The Art World: What If…?!, Season 2, Episode 3: Alvaro Barrington
In this episode, host Charlotte Burns is joined by artist Alvaro Barrington, who brings as much generosity of spirit to this conversation as he does to his art practice. Fundamentally curious, Alvaro wants to connect with as many people as possible and to make art that is as relevant to people today as hip hop was to him as a kid growing up in New York in the 1990s. But, as the art world has expanded, he says, it’s also become narrower in terms of who gets in. Alvaro is interested in changing that, creating less hierarchy and more connections. What if art could be as beloved as music by Beyonce or Taylor Swift? “Art has to be more in people’s lives,” he says, “It just has to figure that out.”
Alvaro Barrington
Transcript:
Charlotte Burns:
Hello and welcome to the second season of The Art World: What If…?! a podcast in which we imagine new futures. I’m your host, Charlotte Burns.
[Audio of guests]
In this episode, we’re joined by the artist Alvaro Barrington. I love Alvaro’s art as much as I enjoy talking to him. I’m always struck by the generosity he brings to his practice and his conversations, which I think comes down to how interested he is in connecting with other people and with different points of view because he fundamentally believes that we get to more interesting and colorful places if we can talk and come together.
He wants to make art as relevant to people today as hip hop was to him as a kid growing up in New York in the 1990s, but as the art world has expanded, he said, it’s also become narrower in terms of who gets in, and Alvaro is interested in less hierarchy—inspired as much by Beyonce and Taylor Swift, and their capacity to engage enormous audiences as he is competitive with the painters of art history.
Alvaro is a man with plans and he’ll talk to us about some of them in this episode, including an exciting new project in New York.
Enjoy!
Charlotte Burns:Hi, Alvaro. Thank you for being here.
Alvaro Barrington:
Hi! Hi, Charlotte. Once again, we meet.
Charlotte Burns:
Once again, we meet.
Last time we met a couple months ago and something you said really has stuck in my mind about how you felt that very little in contemporary art was being made from the culture, or speaking to the culture, which is why so much art feels irrelevant. So I wanted to begin with a ‘what if.’ What if contemporary art was in the culture and from the culture? What would that look like?
Alvaro Barrington:
I guess what I meant is mostly talking about from a market perspective, or like the market that I guess you and I participate in. But I think there's probably a lot of contemporary art happening all over the world in all sorts of neighborhoods but I do think that there have become barriers to that becoming a part of the market that we participate in.
Charlotte Burns:
How important do you think the market is in the contemporary art world that we participate in?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think everything has its relevance. In every place that there's a market, the reason there's a market is that there's a value of an exchange happening and I was thinking particularly about the market that gets covered in our sort of idiosyncratic world of New York Times, Art Basel and the galleries and this is, I think, a very particular world, but I don't necessarily think it's the art world. I think art world exists in many, many, many places. In fact, I grew up in neighborhoods that were very active in terms of how they understood art and those are still extremely important. I don't think necessarily that there's, maybe, so much of a bridge anymore is what I'm saying.
Charlotte Burns:
So the bridge between art being made all around the place and “The Art World” in the capital letters that bridge has become narrower, or maybe even in certain places just not even there.
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I think while it's expanded, it's also become narrow in terms of who gets in.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, the kind of art, maybe, that people are interested in.
I was listening to you on a different podcast, and for you, the great question was, how can art get back to this place where it was like a great church? Can you talk through that a little bit? And where we are now?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I guess when I'm talking about art, I was thinking specifically more about painting.
I was just really curious about what are some of the stews that make certain markets very successful. Obviously, there are certain narratives that sort of play out; Modernism or conceptual art or whatever.
One that became really prominent in the 90s, we think of it now as identity politics although there was always identity in art, but it just became more in the forefront in terms of how does one make something that also acknowledges a particular viewpoint that may be outside of the mainstream, or considered outside of the mainstream—even though I don't really know what that means, because as a Black artist, I grew up in hip hop, and in a particular era of American hip hop, and that always felt to me much, much, much more mainstream than anything that I saw in the art world. I just think there was just this moment in the 90s, whether it's Félix González-Torres or Glenn Ligon or John Currin obviously Peter Doig, all of these things were about how do you think about the formation of contemporary identity. Joe Bradley, many artists who I'm a huge fan of, and I think something else is happening, at least the undercurrent feels like something else is happening.
