, and some of it was about inspiration. So it’s all of that together and it becomes more and more layered. In the familial and interpersonal sense, the historical and structural. All of this ends up coming through.

CC: That makes a lot of sense. You’ve created this conversation across time with Gladys, with her art and with her career, spanning 70 years, which I am so impressed by! You hold such complexity. I sense your love and admiration even while you are questioning her complicity in structural oppression. She had a queer artist best friend but yet she found your flamboyant queerness offensive. 

My next question is about research. I know you talked about being in her physical space—which, what an experience! I remember reading the back of the book, and it looks like you consulted 7 different archives or organizations. I wonder if you could tell me more about the research process. Was there anything surprising? 

MBS: I love what you say about the book because that is my goal, of course, to hold the complexity and the multiplicity. All these things at once, right? She can be complicit in structural oppression and still have been the most foundational person in my life in certain ways and I can still have this admiration for her work even while realizing her limitations, her hypocrisy.

As a child, she acted like art meant everything, everything else had to be pushed out of the way. And this was a myth, right? Because art didn’t mean everything to her, later I realized she was ensnared by the upper-middle-class worldview that I looked to her as an alternative to. But still, when she said that art meant everything, this was a myth that saved me.

So the research came organically because I started literally by touching the art, and then looking at my own personal archives. So that includes letters, to Gladys, and from Gladys, because I photocopied my letters at the time, literally the time of her abandonment of me, when I was 19, 20, 21, 22, because when I was 19 I remembered that I was sexually abused by my father and I realized that so much had been blocked out, and I didn’t want to forget anything anymore. So I have these letters that we exchanged. Then I have photos that I took from her house after she died and again I had no idea I was going to use them for anything but I just thought oh these are interesting, look here’s some photos of her in the ‘50s. Here she is with my father as a child. He’s 13. They’re going on cross country trips and I’m looking at those photos and realizing, wait a second, here’s her gay best friend and his lover, right? They’re on these trips in the 1950s. Even though, in the 1990s, all my work became vulgar to her because it was queer. My queerness was vulgar to her, but still she’s on these trips with her gay best friend and his lover in the 1950s.

Then I think about how all my work is place-based in a certain sense. And usually I’m writing about the places where I’ve lived, or the places that have formed me, but I actually never lived in Baltimore. So I moved to Baltimore to see what would come through. Some of this was research in a traditional way. Going to institutions like the Baltimore Museum of Art, where they have a scrapbook of Gladys’s press clippings from the 1950s to the 1970s in their archive. They also have some paintings that are not on view, and I was able to view them. They also have paintings by her gay best friend, Keith Martin. So that was a sort of central place for doing that kind of research and also the Jewish Museum of Maryland has an oral history with her. And I went to talk to her neighbors, and her students. Her contemporaries were no longer alive but many of her students were, and I was able to talk to them.

But also I went there to see what would come through in Baltimore. And so some of the themes that emerged in the book that I had not anticipated really came from, tracing where she grew up, which was a place she never talked about, and I remembered asking her if she ever went back to the neighborhood where she grew up, which was in Baltimore. And she just said: You can’t. And I said oh, what do you mean? And she said: You just can’t. And I knew, when she said that, that it had become a Black neighborhood, and that her racism and the segregated mentality of Baltimore meant that even though it was only 5 or 6 miles from where she grew up, it was somewhere she literally never went.

So I went there. I also went to the neighborhood where she raised my father. And, walking around other parts of Baltimore, I saw how artists are used as tools of gentrification. A neighborhood will be labeled an arts district, and then that means all this money comes in for arts institutions but the people living in the neighborhood don’t have access to any more resources and sometimes lose their house because they can’t pay the increased property taxes. These are mostly Black neighborhoods, and that segregation continues today in Baltimore. The legacy of displacement and white flight and so those themes and the role that Gladys played within them, like as a Jewish kid growing up in Baltimore and following the path of white flight. Which is the path that facilitated decades of urban removal, displacement, redlining, hyper-policing, all of which continues to this day.

So then my research, once I leave Baltimore, is about understanding these larger historical arcs, so the arc of Jewish assimilation and white flight, the arc of disinvestment and redlining and predatory lending, the arc of the history of Baltimore, but then also the history of the women of abstract expressionism, because that’s the generation that Gladys is a part of. Even though she didn’t consider herself an abstract expressionist, these are the women who have been documented. And we are in a moment where their careers are being kind of resuscitated and sort of recovered from underneath the men who have dominated that whole trajectory. And all of these arcs wind through the book, they form and re-form it.

You asked about anything surprising, and this happened after the book came out, when I was on tour, and I did this interview with Baltimore Public Radio and the host, Sheilah Kast, did this great job of framing the book for a Baltimore audience, and someone who heard the show wrote to me. He grew up 3 doors down from my father. And they went to school together.

And when he wrote to me, he said: I’m the white person who stayed. So he would be 80 or 81 because that’s how old my father would be if he were still alive. And when I talked to him, I asked, does that mean you live in the house where you grew up, and your parents stayed? And he said yes, and I said well, what made them stay? Because white flight starts with the federal government redlining neighborhoods, it starts with its racist policies, right? But it can’t happen unless people actually leave, right?

And when I asked him, he said, well, his parents were integrationists. And he said that once the neighborhood became almost an entirely Black neighborhood, they were much closer with their neighbors than they had ever been with their white neighbors that used to live there. And that was really instructive to me, what could happen if people stayed.

