Rudy Shepherd

Based in New York City, Rudy Shepherd received a BS in Biology and Studio Art from Wake Forest University and an MFA in Sculpture from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He has been in group exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY, The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY, Bronx Museum of Art, NY, Art in General, NY, Triple Candie, NY, Socrates Sculpture Park, NY, Cheekwood Museum of Art, TN, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT, Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art, NC, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL, Tart Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Analix Forever Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland and solo exhibitions at Mixed Greens Gallery, NY, Regina Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. He has been awarded Artist in Residence at PS1 National/International Studio Program, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY, Artist in Residence Visual + Harlem, Jacob Lawrence Institute for the Visual Arts, New York, NY and Emerging Artist Fellowship, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY, Artist in Residence, Location One, NY and most recently at the Process Space Artist in Residence Program Governors Island, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, NY.
He is currently represented by LatchKey Gallery, NY.

Interview with Rudy Shepherd

Questions by Nancy Kim

Hi Rudy! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us! You’ve talked about how different portraits have hit you differently. When I saw your portrait of Hyung Jung Grant, I felt that moment too. I realize as an Asian-American woman I was identifying with her on a different level, as if some collective aspect of my identity or personhood that felt a ghost was suddenly made visible. Until then, I’m not sure I really understood how each portrait could hit a viewer differently depending on their lived experiences. Does that change after you complete a portrait? For those that were perhaps more distant from your lived experience, did painting them bring them closer to you?
Yes, I feel like my relationship to the person I’m drawing changes from when I start the portrait to when I finish it. The process of making the drawings pulls me into the story and forces me to reckon with how it would feel if this happened to me or someone I loved.

I feel like there’s a way in which you become a kind of witness and a kind of speaker for the dead? That’s a heavy weight. What questions of responsibility and ethics do you grapple with in painting people who were victims or are perpetrators? What questions do you grapple with when painting a person whose lived experience or culture is or was very different from your own? Where do you take extra care? 
I have sometimes thought of myself as a designated mourner for our culture. I am the person that takes the time to remember our dead and honor them. This is a role I have taken on with this work. When making these portraits I try to focus on re-presenting these people so that they are more than just a story you hear about on the news. I am attempting to have people find empathy for these people whether they are victims or perpetrators, especially if they are the perpetrators. I think people naturally empathize with victims but struggle to think in complex ways about the perpetrators of crimes. When making portraits of perpetrators I grapple with not sensationalizing/exoticizing them. I always fear people will misunderstand my intentions and think I am just fascinated with evil or trying to get attention by doing something controversial.  

Your portrait series has been compared to a memorial, yearbook, and an archive, but maybe it can also be compared to a program/playbill handed to the audience, where you give us a space or an opportunity to separate from the play or the performance or the script that is America. You let us see the cast, to see the humans that play out these roles where they are constructed as angels demons to be valorized or expelled. You give us a chance to see them flip back in our minds as people. Can you talk a bit about the importance of that flip? Can you talk about that construction of good and evil and how you see it functioning? What role does news and media play in how we create stories?
For me it has become clear that the media tends to simplify stories to present them in a clear way to their audience, so they need good guys and bad guys and there is very little grey area between them. But in reality there is mostly grey and very few people that are purely evil. My work attempts to reinsert the complexity back into the story. I think it is dangerous to paint people as villains and all too often black men have been these villains and we can see when we look at what happened to George Floyd how dangerous that can be. I walk around every day knowing that people’s first reaction to me on the street is to be afraid that I am going to harm them. This whole project in a way is about that. If I can be so misunderstood how many other things are we getting wrong?

What does it do to you to paint a victim? What does it do to you to paint a perpetrator? Has painting both brought you closer to understanding both “roles” within yourself? Is part of your work an invitation for viewers to the same?
Painting both sides of the story helps me to understand what it would be like to be in either position. I can see in myself both dark and light, I have never gotten so angry I would kill, but I have definitely lost my temper and said things I didn’t mean. My hope is that the viewers of my work take a similar journey as they look at the work, even if only for a moment. Maybe that moment will shift their thinking.