We're talking about just how much identity has shifted generationally. We're getting into a place where identity has moved so far ahead. Even myself as a Black artist know that there's times when I'm talking to someone much younger than me where Blackness just means something completely different for them. I mean, I don't even know if sometimes they even think of it in that way. And, or if I'll talk to someone who's of African descent, and they don't have a concept of being Black and so I wonder what it means when their voice becomes a bit more amplified. When like an artist who maybe grew up in Nigeria, and don't necessarily consider themselves Black. Blackness is really like a kind of if you're in America or England, those are those conversations. So I wonder like what happens when more Black people go back to Africa, for example, and aren't greeted “Oh, you're a Black person.” All of these things I think will change the pressures of what art becomes. And I think we'll just have to form under something different. And I'm not really sure what that is. It'll be really interesting, but I'm also just very curious and excited about that.
Charlotte Burns:
Something you said when we last spoke was that we don't really think of Ab-Ex [Abstract Expressionism] as being identity art, or identity-led art, but that you saw it that way. And I thought that was really interesting. Can you explain what you meant by that?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think everything is identity-led, but I think one of the stories that sort of gets misread about Abstract Expressionism or action painting is what was happening politically at the time and this is something that my professors like Carrie Moyer, Katy Siegel—I went to Hunter [College] and the school of abstraction was deep in the DNA.
But if you think what was happening at the time, it basically presented itself as this sort of non-identity kind of Americana art, but almost all of the artists involved were Jews. Even though [Jackson] Pollock became the face of it, his wife Lee Krasner was Jewish, his best friend, Philip Guston was Jewish, Helen Frankenthaler, the people who wrote about it, [Clement] Greenberg, [Harold] Rosenberg. It's interesting how it got written in history because what that would mean is that a movement that started in 1946, 1947, it meant that they had no concept of what was happening in Germany or throughout the rest of the world. That somehow they were somehow protected from the knowledge that them as Jewish folks were deeply hated. In fact, we kind of live in an era now where maybe some of us forget that, but it just is an impossible ask. It's an impossible ask to imagine that somehow [Mark] Rothko and these guys weren't understanding something about how the rest of their community was being treated. And I just think that's an impossible ask.
One of the solutions that they came up with in terms of dealing with this was, how do you make art that acknowledges that your existence is real when so many of the world was ready to kill you including America? I mean, America, I mean, obviously continues to have elements of antisemitism, but back in 1945, 1946, it was a whole different world. And I think these artists were struggling with how to figure out how to move forward after what they had experienced, and action painting was one of the cleanest ways of saying “I'm alive.” I mean, a Rothko painting can be read as just a sunset that anybody could appreciate whether you're Jewish or non-Jewish or whatever you were able to meet at this commonality which is something that I think doesn't happen today.
I was listening to a Jon Stewart interview, and he said that today's conversation, generally people tend to meet at tension points, so they tend to meet at the point in which they disagree, whereas I think what someone like Rothko, or many of those other artists, was starting the conversation from where we all agree, and then maybe we could get into the nuances of where we disagree, and I think that's that was their strategy of how they wanted to move forward, the art strategy of how they wanted to move forward. And I think, obviously, that came from them looking at and going to any of the jazz clubs and realizing how Black Americans had, through this music genre, created this thing of how people can be in the same room together and then from there, maybe have conversations.
Charlotte Burns:
It's always really interesting whose identity gets omitted from those conversations and who we don't discuss in terms of their identity because it's just the dominant one. And I also love this idea of moving the connection between art and life, which is so much part of your work and to go back to the very beginning, your art is, you know, it seems to me closely connected to grief. You really would draw a lot when your mother died when you were just 10 years old and you said the first thing you did was draw in a corner somewhere. It was the only place you felt safe, making little notes and drawing little things. How connected do you feel now, when you make art, to that young child hiding in the corner and drawing?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think my mom's death is probably the most profound experience that lives with me. It has marked so much of my imagination. So there's a way of existing in the world, and that also means in terms of what I make, that, or how immediate my sympathies may be to certain things, that comes from that.
But I also balance that out with so many other very powerful experiences. Growing up in New York is an incredibly powerful experience that I try to draw from, that sometimes has nothing to do with my mom's death. Growing up in hip hop is something that I draw from. Growing up in the Caribbean or falling in love or falling out of love, all of those things are things that I kind of try to tap into at different points.
