Valeska Populoh Interviewed by Bekah Fontz

Bekah Fontz: So my first question for you is what inspires you and leads you to pursue your career as an artist?

Valeska Populoh: That’s a long conversation. I think what is important to share in response to that question is that I was always very active in the political realm and very interested in history. I actually went to my undergrad to study international relations as well as peace and conflict resolution. I was very active with art in high school, but I was the child of a single parent who was an immigrant, and going to art school was never something that I considered an option. That was not in my universe. I went to college thinking that I’d become a diplomat.

I am from Germany originally. During my coming of age in the United States, I began realizing that I came from a country that was responsible for an unfathomable violence against people. Specifically Jewish people. That really forged my identity as a middle school and high school student. Also learning about American history and thinking about what had happened on this soil.

I went to study international relations and language area studies and peace and conflict resolution. When I graduated from my undergrad, my first job was for an environmental organization in Washington DC. As a very young person and someone who did not have a law degree, I felt like there were real limitations of what I was able to offer.

I then went to climate change conventions in 1997. During that time I had been very active in art, which led me to contribute to the newsletter that was published at that convention. I contributed through illustration work and political cartoons. One of the political cartoons that I drew became very successful and spoke to people. Over the subsequent years, I consistently contributed my illustration, drawing, design, and photography skills to the organizations I was working for. Oftentimes these organizations rely heavily on text and words. I did all these different things in my 20s. When I was in my late 20s, I was at a turning point in my professional life because I had been doing work for an organization in DC that was focused on farmer's markets, farmland protection, and educating people about local food. That organization was running out of funds and I knew that I would not have a job the following year. It was a turning point for me. What has been satisfying for me? What has felt really meaningful? I talked to a lot of people in my life and asked them what they thought I was well suited for. They said that I was well-suited for working with people and that I should think about my art-making as something more serious. So I looked at the teaching program at MICA. I thought to myself, maybe I’ll become an art teacher.

I ended up going to MICA in my 20s, and this whole world of art-making was something that I was not aware of. I became aware of ways to work in the realm of social practice or community arts. It has been a very circuitous path and I’m really grateful for this path because I think, as someone who now identifies much more so as an artist than I did when I was 20 or 25, I still feel very strongly about the idea of being engaged in cultural work and that the label of the artist might be a little bit limiting. There are lots of people, who don’t necessarily identify as artists, that do cultural work that is visible, in the cultural sphere, affects us, and makes us think about the world that we live in. That continues to motivate me: the breadth of the space that is available for people to contribute to social change through cultural work.

Bekah Fontz: I have loved looking through your work and seeing how you broaden the horizons of what art is and what activism can be in art. My next question is what identities and life experiences do you bring to your work?

Valeska Populoh: My experience, training, and passion for education and teaching is really a significant part of my identity. It contributes a lot to the way that I approach my art making. There is a long-standing conversation of work that can be perceived as didactic or instructional. In some circles of the art community this type of art can be seen negatively. These ideas say that art cannot be serving a purpose and is not meant to be instrumentalized into serving a purpose. That way it becomes propaganda and the purity is gone. I don’t agree with that. I have things that I do that are not in service of a particular campaign or social movement, but they’re always informed by things that I care about. I think that for communities around the world cultural work and art making have served as a way to uphold the values of the community for many centuries. It has been used as a way to instruct young people to value what the community holds as important.

As someone who relates a lot to things like procession work, puppetry, costume, and masquerade I find these are traditions that exist around the world that are often in ritual context. They are ways to support community building and connection through the passing on of stories. I see my work as being very connected to that. I think that through my role as an educator, I think about how people enter into learning. I think about how to support that learning by creating a space that feels like it can hold the unstable and chaotic feeling that can come along with learning, is a really important skill set that I bring to my art making.

Bekah Fontz: I like how you have really used art to teach people things, educate them, and open up their minds. My third question is which modern issues do you wish to inspire change towards with your art?