Another way I see your body of work is as diagnostic and treatment. I see the portrait series as a mapping out, splaying out of American history as it is happening, as a landscape, as a body, where we can see culminating moments as culminating points that reveal a shape of an unseen sickness. In humanizing both, you disrupt but also give space to diagnose. The Black Rock Negative Energy Absorbers and Holy Mountain project seem to be about treating the sickness and finding healing or searching for healing. As the maker, do you feel a difference when working on the portrait series vs. the Black Rock Negative Energy Absorbers?
Yes, I think of these two projects in just this way. The portraits and other paintings illustrate the problems, whereas the Black Rock Negative Energy Absorbers, Healing Devices and Holy Mountains offer an artistic/spiritual solution. I think any presentation of my work should include a bit of each, they legitimize each other in a way and maybe start to speak to the complexity of life. For me the experience of making the portraits can be sad or frustrating whereas the process of making the healing work is very life affirming and brings me energy instead of taking it away. It is nice to be able to switch between the two.

You started in the portrait series in 2007, 14 years ago. You have said that working on this portrait series was healing for you. Has that been surprising for some people to hear? I think something that many might not have thought about until recently is how death is such a constant specter for so many people of color, TQPOC/BIPOC communities in particular. Do you feel a schism in legibility of your work by viewers' different lived experiences? Has that changed over time? How has conversation changed since George Floyd and BLM?
This summer I noticed a big spike in interest in my work which resulted in a solo museum show, an interview on NBC and like five lectures at different universities this fall. Like you said I have been doing this for 14 years, but I think what happened to George Floyd and the protests that followed pushed this issue to the forefront in a way I have never seen in my lifetime and so this thing I had been trying to get people to pay attention to since 2007 is finally being acknowledged and discussed.

What has it meant to be working with content so closely tied to trauma and death in this way for so long?
It is something I pay attention to and think about anyway, but it definitely has meant I have spent more time than most people thinking about it. But the upside is, I have also spent that time processing my feelings about the issue and talking to others about it. This summer I didn’t look up and say what am I doing to help. Not to toot my own horn, but I know what I’ve been doing.

You’ve also started including paintings of scenes from the news. There’s something about them that has the cleared-eyed straightforwardness and vitality of illustrations, but are material translations of actual moments in current events. When did you start painting these scenes? Are there ways in which they operate differently than the portraits?
I’m not sure exactly when this started, I think around 2010. I started to think about how to extend this portrait project towards representing things that could not be  properly encapsulated by a portrait of just one person. It has put the project in dialogue with history painting for me. It is my attempt to document the important moments of our time. And it allows me to elaborate on stories I have begun telling with the portraits. Usually I know when it's time to do one of these when I see an image and I’m like wow people need to see this. One that comes to mind is the image of James Fields driving his car into a crowd of protesters killing Heather Heyer. When I looked up an image of this scene I was horrified and felt like people really needed to see and consider this again.

A way in which they may function differently than the portraits is that they become more emblematic of what is going on in our society, more symbolic. Each one is real and a reproduction of an image, of a specific moment, but they also hopefully speak generally about how I and many others feel about what’s going on. One that comes to mind here is the Limousine burned during Trump’s inauguration by the Black Bloc or the protester outside of the burning Wendy’s in Atlanta.

The visual and collaborative experience of the Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber series and the performance as the Healer does not get to healing through a clinical kind of treatment, but something more intangible, mystical, or magical. It seems as if the healer doesn’t come to us with the rituals and steps already figured out, but it is as if we are seeing the healer in process and working through grief. Would you say grief and mourning play a more prominent role here? What is the role of grief and mourning in healing? Is healing a process of creation?
I think grief and mourning are present in many aspects of my work and that the performances are my attempt to process those feelings in real time along with the audience. My hope is that it is not just something the audience watches me go through, but something that brings them along in this process as well. So that by the end of the performance we are all transformed.

It’s funny, I grew up Catholic, went to Catholic school through high school and spent a lot of time in church watching rituals, wishing I could go outside and play or something. It seems I have recreated these rituals in my own way with these performances. Maybe if they played metal in church it might have pulled me in a little better.

I like that there’s a “messiness” to it? I feel like American culture does not handle the emotional messiness-sadness, anger, frustration, impotence, etc.-- of grief and mourning well. What has it been like to make that messiness public and collective? 
It’s been very refreshing for me and I have heard from the audience that it is refreshing for them as well. It is like I am giving everybody the freedom to just freak out and lose their composure. I am modeling it myself at least.