Charlotte Burns:
You've spoken about this idea of narratives, and the narratives that are your material conditions, but I think with the question I was asking less about the kind of narrative of what that means and more that feeling of what it was when you were a young child drawing that you felt art was offering you, the potential you felt as an individual making things?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I think what it did was give me space. Oftentimes we don't know how to deal with someone who's grieving. I mean I was probably one of the few people that I knew in my neighborhood who didn't have a mother. People didn't really know how to deal with me as a person. It was extremely otherizing. But they cared, and there was so much love there, and once they saw me drawing, they kind of just said, “Okay, he's doing something productive.” They just left me alone, which I needed at the time. I didn't really know how to answer those questions that people were asking me. So it wasn't about the potential of what I was making. It was just more about a kind of, “Okay. I'm drawing, please leave me alone,” and that still exists today. I still get that same sort of “Okay, he's drawing, we're gonna leave him alone.” Which is great.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah, that's really nice. It's interesting because your art is so much about connecting, but I guess it needs to come from that sort of sense of self first in order to do that.
[Musical interlude]
You've said that your work always starts with a narrative and one of those is that you are a New Yorker of a particular moment in time when New York culture went global. Everybody around the world knows what it means when you talk about the hip hop scene in New York that you were a young kid in. I wonder, when we think about audience, the hip hop culture that you were in was so much more relevant, so much larger, so much more present and alive than anything you were seeing in the art world at that time. And I wonder for you and your art, like how much do you think that art can achieve the same thing, that sense of truly mass connection of really going into people's lives and changing their lives in the way that Tupac [Shakur] did for you?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think music is probably the most immediate art form and its ability to really spread is really unmatched. Painting, of course, has tremendous limits. Those limits were matched with, ultimately, I think, what became PDF art. It became like Instagram or images that it just flattened the potential of the image.
But I do think that there have been attempts to make painting a bit more far-reaching, but there's something about the physicality of the medium that makes it impossible to replicate without experiencing it firsthand. It will always be met with that limitation, and because I consider myself a painter, in my mind, I'm like a deeply competitive painter, and I think my painting, as much as it's going up against a [Johannes] Vermeer, also needs to go up against a Taylor Swift or a Beyoncé, and I'm just exploring what that means in the 21st century.
I really don't know if its inherent limits will always be something I have to deal with, but I'm excited to try to figure that out. And, it's been really exciting partnering with people, partnering with Notting Hill Carnival, so many other ways of trying to make that happen.
Charlotte Burns:
How was that experience?
Alvaro Barrington:
Up to two million people participate in Notting Hill Carnival. And so I just thought, “Okay, how do I make painting have this access?” I don't know if there's any museum or gallery that, within two days, can have that much audience. Things like Glastonbury [Festival], there's just so much excitement around it that I just thought, oh, if my painting could somehow exist in these places, and still somehow feel like it adds to the conversation.
I think what's special about Carnival is that so many different people participate, but it's also not a place that has a tremendous hierarchy. The musicians aren't the 1%. Everybody somehow is centered but also is just a participant. It's an incredible erasure of hierarchy that I'm really interested in because it's all about how we then share in the same experience and I'm much more interested in those spaces, I think. Because if you go to social media, I mean, so much of our lives now, it's about who's allowed in those spaces? Which doors exist that tell somebody they can't enter into the space? And there's so many ways in which we've created doors. I remember, Justice [Sonia] Sotomayor, when she became a Supreme Court Justice, wrote this incredible article about what are those small indicators that let somebody know that they don't belong in a space. That triggered something in me to say, “Yeah, how do you take away those things and tell somebody, oh, you don't necessarily belong here?”
Fundamental to my belief is that I have profound differences of opinions from many of my friends. But what I find incredibly valuable, both within my friends and within the world that I live in, is that those differences actually make my world a lot more colorful and a lot better and I fear that so much of how we engage in conversation now is, a kind of, yeah, meeting at those tension points.
Charlotte Burns:
As I think about your work, it seems that there's a striving to find your own voice, but that you deliberately do that by being in conversation, sometimes collaboration, sometimes competition, with different voices. And I wonder how much that's to do with this search for freedom that you've spoken about, that your art is, as you've said, “Just letting me unlearn through shit.”
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I don't think you're free if your choices are basically between a rock and a hard place, or if your choices have only been formed by one source. And all you know, in your imagination is one choice. I don't really think that's technically freedom. I think freedom comes with having as many options be presented in a logical way that you understand as possible, and then you could make that choice.
Growing up in hip hop, one of the sort of understanding, at least back then, of what made a great artist or made a great rapper was that you somehow had to be able to really look at the world that you're in, borrow from as many influences or steal from as many influences as possible, but trust that your experiences were genuine to you.
