We recently connected with Olivia Guterson and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Olivia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share an important lesson you learned in a prior job that’s helped you in your career afterwards?

Until getting accepted into Cranbrook Academy of Art’s MFA program in 2022, I had not studied art outside of mandatory classes in high school. I spent the last decade in tech (cybersecurity and data analytics) with the last five years of my corporate career working alongside startups and investing in entrepreneurs. All along, I was painting at night, attending art events, and visiting museums and galleries, but I didn’t see a way to be an artist and make a living. I truly believe it was all those years of having a front-row seat to entrepreneurs pitching their businesses, dreaming out loud, and betting on themselves that planted a seed that what I felt called to was a possibility. Being that my education and lived experience up until that point was in business and entrepreneurship, I conducted research and created a roadmap so that I could transition into a life that centered my creative practice. What I learned that has proven to be the most valuable on my journey to being a full-time artist is that relationships and community are essential and showing up to the studio every day is vital.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I engage in an evolving multidisciplinary practice that is a collaboration with my ancestors through prayer, listening, divination, and working with and through the archives that manifest in visual offerings. While I belong to and/or in the African and also the Jewish diaspora, there is an experienced displacement and a dispersal, and also a claiming and a locatedness simultaneously experienced. This is foundational to my practice and has necessitated the crafting of language, tools, and textural movements that uplift the spatial organization strategies and technologies historically and presently known within the Black diaspora, more specifically privileging the innate wisdom and practices of Black women, which is intimately connected to survival. Relying heavily on iteration, repetition, a sort of remixing, and call-and-response, conversations become embedded within my offerings which simultaneously answer and question themselves while in turn becoming an underlying algorithmic structure of commands, instructions, and locations.

Concepts of margins and centers, integration and separation, placement and displacement, migration and settlement, negotiation and navigation are constantly being examined, questioned, manipulated, and ultimately dictate my materials, forms, and marks. Most of my offerings have come to feel like an extension of my body highlighting my methods of navigation and serving as a way of seeing myself back to myself. Often using my hair brushes and afro picks to apply and manipulate my materials and surfaces, I at times adorn the works with beads, seeds, beans, earth, and thread. The obsessive intricacy of my mark-making and material layering is underscored by the fractured grids and overall geometric compositions, resulting in visual experiences that feel both in time and beyond time and seek to uncover new vantage points revealed in the archives that tell new or truer stories of how we’ve survived and how we’ll continue to survive.

I am interested in how we survived.

I am interested in how we are surviving.

I am interested in how we get free.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

While being an artist/creative is foundational to who I am, so is being a mother. I had my son at home here in Detroit that first August of Covid (Summer 2020). There was so much I had to learn about being a mother and also how to find flow and curate opportunities to make a living from my art. For the first year of my child’s life, I pivoted to murals and I wore him while I painted. My practice ebbed and flowed and changed so that I could keep him and his care at the center. When I was accepted into grad school (which was its own type of miracle) I had no idea what that was going to mean to us and also my desire to be with and near my young child. I write this now after just graduating from my MFA program. These past two years have been the longest, shortest years of my life. I say all this to say, that I hope that one day my practice will resource me enough to create a fund to not only support mothers and caregivers pursuing higher education in creative fields but also to break down barriers that make it so difficult. I struggled with rent, transportation, material costs, and childcare and I don’t want others to have to share that experience. What I believe is that we need the dreams, art, writings, gifts, and magic of mothers and caregivers. I am where I am because those are the people who encouraged me and supported me along the way.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

When I think about social media, I don’t think about followers and audience, but community. I personally want there to be consistency with who I am in my day-to-day life and what I share or offer in my online world. With that being said, I mostly share my art and the little moments in my studio or with my child that bring me joy and inspire what I make. I seek to be really honest around my experience as an artist/mother. While I don’t post a lot about my child, I do share videos of trying to work in the studio with him. I utilize my stories to uplift those in my community and what they are doing. I also like to share and amplify funding and resource opportunities. I welcome conversation and engage with a lot of mothers who are navigating their creative practices. I find a real generosity in sharing what I have learned and also reaching out when I have questions. I also find it crucial to celebrate each other.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.midnightolive.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/midnightolive/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliviaguterson/

Image Credits

Headshot by Suzy Poling @light.arc.studio

Photo by Tim Johnson—courtesy of the artist and Louis Buhl & Co.