Valeska Populoh: I grapple with that. I wish that I was able to give more of my energy and time to responding to the diversity of social and environmental justice issues that I think that are incredibly critical right now. I also think about what my role as a white person is. What does it mean to be a white artist supporting the movement for racial justice in the United States?

One of the areas that I and some of my white anti-racist friends have been reflecting on is a call from Resmaa Menakem, who wrote the book called My Grandmother‘s Hands. Menakem speaks to the importance of white folks building up white anti-racist culture. He asks what are the practices of a culture? You have elders, rituals, visual elements that signify who you belong to and what you value. When I read that I struggled to think of elders in my own community that are white anti-racist artists. I have lots of people I look up to who are activists that are organizers that are both white and anti-racist. I have lots of elders I look up to but they’re not specifically committed to and motivated by anti-racist work. At least I don’t perceive that to be the case. All this has made me think what does this look like when you’re not centering yourself?

I think in art making, especially when you’re working for an institution like I do, there’s a lot of incentive to be visible and a claim ownership and responsibility for the artwork that you’ve made or been part of. There is a disincentive, in my experience, on being a participant and collaborator. I firmly disagree with that. I think that, particularly for those of us who have class and educational privilege, it is important to be participants and not not necessarily be in the leadership position. But it’s not incentivized. The value and focus of independent work is something I don’t think is needed right now in our culture especially with white folks. We need to be collaborating and listening to people of color, to black folks, to indigenous folks and see where we can fit in. I’m grappling with how to use my artistic skills in a way that doesn’t center me or center white folks. But how do I also not pull away, because of my lack of clarity around that, and not bring those skills that I have cultivated for many years where they can be useful.

The issues that I am traditionally most passionate about are the intersection of environmental issues and social justice issues. I am passionate about supporting the connection between these issues. I think that that’s where storytelling can be really helpful because people tend to see these issues as separate when they’re actually connected. The people that have the least infrastructure to deal with destruction are the ones that are going to suffer the most and are currently suffering the most. I think that piecing that together through my work is something I really care about.

Bekah Fontz: My next question is when did you start making your art for activism purposes?

Valeska Populoh: Before I even identified as an artist per se I was contributing to campaigns. I did a bunch of comics or political cartoons while I was in Kyoto. One of them is Al Gore on a tightrope because he had just published that book, Earth in the Balance. People were waiting for him, because he was vice president at the time, to make a statement on what he would support in terms of emissions reductions for the United States. The image was him on a tightrope and it said “Gore in the balance.” That was one of my earliest experiences using art making to support activism.

I think that for some years my photography and other work served the purpose of illustrating. I realized it was a secondary component of the actual activism. I would say that realization was really significant for me. When I first finished art school a friend of mine, Ashley Hufnagel, was working for the United Workers. This is an organization that focuses on human rights and anti-poverty work in Baltimore. She asked me if I would work with them on a campaign that was focused on the inner harbor. It was specifically focused on helping people who worked in businesses in the inner harbor who were dealing with low pay, no healthcare and no job security. This project was to help them tell stories of their harbor. So I helped them and other organizations involved by making props and puppets. That really affected me by being able to contribute that way.

Then of course spending time with Bread and Puppet Theater up in Vermont and becoming part of that community. They were really influential to me and thinking about how those two worlds can combine.

The cranky that I made a couple of years ago was in direct service of a campaign. I asked for some artistic autonomy in creating a story that made sense to tell. But all the other projects, such as the Herring Run Shadow Performance as well as a recent project that’s not on my website yet, weren’t in direct service of a campaign. This new project focuses on barnacles in the Chesapeake Bay and uses them as a metaphor for our lives as isolated little pods. This is because we are dealing with a pandemic and are vulnerable to the effects of climate, weather, and, metaphorically speaking, storms. Those have more so come out of my own practice and desire to speak to environmental issues or social issues.