I was listening to the brilliant Method Man and he was just talking about to make this song when he was 17 where he was like borrowing a flow from Jon Bon Jovi and The Clash and all these different things just to make up like the verse of “M-E-T-H-O-D Man”, and he just started talking about all these different people who helped them say each one of those words, and that was understood back then in hip hop—that you became yourself because you allowed yourself to just really embrace all of the aspects of the world. And I think this was why hip hop was so particular to New York because New York was such a stew of all these cultures. It allowed itself to be so brilliant because you're able to meet that genre of art that was able to just take in so many different cultures and still it be hip hop. And I think painting is very similar.
I just knew that freedom didn't come from… if the only advice I had in my head was my parents, maybe my dad and my mom, that I'm not really free. I just think then you're just a product of their choices.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you feel free now?
Alvaro Barrington:
I feel I get to exercise my freedom a bit more than other parts. But also there's, I also have responsibilities that feel more pressing. So those things all are mixed in a stew. But I definitely feel a lot more that I can exercise moments of ‘fuck it’, moments of “I'm not doing this”, moments of, “Oh, I'm going to do this”, much, much more than any other period of my life.
Charlotte Burns:
When we were talking in New York the other week at Nicola Vassell’s gallery before your show was opening there, I was asking about value, how you saw your own value within the current museum system, within the current market system, and you were saying that for you, it wasn't the be all and end all. Can you elaborate on that?
Alvaro Barrington:
Vanilla Ice or Nelly, the rapper, sold more records than Lil’ Kim or Lost Boyz are one of these rap groups that I find has given me more truths in my life. And so I never really thought that value came from price tag. But more so how the thing that you're encountering, how much does it speak to you? And how much does it speak to your truth?
That's how I approach a lot of stuff, actually. Does this thing have meaning to who you are and how you understand the world. And how much you could expand your understanding of the world by meeting this thing. It's not necessarily, “Oh, this thing is selling at this price tag,” or it's in this museum, or this institution, or it's with this gallery. I really don't know what any of that stuff even means. Fundamentally it just boils down to, does this thing affect how you understand yourself in the world?
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
You just talked about the value of those kind of systems, and when you were graduating from Hunter, several people told you to leave the US, including—which sounds awful, but they didn't mean it in a hostile way, they meant it in a supportive way—the art historian Katy Siegel, who was one of your advisors at Hunter, and the visiting artists, Nari Ward and Chris Ofili. And Nari Ward felt that you would be dismissed or overlooked in American MFA programs, and that you'd have to fight harder to have your ideas heard.
Alvaro Barrington:
He was just trying to say, what are the conversations you want to have? And obviously, if you go to a CUNY or any school, those are part of how somebody may understand your value. And, or if you don't go to school, or if you go to Yale [School of Art], or you go to Slade [School of Fine Art], and he was just saying, just understand that there are certain things that are gonna, because you're attached to those things—and the same thing happens in the art world, if you show at a certain gallery—there's just certain things that are attributed to you that really have nothing to actually do with who you are.
You don't become a more interesting artist because you went to Yale or you went to Brooklyn College. But, there are going to be assumptions made based on these labels. And do you want to use those assumptions as tools within how your art operates? And so he was just saying, what are the things that you want to engage with as a tool?
Charlotte Burns:
Like you say, the structures within the art market and museums are often used as a filter to signify relevance.
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
And that perhaps those things might not be helpful, actually, for artists.
Was he talking about your perceived value after school experience, or was he talking about your practice within that school experience?
Alvaro Barrington:
The general thing I was trying to figure out at the time was, what should I do next? I'd been at Hunter, and I'd been an undergrad for quite a long time. I'd been out of undergrad for about a year, and I just thought I would ask people who were way smarter than me. I was so honored and blessed because there were so many people were just saying, here's the pro and the cons of what this thing may mean for you.
Katy was like, at the time, this isn't necessarily true, was like, if you go to a school in the Northeast, the Northeast tends to have a very specific art conversation that it has, versus if you go to L. A., for example, or if you go to London.
London was brought into the picture because New York, we can be extremely centered on our own imagination, and I'm from New York, so I know what that means for hip hop. There was like a period where Snoop Dogg sold the most records in the world. But you went to New York radio and there was no Snoop Dogg, you were hearing like these local rap acts that nobody outside of New York heard because we just didn't have any space for thinking about anybody else and I found that to be also true in art in that we were so centered around what was happening in New York that we didn't give too much oxygen for what was happening.
