Q&A with Mildred Beltré, 2023-2024 Artist-in-Residence

TLP: There is a focus on materiality in your art (making your own ink, experimenting with fabric or printing). How does this material aesthetic relate to your exploration of abstraction and the conceptual, sometimes in ways that challenge formal and political legibility?

MB: I don’t really remember where my interest in making walnut ink started. I think I read about it somewhere, or someone told me about it and thought it would be cool to make my own ink and it all grew from that. I don’t live too far from Prospect Park and I had never noticed that there were black walnut trees there until I started making my own ink. Once I became aware of them I saw them all the time, on the ground by the walking path. The same thing happened by my sister’s house. I found something new in places I go to all the time, saw something new in what is familiar. That’s what I want to happen in the work. I think political processes are like that too, once you become attuned to something you start to see it everywhere. There is a relationship between knowing and seeing that I explore in my work. There are also ideas of transformation in it, something that exists in one way and is always around us can be turned into something else. It’s a pretty basic idea but that idea of transforming something is endlessly interesting to me.

There is also a built in delay into many of the processes I employ. I was trained as a printmaker, so ideas of labor and patience are part of how I use materials and how I make things. It takes longer to collect the walnuts that have fallen on the ground and to boil them myself, especially when I could just buy the ink. I could use synthetic hair, but instead I wait for it to fall from my and my family’s heads, gather it, and then felt it or spin and crochet it. So there is something in that delay or process that allows for my ideas to form.

TLP: Your work often incorporates text, plays with the act of reading, and is in conversation with writers, philosophers, and theorists. Can you elaborate on the place of writers and writing in and beyond your creative practice?

MB: I am interested in language and the comprehension of words as a reflection of lived experience. I am interested in the power and limits of language.

In my visual art, I sometimes quote directly from writers that have influenced me and other times I just let myself be moved by their ideas or the feeling their writing produces for me. Other times, I like to remix their words to create another narrative, one that can be in opposition to it or complicates the original meaning.

I am interested in writing that centers the Black radical tradition, imagination as a political tool, the poetry and power of language; in writers whose influence helps form and re-inscribe our understandings of what we see and experience. I’m drawn to and want my work to be in conversation with authors whose work is as much a call to reflection and reimagining as it is a call to political action. This is what I want my work to do as well.

TLP: Blackness is central to your work, yet your aesthetic and trajectory seem defiantly eccentric. Where do you locate yourself within or beyond the many geographies and traditions of Black art and culture?

MB: I am always interested in how, why, and to whom things are made legible, in how do we come to understand what we understand. For me, the body (and its many stand-ins) is one of the sites where legibility plays out.

My identity and what I have called myself has changed based on where I have been and over time. Growing up in a Dominican home I was slow to take on the term Black to describe myself, not because I am not descended from Africans (that’s obvious), but because I understood it to have a very specific meaning in this US context. When I was growing up, only the African American kids were Black. The rest of us dark-skinned people had other names used both by us and by African Americans, we were Haitian and Dominican, Puerto Rican and sometimes African of many stripes. I now take on the term Black to identify myself and I tread that line carefully. I want to be respectful of the particularity of African American history while also understanding my relationship to and participation in a diasporic Blackness that is also US based.

In terms of my relationship to Blackness, I don’t see that as contrary to the eccentric, but rather as eccentric and specific and full of complexity, nerdiness and contradiction.

Photo Credit: Scott A. Dolan