We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Paula Mans a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Paula, appreciate you joining us today. Do you wish you had started sooner?

I started my journey as an artist quite late in life – in my early 30s, after becoming a mother.

As a child, I was always engaged in some form of creative work – from singing, to ceramics, dancing, playing instruments, and even performing on stage. I loved to create in many forms. My childhood home was also full of art – sculptures, paintings, and tapestries of Black artists from across the African Diaspora. As a teen, however, I had a negative experience in an art class that pushed me away from making art. The class was highly technical and largely drawing based. Learning about making art in that rigid environment led me to believe that I did not possess the facility or talent to be an artist and pushed me away from creating entirely for decades.

I gradually found my way back to art when I became a mother in 2015. When my child was a toddler, I used art as a tool to encourage their self-expression and support them as they explored the world around them. We loved to pin up large pieces of butcher paper on the walls of our apartment, and I would leave drawing tools all over the home for my child to access and create with. Everyday, we would draw together in the living room responding to the music that we listened to, the movies we watched, and books that we read. Witnessing how naturally my child gravitated to and excelled in art making helped me unlearn the negative self-perception that I had about own my abilities as an artist. Working with my child pushed me to return home to myself through artmaking. Over time, I began to draw again, rendering faces on scrap pieces of paper and, eventually, I began to paint again. I believe that I would not be an artist today if I hadn’t become a mother. The act of mothering nurtured my inner child and ultimately reopened the long-closed door to my artistic voice and identity.

While a part of me does wish that I could go back in time and begin my artist journey at an earlier age, I do believe that everything has happened in its right time and in its right order. Our society places so much pressure on young people to know who they are and what they want to pursue so early in life. Living my life has enabled me to develop a strong sense of self and a worldview which has funneled into and defined my creative work. I believe that my long, winding journey back towards art is proof that it is never too late to find yourself, your purse, and your calling. I am grateful that I had the time to explore myself and the world around me which has, in turn, allowed me to expand from within. I now believe that you must truly live to fortify your voice and vision within your artistic practice.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Paula Mans. I am a self-taught mixed media collagist based in Washington, DC. Through my work, I seek to tell the many stories of the global Black experience through mixed media collage. I view collage as emblematic of the cultural and historical interconnectedness of the African Diaspora. Just as the dispersed people of the Diaspora are tied together by the common thread of ancestry, in collage, disjointed pieces are fused together to communicate one story. During the Transatlantic slave trade, millions of people from across West Africa were forcibly displaced from their ancestral homes. These Africans were thrown into the bellies of ships alongside fellow enslaved people with whom they did not necessarily share a common language, ethnicity, or religion. Rather than perish under the immeasurable weight of violence and degradation, enslaved Africans chose to survive – taking remnants of their identities and molding them together to form new cultures and identities in the Americas. In my artistic practice, I use collage as a physical tool that mirrors these historical processes. I draw from imagery of people from across the African Diaspora – deconstructing, bonding, and resignifying small parts to assemble new faces and forms that communicate shared identities and experiences.
As an artist, I am deeply inspired by my experiences living throughout the African Diaspora. As a child, I lived in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Eswatini. I also spent all of my 20s living in Brazil. These experiences instilled in me an expansive view of Black identity. Living in these places, pushed me to envision Blackness beyond the myth of monolith by encouraging me to see Blackness as a global identity that transcends cultures, languages, religion, and geographies. This worldview shapes my identity, politics, and informs my creative work.

I also seek to create works that amplify the agency of people of African descent within contemporary social contexts. As a native of Washington, DC, – one of the most rapidly gentrifying cities in the United States – my most recent body of work navigates Black erasure that stems from this racialized socio-economic process. As Black people are increasingly displaced under the thumb of gentrification in many neighborhoods across DC, I endeavor to create works that serve as visual records of Black permanence and protagonism. Rather than crafting voyeuristic figuration to be viewed and consumed, the figures I construct look defiantly out onto the world – engaging, confronting, and challenging the viewer. My intentional use of monochrome throughout my work speaks directly to the experiences of erasure and hyper-visibility while my use of negative space engages in dialogue with gentrified displacement – the removal of Blackness from place. This heightened contrast plays with notions of visibility/ invisibility that define the ways that Black identity is viewed and constructed by white supremacist power structures.

I began my artist journey as an abstract painter – creating large scale, mixed media paintings during the COVID quarantines that allowed me to process the turmoil happening in the world around me. Witnessing the graphic video of George Floyd’s state-sanctioned murder and portraits of Breonna Taylor go viral in 2020, however, greatly impacted me both politically and artistically and ultimately led me to break from abstraction and focus on figurative work. While these murders at the hands of police signified the destruction and erasure of Black lives, voices, and bodies, the viral nature of the videos and images signified a hypervisibility of Blackness within social media and societal spaces. Both processes, nonetheless, contributed to the dehumanization of Black people via the eradication of our power and free will. I began to use collage as a tool to examine this tension by collecting found images of Black people – deconstructing and reconstructing portraiture to amplify the agency of the Black figure.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think that it is important for society at large to acknowledge the work that artists do as just that – work. The labor performed by artists is just as valuable and important as anyone else’s in our society. Through our work, artists reflect the times – providing meaningful social commentary, fostering important dialogues that connect disparate peoples, and engaging in world building that envisions a more just, equitable world. To do this important work, artists need not only the time and space to dedicate to their practices, but also dignified wages. I believe that governments should financially support artists in the form of ongoing grants and programs, similarly to what was achieved during the the WPA’s Federal Art Program of the 1930s and 40s, to ensure that creative ecosystems, and the artists that operate within them, not only survive but thrive.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

As an artist, it is incredibly rewarding to use the physical act of making to explore the deepest recesses of my mind, process my lived experiences, and excavate memories. Being able to bring my ideas and beliefs to life through the tactile manipulation of physical materials is incredibly meaningful to me. It is equal parts cathartic, healing, and spiritual. It is also incredible to be able to tell stories and communicate through visual forms. To be an artist is have the power to create visual texts that speak out to unknown others – beyond the confines of language, culture, and time.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paulamans.art
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/paulamansart/?hl=en

Image Credits

Photographs courtesy of the artist