What was clear to me at the time, and I think we're seeing it even more now, is that the world was becoming much more global in its conversation and in its imagination. And London felt like a place that was ready to embrace that a bit more and had historically embraced that a bit more. Maybe because of his history of Imperialism and et cetera, but it just felt like that was just a much more open conversation, in terms of where the world was going.
Charlotte Burns:
You came to London in 2015. It was a million years ago in terms of where British society was and now is. Do you feel that's the case? That London is part of a more open conversation?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think the world has moved much, much, much further in terms of being aware of what's happening in the rest of the globe. When I left, a few years later, Trump became President. And if you listened to the news, it was almost every day, something about Russia and Trump, and what Trump tweeted. I remember going back to New York and just feeling like there was just so much noise. He dominated the news cycle. And there were so many other things happening around the world. It felt like if you opened up the front page of a newspaper, it was like what Trump tweeted at 3 a.m. that morning, it's like…
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah.
Alvaro Barrington:
I didn't want to wake up thinking about Trump. I found it to be the least interesting conversation.
Charlotte Burns:
I read something you said about New York that I really loved and I was reading it thinking, “Oh my God, that's exactly how I feel.”
Being in New York, you said, “When I went back, every corner means so much. It's like where I had my first kiss, or whatever. So I found that by the time I went to the studio, I'd lived 20 emotional lives walking those 20 blocks. And I really had to spend a lot of time getting those voices out so that I could just be active with trying to find what the painting does and what the painting needed to do. And being over here, I very much consider myself an American and a New York painter. And that's what the work is trying to do”
I really love that idea because New York is the city where you really live in the city on the streets more so than London. And I wonder in that space away from those 20 emotional lives, do you feel that you're operating in a different way?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I think so. It just means that I engage with my imagination slightly differently, but one of the things that I—and I really find this extremely special about New York, and it's why I have so much love for it—is that being outside, it's such a magical landscape.
It really is. Street corners, how the light hits the city in the evening, in the night. What store is at what corner, or what place is at what corner, means so much to the city and meant so much to me as a kid growing up in the city.
Because all of those things, I remember, like, when the Prada store opened in Soho on Prince and Broadway. That marked the direction that the city was headed in. If you were pre-Prada Soho, when it was much more Mom-and-Pop stores, on those streets, there was a different relationship to the city. I love Prada. I wear it all the time. So it just marked a different kind of meaning for the city.
Charlotte Burns:
Different phase.
Alvaro Barrington:
But yeah, but I loved, I love everything about those street corners because it just operates in a way that lets you know, okay, this is what is possible in this area, in this corner right now, and what's no longer possible.
Charlotte Burns:
Do you see yourself going back to New York and living there again?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, I have a studio there, and I want to do a lot more stuff there.
I think it was a bit hard for me because everybody gets romanticized, the place they grew up in. And I've been away for eight years, and so the city has changed dramatically. One of the ways it's obviously changed is that it's no longer a city that mixes well with different classes of people. It's become more and more upper middle class and the city that I grew up in was much more open to meeting people of different class. And I think diversity also includes class differences because it means you're experiencing things in certain ways.
And I had to get over that. I think because I understand one of my narratives is that I come from a working-class background. So it at times felt like maybe hostile to a world that I wouldn't know what world my mom would move to. And that always is a metric for me in terms of what space I want to exist in. Would she be welcomed here?
And I don't know if that's necessarily true anymore for New York. So I had to reimagine what my relationship is because the truth of the matter is, obviously, I'm not working class anymore. So it means it plays more to who I am today and less to my mom. So that, that just meant I had to readjust myself and now I'm very excited to be back there in some capacity.
It also meant the art that I want to do there has changed and I'm very excited about that.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. So you said you want to make a different kind of art. What kind of art do you think you want to make in New York now?
Alvaro Barrington:
I mean, we're rolling this out, but much more lifestyle choice and much more product-driven art.
There's so much narrative around Blackness and surviving, and because I come from that, I hold on to that. But how do you think about a quality of life now when you're at a certain economic level and most folks that you meet are within that? And I think those are also in consideration of food and all sorts of stuff. So, yeah, we're opening a deli.
[Laughs]
I mean this is like a bit of a backstory, I've been partnering with a lot of my friends when we were talking about the history of the corner store is that it's always been in relationship to working-class migration families. Growing up in my neighborhood, you had the corner store. So, some of my friends and I, and local farmers, have been really thinking about, what does that mean, and how do we then reimagine what the corner store means for healthy eating, better access to food.
