We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick Earl Hammie a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Patrick Earl, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
Thanks so much for the opportunity to share! Yes, I’m able to live as an interdisciplinary visual artist. I produce exhibitions, sell artworks, complete commissions, speak publicly, curate and jury exhibitions, and teach and administrate in higher education. These activities keep me fed and make it possible to own a home. They’ve taken me toward projects and people that are dear to me, and helped me grow others’ dreams. A naive compulsion to aim high, love from my circle, and a bit of luck have been key. A lot started shortly after graduate school. Wellesley College discovered my work through a job search. I didn’t get the job, but fortunately they saw a potential worth nurturing and took a different chance on me. They awarded me a fellowship that financed me for a year. With the time it provided I engaged with the Wellesley community and created and exhibited new work. Their acknowledgment was like nitro at the start of my career. That momentum led to several New York exhibitions and accepting an assistant professor position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. That was 14 years ago.
My journey so far has felt like being on a stove burner, with family and investors’ heated beliefs lifting me upward. My mom and dad encouraged all my curiosities—martial arts, baseball, choir, football, and of course art—as long as I kept a B average in school. We weren’t connected to the art industry or academy. As far as I know, I was the first family member to pursue art, earn a terminal degree, and gain tenure at university. It’s been work: developing industry relationships from the ground up; self-caring; making the art, lectures, and syllabi; trying to say yes when you’re terrified of being an imposter. Or worse, failing to live up to your expectations.
Patrick Earl, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I specialize in portraiture, but also explore storytelling and the body in visual culture. Since 2007, I’ve examined personal and shared Black experiences, systems of knowledge production, and the politics of representation as a visual artist. I engage these topics through representation, abstraction, pastiche, and narrative, using techniques informed by critical theory and postcolonialism. My practice includes oil painting, printmaking, sculpture, installation, illustration, and curation. My stories expand notions of self, family, and community. As a Blerd (a Black nerd), I draw upon history, mythologies, music, and speculative fiction.
After gaining tenure at Illinois in 2015, the International Review of African American Art named me an “Artist to Watch;” Poets/Artists Magazine named me one of “50 Memorable Artists of 2015;” The JPMorgan Chase Art Collection acquired my painting Contact (2014) from my previous project Significant Other. During Art Basel Miami 2015, I had work on view at three different locations in the city: JPMorgan Chase exclusive exhibition; Yeelen Gallery’s What’s Inside Her Never Dies; Sirona Fine Art’s The Artist’s Gaze.
In 2017, my fourth major project, Birth Throes, premiered at Kruger Gallery in Marfa, where thousands descended on the small West Texas town during Chinati Weekend. The series of twenty-five paintings and drawings personalize Black familyhood and intergenerational acts of survival, rebellion, and hope. In 2018 the David C. Driskell Center in Maryland included my painting Oedipus (2017) in Portraits of Who We Are, an exhibition and catalog surveying 150 years of Black self-portraiture. The Center, an intellectual home for studying and expanding African diasporic arts, added my painting Oedipus to its permanent collection at the close of the exhibition.
Since 2018, I’ve accepted commissions from institutions for portraits of individuals who have played important roles in history. These include Romare Bearden for the Smithsonian Institute’s Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth, a ten-city traveling exhibition that asked twenty-five artists to depict twenty-five Black men who have changed American culture; Albert R. Lee, an advocate for Black students navigating Jim (Jane) Crow Laws at the University of Illinois; Mark Burstein, the sixteenth and first openly gay President of Lawrence University; and Willie Reed, the first Black Dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Purdue University.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
During the stay-at-home order 2020 I scrambled for a path to joy, for an escape into meaning. The pandemic, civic unrest, and loss of stability and loved ones was challenging for many, and art professionals weren’t immune. The murders of Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, Daniel Prude, George Floyd, Julian Edward Roosevelt Lewis, Marcellis Stinnette, and Andre Hill hit me particularly hard that year. They are just some of the victims whose fates extended the legacy of slave patrols, night watches, and lynch mobs.
The real world beating of Rodney King by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department introduced ‘90s kids like me to these violent realities, but the film Candyman etched this brutality into my creative heart. The Candyman is Daniel Robitaille, the son of an enslaved man, and a portraitist working in the early 1900s. He falls in love with a wealthy white woman sitting for her portrait and conceives a child with her, prompting her father to send a lynch mob to kill him. Intelligent and talented, Robataille finds himself in proximity to wealth and whiteness and learns that crossing some boundaries, such as loving a white woman, carries the penalty of death. Robitaille manifests in modern day Chicago as the Boogeyman that the mob claimed him to be. Candyman shows racism as it is for Black people: an enduring horror story. The terror of lynching in Candyman returned with every digital alert and notification of a recently murdered unarmed Black person.
In 2020, I found obsession in Soul Train, a musical variety television show that ran from 1971 to 2006. I explored its programming for months—its performances and commercials, as well as interviews and histories reflecting on it—and was transported back to my youth and the glitz and suede of the Black imagination. The show incubated parasocial communities within the walls of Black households. This space offered precious reprieve for viewers during the show’s run, and for me in the present, from the violence and hostility dominating the public sphere, and celebrated visions of Black audacious joy and collective pleasure.
I developed I AM… LEGEND, wall-painted installations and ten small-scaled drawings, to examine nostalgia for both the Black cultural awakening represented by Soul Train, and the resurgence of white nationalism represented by lynch mobs. I imagined another “soul train,” now as the “ghost train” of folklore—spiriting the memories, dreams, and deeds of the dead—remembering those legions that are dying and disappearing. I captured over 300 stills from Soul Train, surveyed people who watched its initial run and re-runs, and reviewed interviews with creators and performers.
Other drawings began with the iconography of lynchings: scans from the book Without Sanctuary (James Allen; 2000), and images from Getty Images and several digitized collections. I isolated the lynch mobs and spectators from the victims and backgrounds, a task that led me to explore the horrifying details in this imagery. Rendering the murderers as silhouettes emphasized the haunting effect of their collective force.
In October 2021, I AM… LEGEND premiered at the Freeport Art Museum in Illinois. I co-curated a sound installation for this show as a Spotify playlist with Blackmau, the collaborative duo of Stacey Robinson and Kamau Grantham. The show with a playlist echoes the celebration, harassment, disobedience, love, and making of Black space found throughout the project.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Shifting common expectations could lay a foundation for a more equitable and “thriving” creative ecosystem. We all live with art in our daily lives. Music and video streaming, paintings, gaming apps, films, comics, posters, and public monuments are some examples. Many enjoy and everyone benefits from art and design, yet we’ve organized our common sense, school counseling and curriculum, and federal and state funding toward marginalizing the preparation, production, and profit potential of our entertainment and cultural touchstones. This ignorance benefits some whose privilege or position seemingly rely on a devalued working class. Enthusiasts and collectors often connect artifacts with creators and work flow—education, debt management, funding, space and facility needs, research and production time, and distribution—but rarely beyond. In short: we’ve nurtured negative fictions around creative professionalism, and left the majority of the weight on private citizens and organizations to develop literacy around and care for these practices.
Think of the farm-to-table movement as a productive model, which prioritizes and supports local producers and community. If we begin with proper recognition, education, and funding and compensation for creative producers, their quality goods and services, market pressure might force needed readjustments. Like the farm-to-table movement, these adjustments could lead to higher initial costs and a need to reprioritize across all sectors. But, with earnest effort this might establish new norms, opportunities, and benefits for creators, investors, publishers, educators, and consumers, who are all of us.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://patrickearlhammie.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/patrickearlhammie/
- Other: https://art.illinois.edu