It’s very important for me to collaborate across race, like I did on the Herring Run piece. Because again I think it’s important for people to see folks of color collaborating with white folks, working together, and telling stories together. It’s part of culture building.

I also really thrive off of being in service. The Baltimore People's Climate Movement work was very exciting for me because I got to organize art builds and bring people together from all different walks of life. We got to be in a space together and talk. We were building community and getting to know each other. We were educating each other about things that were important to us, talking about climate justice, and making things together. That was deeply satisfying for me. I feel like that is what I want more of in my life. As a full-time faculty member it’s hard to carve out that amount of space and time. Right now it’s very difficult to do that obviously because of the pandemic.

Bekah Fontz: Yes of course, I think it is important to bring an element of community to art. It shows those who may not realize that art is not simply an individual experience but it can be a community experience and a building experience.

So my next question is which one of your projects is most memorable to you and why?

Valeska Populoh: Well I would say three things. The Herring Run project really is meaningful to me because it was the first project where I worked with such a large group of people. It was an individual project, in a sense that I came up with the storyline, but then I asked friends of mine to collaborate with me on music and performance. Every time we perform that piece it’s so localized and specific to Baltimore. Actually to a very particular part of Baltimore. I love the specificity of it and how local it is. We performed it a number of times in Baltimore and people would come up to us after the performance. One woman said to me when we first performed it, “you know I grew up near Herring Run and I used to go there a lot when I was younger. Then I moved away to a place that was much more beautiful ecologically. When I came back it was so hard for me to take walks here in Baltimore because all I could focus on was the trash and the impacted landscape. What I loved about your performance is that you reminded me of how miraculous it is that a park like Herring Run can exist in a city like Baltimore. Despite all of the impacts of pollution, runoff, erosion, and invasive species there are these magical experiences that you can have. Experiences of seeing the heron or seeing the beaver. I am so committed now to returning to my daily walks in Herring Run.” People were really moved to tears. I think they are moved because it speaks so specifically to something that they know and love. It honors a place that oftentimes does not feel like it’s being honored. I asked these colleagues and collaborators to work on this with me because I know that they have a certain sense of the sacred for nature. They deeply connect with nature in a spiritual way. Before we would start that performance, we would always come together into a sort of prayer or ritual we were doing for each other to sustain ourselves. Because we all feel so deeply about the state of the ecological issues we are facing. The impacts are so severe.

The Cranky project is very important to me because it was over an extended period of time that we performed that. I performed that with young people from the United Workers and we toured that piece to other places, like to Connecticut. So it created an opportunity for some of those young folks to travel and to develop more comfort in performing publicly. The last part of that cranky is co-written by some of the young folks, Charles Graham, Destiny Watford and one of the organizers Greg Sartell. That felt really meaningful. We performed it in all these little tiny places, festivals, community block parties, and other events. It felt so meaningful to share that story with so many different groups of people.

Then the Baltimore People’s Climate Movement work. It just served my values so deeply. We made a lot of things out of recycled materials. It created a community that continues to feed movement work and feed us. It brought many different kinds of people together. That is something I really cherish. So those are the three that I would say were most memorable to me.

Bekah Fontz: What brought you to your home location of Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay watershed?

Valeska Populoh: Well I am an immigrant. I moved to the United States when I was 10. I moved around quite a bit and then landed in DC for college. That was my home base for a while. When I looked at schools and found MICA I then moved to Baltimore to go there. I did not intend to stay. Actually having lived in DC 10 years before that, Baltimore was a place that felt like a totally different world. I did end up staying because I got a job here and built community pretty quickly due to the kinds of people that live in Baltimore in the work I wanted to do. When it became apparent that I was not going to be leaving, I did work at MICA about the Inner Harbor and about the water.