Charlotte Burns:
What does that look like? Is that you opening corner stores? One, several?
Alvaro Barrington:
We're starting with one. It's my studio. It's also where the work will be shown and it's where I make paintings. It's also a storefront. And it's really interesting because it makes the art much, much more public-facing and because people are walking by and seeing me right there in the Lower East Side.
I just think it's a great way to be much, much more active in the conversation. It just means that my studio is right there on the ground floor.
Charlotte Burns:
I know the history of the architecture of New York and storefront culture is meaningful to you. So to put your practice into that history is a really interesting thing to do because you're interacting with that in a really direct way.
When you say the art has to be much, much more engaging, what does that mean?
Alvaro Barrington:
There's something about people's desire for art and it to feel more alive. Which is why there's such long queues for the Van Gogh [Exhibition: The Immersive] experience, the Frida Kahlo [The Life of an Icon] experience.
And that means that painting has to do painting because it is an artist, for good or bad, one of the narratives that's within art is that they’re honest about how they understand the world. And people, I think, feel that they're being, that they're being lied to by the media, by leadership. Any poll that you look at will tell you that folks have deep distrust of many structures but they'll line up forever for a Taylor Swift concert or a Beyoncé concert, or a Van Gogh experience. And I think there's things that I need to learn from that, as an artist.
I think art has to be more, much more in people's lives. It just has to figure that out. It just can no longer, I say this quite jokingly, but I was talking to an art advisor and they were telling me about a story that they were selling this painting to a collector while they were at a restaurant, and I just had this funny imagination of that collector buying this million dollar painting and they're like “Buy this painting. It's really hot right now,” and they look at it on a PDF, and then they order their burger, and they just, it's…
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Probably thought more about the burger.
Alvaro Barrington:
[Laughs]
Yeah, because, I just thought, “Oh, okay, I gotta buy that right now. Okay, do I want bacon and cheddar on my burger?” And I just thought I put so much, any painter that you know, any, put so much time. Chances are if you're meeting a young painter today, they've taken on massive student loans. They've put themselves in deep debt.
Charlotte Burns:
I mean, you graduated with $270,000 in debt, right?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah. And so most young artists, if you're $270,000 in debt, that means you've invested so much in yourself, in the belief that somehow you're going to become an artist, that somehow you're going to make something of yourself. And then to have that thing be reduced to ordering it next to a side of burger, it just, there’s something really crude about that.
Charlotte Burns:
It's a little crushing.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
You talked about the violence of debt and what it means to make different choices in your life to try to appeal to whoever it is that wants to maybe buy that work or believe in you or back you.
You made that investment in yourself but you asked the question in one of the interviews you did, “How many people do you think successfully live off art? The way I've managed to live off art in the last five years, the number’s probably under 200.”And so how does it feel to juggle those realities, that you took that massive financial gamble and have made financial success? How strategic are you about that? How precarious does that feel? Do you feel like this is a moment to make the most of that? You have this enormous interest in your work. You're represented by a constellation of galleries around the world. How much of your sense of value do you invest in that success, which is a market success, and what does it teach you about what you think is missing and where you want to go?
Alvaro Barrington:
I mean, I took this on when I was much, much older and I had smarter people—Katy, Nari, Chris, Kerry, Daniel Bosco—so many just brilliant people who guided my decision. So it was a really well-informed decision that I can say that I was free in making. And I was able to accept accountability for the outcome of that decision.
I think when you're 18 and are being told to make that same decision, or even if you're 30 or 40 but don't necessarily have the resources that I had to make that decision, then, I think what you're, what society has created is a new, culture of indentured servitude.
The amount of times I've walked into a classroom and as a teacher, know that there's at least five of those students who have become sex workers because they cannot afford the education, and the housing, and so many other things. It's one of those things that make me so upset. And I don't really think people understand how crazy it is that you have 30 students, and five, six of them have said, not of their free will, that they're going to become a sex worker.
Not saying that there's anything wrong with sex workers. I have many close friends who've done it and have historically enjoyed it. But I just think that we're creating these conditions in which people are making decisions that ten years from now they will realize how fucked they are. This is why I get so upset when there's [President] Joe Biden student debt cancellation conversations. It just, it's extremely upsetting for me. Because I know, I go, “Man, I made that very informed, but most of my cohorts was not as informed as I was.” They weren't as privileged as I was. How many people could say that they could turn to someone as brilliant as Katy or even Chris Ofili to say, what decision should I make next? Most people are just like coming from a small town…
Charlotte Burns:
And feel like they’ve gotta do it, yeah.