In thinking of your work through the idea of memorial, what do you think the relationship is between moving forward/processing and memory? Are memorials created to remember or to forget?
Good question. Hmm. I think that it is important to remember all we’ve been through but not be a prisoner to our past. I mean this on a personal level but also as a nation. I think we must remember and reckon with our past; for me that involves creating these artworks, taking more time with the stories we hear each day on the news to really think about what’s happened and what we can learn from it. I think the idea of permanent public moments is in the process of major change right now. Most of what exists honors things we don’t think too highly of anymore, and I think artists struggle to know how to memorialize the things happening now. How will we honor the 500K plus people killed by the COVID 19 pandemic? Will someone try to make a bronze statue?

Do you feel there is a difference between healing alone and healing collectively? Is healing somehow amplified when working with others? What has that psychic and spiritual healing looked like for you and your participants? What kind of conversations have sprung from working collectively—with collaborators and with participants?
The performances are collaborative in two different ways, one way is that I am collaborating with musicians to perform the improvisational music live. The other is the relationship with the audience. The conversations I have with both the audience members and my fellow performers is what has continued to shape the project and help it get better and better. It is like we all go through a transformative experience together, we come together in time and space, something happens and then we all walk away with a different impression of what happened and what we got out of it. It’s so different than if I were to be doing this work all by myself and with no audience. There is a transfer of energy that happens which is really what the whole thing is about and what is so healing about it.

You work from news images which are photo and video images which are fast and ubiquitous and translate them to painting which is slower and singular. Can you talk about what painting does to the image and what seeing that translation occur does to you?
The process of painting from these photographs is one of rehumanization. I am taking the person out of the hands of the machine and making it human, delicate, fragile again.

I often think about different kinds of paint when it comes to conveying content. Your portrait series works with watercolor vs. oil or acrylic. What is it about watercolor that is best suited as a medium for you to speak through?
I think it is the fragility it conveys. There is a very delicate nature to it that does very interesting things when put contrast to the content I am addressing. It also speaks in a subtle way to my intentions which are to re-humanize these people.

You started the portrait series 14 years ago coming to it as a sculptor. When you first started working with watercolor what was it like for you to work with such a delicate, hyper-responsive, and at times unwieldy feeling material? Now you’ve gained so much control over the material, are there times where you feel your own mastery gets in the way of communication? Over the years, has your love of the material been rock steady or were there times when you’ve had to renegotiate your relationship to the medium?
I started the series actually making the portraits out of acrylic on panel and really liked the way that looked, but once I got into doing them in watercolor I have been less satisfied with the way acrylic paint works. Watercolor is so sensitive to what you do with it. I feel like I can make so many different types of marks. When I go back to working with acrylic now it seems so limited in what it can do.

I do look back at my early pieces and marvel at the wildness of them, but I don’t think that my mastery of the material is getting in the way. I’m not that good at it so there is still always something a little bit weird about the pieces. 

Is there something healing about the act of painting or the material of paint itself or watercolor in particular?  You teach at Penn State and through Penn State’s restorative justice program you’ve been teaching incarcerated people how to paint. What has it meant to teach painting to others? What has it meant to teach painting to those caught in cycles of trauma, to those who may have a sense of what it means to be both perpetrator and victim?
Having the opportunity to teach what I love to men that are currently incarcerated has been a real eye opening experience for me. It has really pushed me to practice what I preach as far as treating people the same no matter what they have done in their past. But also as a black man, to go into a prison every week, mostly filled with other black men is profound. I think deep in the back of my mind I have been trying to avoid going to jail my whole life, it is the big boogie man in my life and many others, so there is something strange about walking in on your own volition.

But to share what I love with the guys there has been super interesting. Some of the guys in the class had a lot of experience and we built on top of that to further help them express their ideas and give them access to different art materials and the time and space to work. For others it was a whole new thing, that maybe they had an interest in, but never had the opportunity to pursue. The work they made was so interesting and really spoke to their varied interests. It’s funny, once I was in class and we all started working, I didn’t find it much different than teaching students at Penn State.

In the making of your pieces, whether it’s the portrait series, the healing devices, the negative energy absorbers, or the performances, what is the importance of touch? The presence of your touch as the maker? Or the experience of touch and the viewer?
Hmm, interesting questions, it’s something I definitely respond to when looking at other peoples work, it’s what gets me excited about looking at art. We all do it differently and not matter how hard we try, some truth about ourselves is revealed in the process. When I am making my work I just have to trust that it’s happening and that it’s a good thing. I make my work through a specific series of processes and it looks a certain way as a result. I just have to trust that process, not that I don’t make changes and experiment over time, but in general it comes down to having confidence in the choices I make.