You know, that’s just one story. But I guess in the book I want to open up these questions. So, part of it is about accountability. Structural racism continues to this day and corrupts creativity and narrows the possibilities for connection and transformation, right? And also to ask questions about what could be possible, even now?

CC: “What could be possible” is a great question, a guiding principle to keep moving forward with. You wrote about the phrase “history repeats itself” in Touching the Art: “When someone says history repeats itself, this phrase has already been repeated so many times that it’s hard not to nod your head in agreement. But does the repetition of this phrase make the persistence of structural injustice sound inevitable, neutral, or coincidental? Does this conceal the bias of the discipline of history, everything left out that continues to remain invisible?”

And then I’m gonna jump back because I think something I was struck by, or something that came to me was dream justice. And I think that this is from like page 55. Oh, I  think this is from a literal dream that you wrote about, it was in your confrontation letter confronting your family’s violence and I think I was curious about your thoughts about dream justice, abstraction, and writing this book. And what are the possibilities of art? What are the possibilities of dream justice?

This is along the lines of the “what if’s” and imaginings, because there’s the real life confrontation, but perhaps another possibility in what’s imagined. If abusers and politicians are refusing to be held accountable and refusing to listen, what are alternatives? How are we dreaming (and creating) these different possibilities?

MBS: Yeah, thank you. I love that. The part that you’re pointing to is really interesting, now that I think about it, because this is a part of the letter I wrote to my father when I confronted him about sexually abusing me. I gave it to him when I was 21. And you’re referencing a dream that I put into the letter, right? And the dream is, in some ways, about how I’m healing. The phone rings and I go into the living room with Gladys, my grandmother, who is next to my grandfather and the TV. I pick up the phone, and it’s my father, he says, this is your abuser. I start crying, I want to say what did you say? Because I’m not sure. My mouth moves but the words won’t come out. I don’t look at Gladys, but I want her to see me so she’ll know I was abused. I try to say what did you say, but I can only say excuse me? He says something, maybe I got the letter, maybe he’s crying. I try to say what did you say? Gladys is watching me, she can feel the pain. I’m crying and I’m trying to say what did you say?

And this is something that never happened. Because he never acknowledged sexually abusing me. He was a psychiatrist. He had all the access to coming to terms with it. When I confronted him, and I was 21, Gladys enacted a typical pattern, which was to support the abuser who in this case was her only child. And to deny the truth, right? And so that violence has ricocheted throughout my life. But I hadn’t thought until you asked this question about how interesting it is that I put a dream in my confrontation letter to my father, which I gave to the whole family, where I’m saying: Here is the truth.

And I think it’s because in that dream, this is the felt sense, right? And I think that is a really interesting connection with abstraction. In this case it’s very literal. And abstraction guided my relationship with Gladys, her life as an abstract artist gave me the inspiration to dream.

There’s another dream in the book, where I’m surprised to see Gladys sitting on the floor in painter’s clothes, maybe not her usual clothes but someone’s, and she says: As a kid I painted with Lacey. Who’s Lacey, I say. And she says call up Russell and ask. And I realize she means Russell Paints. Lacey must be a color. Wait a second, I say, I need to get some paper to take notes, so you see, this is a dream that I had when I was working on the book. In the dream I’m excited because I finally get to interview Gladys. I get some paper and go back in the room, and she asks, are Marvin and Eric going to read it? Now, Marvin was my grandfather’s brother, so I know he’s dead, and I’m not sure who Eric is, but the director of the arts program at the University of Maryland, where they have a permanent collection of Gladys’s work, is named Eric, but I’m just realizing this now, while I’m talking to you. In this dream I just say Gladys, they’re not around. I don’t want to say dead, because what is she? And she says: You can join me. Now she’s wearing a red jumpsuit with a cinched waist.

No, I can’t, I say, and she slowly fades away. Outside, the slam of the garbage truck wakes me up, but I want to bring Gladys back. I’m still partially asleep so I think: I need to have a list of questions ready for next time. I think about how the red of her jumpsuit was close to the orange of the prison uniform, how in this dream I said I wasn’t going to kill myself, and has this ever been so direct?

What happens in a dream can be even more literal than what is happening in the world. In the book, I want all of that to be in there—it’s all at once, the inspiration and the injustice, the trauma, the impossibility, and the possibility. I’m kind of leveling the playing field. When I first started writing, I was looking at Gladys’s art and feeling this childlike excitement. But then, very fast, trauma came through, the trauma of my father sexually abusing, and at first I was like, well, I don’t want this in here. I’ve already written about this, now I want to write about the love I feel for Gladys’s art, what it still gives me.

But it has to be there, right? He is the link between me and Gladys. Without him, I would never have known her.

Gladys believed in a modernist idea of purity, that art should be pure, that it should transcend experience, but also she taught me, through abstraction, to never write that way. Or at least that’s what I learned from her, even if that’s not what she meant to teach me. Even if that was vulgar to her. I was vulgar to her.

A more traditional arc might have been, let me talk about this beautiful relationship I have with my grandmother and leave everything else out. That’s very typical, right? But this just furthers the violence. Because that’s a myth. I want everything or nothing. An omission of the violence is worse than nothing, it keeps it invisible. So I want to tell something more complicated, with all of our contradictions, all of our longings and losses, everything at once, all of it, like in a dream. For me, it really has to be all of that.