Alvaro Barrington:
…and making it because they're told, “Yeah”.
Charlotte Burns:
When you talked about this next phase of your career, I wonder if you're getting closer to your “Cubist period”. You've spoken about, for you, a lot of the art you've made has been moving through your “Blue Period”, grappling with the history and the pressures of history on painting, and that you'll know you're in your Cubist period when you're making painting that's dealing with the pressures of painting today.
When you talk about moving into like a more product moment, is that you moving into your Cubist period, do you think?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think that's probably one of the elements of it, and by product, I also mean public. I could be completely wrong right now, but I think painting is extremely limited. Like, I will never not make paintings, but I think one of the ways is that maybe I need to think of it in a much more product-driven way in that it can be replicated a bit more.
Charlotte Burns:
You mean like merchandise?
Alvaro Barrington:
Like merch, I made this painting that's a shutter. It's my landscape painting. It's like the joy of waking up and waiting for a store to open up. And then we made it into a lamp that can be reproduced somehow, but hold some of that.
And I think I have to start thinking more like those things. And I think that was one of the pressures when people made prints. I think print, printmaking was one of those strategies of how to disseminate the art in a more product-driven way.
Charlotte Burns:
And how much of that is about access? Because prints were tied to that sort of great Victorian push for education even though, obviously being Victorian it was deeply tied to the class system. How much of that move towards thinking about different things that I guess carry the spirit of painting within them is about access for you?
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, it's all about access. It's all about access. I was walking through Bed Stuy, a few years ago, we stopped by at brownstone, and it was obviously well maintained. And I said, “Whose artwork do you think is in there? I bet you it's probably Kaws, if anything.” And I thought what was brilliant about what Brian [Donnelly, known professionally as Kaws] did was that he started in the public domain. I thought there, that I just need to think much, much more public about my art and that means then more people could kind of get it in, because that's my way of competing with Taylor Swift.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
So I'm going to ask you a ‘what if.’ What is the ‘what if’ that motivates you to get up in the morning and the one that keeps you awake at night?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think the ‘what if’ was like, what if I was working at P. C. Richard Son again, or Circuit City? Not that I didn't like those jobs, but I feel extremely grateful to be a painter. There were times where I was working 80 hours a week at many different jobs that added to probably $30,000 a year. And I'm like, what if I still was stuck doing those jobs?
And I'm like, “Wow, I get to do this thing,” and so I, yeah, that often plays in my head, especially when I go back to New York and I'll see an advertisement for Bob's Discount Furniture. Or I'll pass a cafe or something that I worked at, I'm like, “Oh my god. Let me go to the studio.”
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. Let me go and put some hours in.
What if art was seen as an essential, not a luxury?
Alvaro Barrington:
Then we'd be in a better world. I deeply believe that.
There's this phrase about how arts always get attacked with the idea that there's some sort of financial crisis looming. So they cut out arts education. But I think deeply at the foundation of art is a need for us to be, for people to be seen and for the world to understand the complexity and how we can enjoy each other and be with each other and see each other's humanity.
And I think there are strong forces that do not want people to see the humanity of other people. And I speak of this from the point of how much hip hop was attacked at an era where Ghostface Killah let me know that my reality, I wasn't insane. But there was leadership that strongly advocated for every one of those guys to be in jail or their voice being taken away.
And I strongly have an antagonistic idea about censoring. It's one of the things I think is so great about America, this idea of it as a First Amendment right?
Charlotte Burns:
I was going to ask you, what if it was possible to reimagine or rebuild our institutions, but I guess you're doing that with the corner shop.
Do you see it as a new kind of institution, as a new kind of platform?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think it's a traditional model that somehow over the last 20, 30 years got erased.
I live in Shoreditch and my studio is in Whitechapel and I walk by this storefront that Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin’s did their [The] Shop in the 90s. I've walked by it almost every day.
Charlotte Burns:
Was that an inspiration for this project?
Alvaro Barrington:
I think there's many things that are inspiration. I grew up where you saw rappers before they blew up.
Charlotte Burns:
There was an accessibility.
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah. You knew that, oh, if you went to a certain corner, you might see Biggie rapping. And if you were, you paid attention to it, then you knew who was going to become the next big basketball player, the next big rapper, they were accessible to you, yeah.
Charlotte Burns:
How is it being funded?
Alvaro Barrington:
Well, luckily I have a decent art market.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
We can thank the art market for this.