As an artist who has been working with a long-term sustained project, one might think you’ve got it all figured out. Do you know before starting whether a piece works or doesn’t?  Where do you find space for experimentation? Are there ways in which you still surprise yourself?
When I sit down to make an artwork I have some sense of what I’m going to do, but I have no idea what it’s going to look like in the end and absolutely no idea whether it’s going to work. There are pieces that I really like that bring me joy and I feel like express ideas I’m excited about. There are other pieces where I tried to do one thing and another thing happened, sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s sort of embarrassing, but this evaluation seems to have little to do with how other people respond to my work. So many times people have told me they love a piece of mine that I find just mortifying. So I’ve just given up on the judgement game. I make the work and we just see what happens and how people respond.

Artists whose work is conceptually driven we often think their creative development of concept and aesthetic occur before the physical making begins—in the head and not the hands. For you where does the creative process occur? Can you talk more about spaces of discovery, conceptual and aesthetic, through process? 
I think the creative process happens in both the head and the hands. When I sit down to make an artwork I usually have a solid idea of what I want to make and why, but so much happens in the making of the piece that adds to this idea and brings in many more layers of complexity.

The sculptural and performance work is completely about process. These are places I work in a more abstract way, and really involve me just showing up and working very intuitively with materials--moving things around, finding form, experimenting with texture, scale, and movement--things people respond to in a similar very intuitive non-verbal way.

It seems a part of the work is asking us to place faith in art –perhaps a faith in its power to heal or communicate. Do you ever experience crises in faith? 
I’m happy to hear you pick up on this, the work is about faith, belief in the power of art. I believe that artists have over the time of human history shaped the world we live in, both physically, sonically, but also psychologically. It for sure has transformed my life, taking me from a disaffected disempowered young man to a person who speaks loudly and confidently for the things he believes in and has been given platforms like these to do so on a decent scale. I have this fantasy that I am carrying on the legacy of the cave painters, cathedral builders, artists on the African continent, and every other continent shaping the culture we live in.

Your recent online solo exhibition “Dreams Deferred” is on display via the James K. Schmidt Gallery at Voney Art Center, Principia College and uses Google Docs as a viewing format. You have also been posting portraits through Instagram. How has exhibiting in digital space affected the experience of your work? Are there certain aspects in which you feel it has enhanced or taken away?
Exhibiting in digital space through online shows and social media platforms has allowed me to interface directly with my audience, to share my work with people around the world and to do so whenever I feel like it. It is truly a powerful tool that has manifested so many magical experiences I would have never thought possible. I have had family members of people I have made portraits of reach out to me and thank me for the work I’m doing, which was a fantasy before the age of things like Instagram.

At the same time as I say this I must also say that it is a completely different experience seeing the artwork in person. I am an artist and I take great care in making my work and so there are physical aspects to the work that you will experience in person that may be missed in an online reproduction. One obvious one is scale. Scale is an important element in my work. I make pieces that fit in the palm of your hand and pieces that tower 20 feet above your head and the experience of standing next to these two different things is completely different and completely different than viewing them on your phone.

The project of your work is empathy cultivation and healing through empathy. What are the ways that the online environment has been a supportive vehicle for your project? Are there aspects you look to experimenting with more?
It would be interesting to create pieces specifically made for the environment of the internet, using sound, moving images and such. This is something I would love to do if I could ever put down my paint brush and learn a few new things. I have been working with sound on and off for the last 10 years. It would be fun to push that to the forefront in a project like this.

Are there upcoming projects that you’re excited about?
I will be participating in this year's 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, May 17-23, 2021with Latchkey Gallery, NYC. I have also been invited to build a Black Rock Negative Energy Absorber sculpture at the Visual Arts Centre of Clarington, Ontario, Canada this summer. It is going to be a large outdoor public sculpture that will be up for a year. I’m bringing my kids up with me to help me build it which should be a really fun experience. I am also doing a workshop with a group of troubled teenagers while I’m there. We are going to make healing ceramics sculptures. I know it will be challenging, but I’m excited to share this process with them and hopefully get them excited about the idea of using art to express your feelings. I was a troubled teenager back in the day so I am always looking for opportunities to work with that community when given these types of opportunities.

Thank you so much, Rudy, for being so generous with your time and thinking. We truly appreciate you and the complexity and generosity of your work.