It's really interesting that you're using your success to do something other than just continue your own success in the art market. You're trying to parlay it into something else as well. Do you think you can sustain both? Can you keep that art market success going and build new models at the same time?
Alvaro Barrington:
I try not to invest in things unless the money is in the bank. I think the only thing that I invested in that was like, I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God’ is the building that I bought, and I was like but it's where I have a mortgage, but everything else we start from like a zero-based budgeting framework and also okay, the money's here, and this is how much money I'm willing to lose or gain.
I even do that with my exhibitions. We do okay, we're doing this exhibition. I've put $500,000 in production. Can I lose this $500,000? Okay, I can. Okay, let's go.
And obviously, I didn't always do that, but that's where I'm lucky to be at the point where I don't really put money into something unless it's money I'm ready to lose because there's people who work with me, people, it just isn't fair to them that I've blown every penny on a painting that didn't sell.
Charlotte Burns:
Does it need to be financially sustainable, the new project? Do you have a sense of when it would be or are you putting pressure on yourself to figure that out? Talking about the merchandising line and things like that.
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah I mean I don’t like losing money.
[Laughs]
I like the idea that, oh, that I made something and somebody found it valuable and they wanted to live with it. I find great joy in that. So yeah, I never hope to lose money.
I try to be smart about things, I try to follow my intuition. I know if I'm deeply selfish and concerned about something, then there's probably one or two people out there who feel the same.
That was also one of the great parts about growing up in New York City and being a kid from the city. I had so many different groups of friends because there were just some circles that the possibility of my emotional space wasn't really accepted in those spaces. I would just go to another circle where I would get validated in that space and that was also the great part about being an orphan and having all these different family members who would be willing to take care of me for a weekend, is that, okay, I know I can't get away with this over here, so I'll go to my next aunt's house.
[Laughs]
Charlotte Burns:
I like it. There’s intuition and strategy at every level.
[Laughs]
Alvaro Barrington:
It's like, well, ok, I know I'm not going to get away with this over here, but if I go to my cousin's house over here, they'll get me on that level, it just is. So I honestly think that there's so many different parts of me that just looking at my reality I'm still friends with the same people from every part of my life. I'm friends with people from when I was eight years old, and we still talk, regularly.
I just deeply believe that there's so many different positions on how one can exist in the world and it's just about if you bring something to someone that may not necessarily be what they're interested in. But, it's just knowing who to have conversations with.
Charlotte Burns:
I think it's really exciting. I think the way that you think about art and what it's for and who it's for is genuinely really exciting and ambitious. And so I look forward to hearing how it all goes.
Are you moving to New York permanently then? Are you leaving London or are you going to be between both?
Alvaro Barrington:
Between both. I have my studio here, my life is here, my partner doesn't want to leave here.
Charlotte Burns:
Yeah. So a few important things.
[Laughs]
Alvaro Barrington:
Yeah, but I'm from New York and my family's there and I just genuinely love the streets. I just genuinely love that a building existed. I get excited when I see a certain street corner, and how the sun sets in there. So it has me, despite its, what I think is a growing attack in creating a subservient class of people by political leadership.
Charlotte Burns:
As you were saying that, I was picturing all these beautiful New York sunsets I used to see across the Hudson River.
So just for me to say, thank you so much, Alvaro. I really appreciate your time and all of your thoughts and everything that you're doing. And I look forward to hearing about the next 10-year plan because it feels like you're just at the moment where you're about to embark on a new and really exciting chapter.
So thanks for sharing it with us.
Alvaro Barrington:
No, thank you, and I'm such a fan so just the fact that we get to speak is one of the great joys of my life.
Charlotte Burns:
Oh my goodness. Thank you.
Alvaro Barrington:
Okay, speak soon.
[Musical interlude]
Charlotte Burns:
Big thanks to Alvaro Barrington. Join us next time on The Art World: What If…?! when we’ll be talking to the artist and director of NEW INC, Salome Asega.
Salome Asega:
Power for me, I think, was always a process of self-reflection and self-improvement. It was power, I guess, as measured against myself. Can I outrun maybe the other parts of myself that are saying you can't do it? And when I can beat those other parts of myself I feel victorious.
Charlotte Burns:
I really enjoyed that conversation and I hope you guys will tune in next time on The Art World: What If…?!
This podcast is brought to you by Art&, the editorial platform created by Schwartzman&. The executive producer is Allan Schwartzman, who co-hosts the show together with me, Charlotte Burns of Studio Burns, which produces the series.
Follow the show on social media @artand_media.