Because of my background in working for environmental organizations, I began thinking about watersheds and how they are not bound by geographic borders the way that our maps are. I thought about how I have been living around the Chesapeake Bay Watershed for 15 years and how I would like to know its tributaries. I thought I should be able to name those. I then made an embroidered map of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed made out of silk. That took me quite a while to make. I put pearls on it noting significant cities. I would show it to people at the performances and I would ask them to find where they were on that map. Most people were not able to because it was just water. I thought that people knew these waters.

I am also a kayaker. Part of the Riperia work, even though it’s not necessarily reflected in the project itself, is that I read Life in the Chesapeake Bay. It’s a beautiful field guide telling all about the different zones of the Chesapeake Bay. My partner and I have been reading and learning about this. Whenever we go on a kayak we will come back having seen something we are unfamiliar with and we’ll read about it. Another book I read is called John Smith’s Chesapeake Voyage. At first I didn’t want to read about John Smith. But then I read it I realized it is the earliest accounts of a non-native person who came through this region writing about what they saw. It is just mind blowing. Thinking about what this region must have been like in 1608. So I’ve sort of become a bioregional nerd. I thought about becoming certified as a master naturalist. Maybe that’s my aspiration when I get older and have more time.

I just see everything as very connected. That is what the Barnacle show is about. There is a moment in the barnacle show where I realized that people just think these are inanimate objects, like a rock formation, but they’re animals. There is no end to the mystery and magic of our natural environment. People don’t even pay attention to it. It’s so masterfully beautiful. That’s part of what animates me too, a desire to share that beauty with other people through the work that I make.

When I do my card readings it opens up an amazing space for conversation with people. Conversation you will not get if you are holding up a sign at a rally. That is worthwhile work but it’s very different from when you are sitting across the table from someone and you ask them what images are resonating with them. You have this ability to connect with someone. I can say to them ‘I invite you as you go off today, if you don’t know the name of the nearest body of water, to find it, visit it, and maybe learn about the history of it.' I think that that for me has become a very interesting way of encouraging people to develop their ecological consciousness. That’s just not gonna happen at a rally. Again I value those because I have participated in them, but it’s a different mode. As a teacher and an educator I know that people are reached in a lot of different ways.

Bekah Fontz: I really loved looking at your Charm City Merfolk Project and I wanted to ask you if you found that the citizens knew or cared very little about the waterway pollution? What sort of answers did you get from these people when you asked and brought it to their attention?

Valeska Populoh: That’s a complex one, partly because I think differently about litter now. I think this shift in my thinking is because I used to be really infuriated by it. It’s not that it doesn’t bother me anymore, but I think I now understand the complex social conditions that lead to people throwing their garbage in the street. This can’t be reduced to people just not caring. I used to think that way. Now I recognize that if your life experience is that you and your community are not cared for and are treated like they are disposable, that is very easy to absorb that deep into your tissue. Not that this is necessarily a conscious thought, but that it is deeply internalized. These people are not being met with care, so why would they embody that? So that is why I think differently about that project now than I did back then. I think my experience talking about that with people is that some of them, to be frank, thought that we were weird white people walking around Baltimore city dressed as mermaids. They found it amusing. The costume definitely creates levity and space for conversation. There were people that were open to talking with us. They didn’t think about the fact that the stuff they were throwing in the street ends up in the harbor. In addition, they did not realize that the harbor is connected to this larger body of water and that they depend on it. That is really interesting to me. I’m glad you’re in graphic design and that you care about that because it is so important. Figuring out how to tell stories that connect people to the realization that this huge estuary, which is one of the most magnificent places on the planet, directly affects their lives. This is so abstract to people.

The Riperia project is actually a deepening or a continuation of the Charm City Merfolk. I wanted other ways to connect with people. One of the experiences I had while doing the Riperia project in the Inner Harbor was when I did a number of performances during Light City. Because that is such a tourist event there was so much traffic of people who wanted to come up to me and get their picture taken with me. Like being at Disney World and taking a picture with someone dressed up in a costume. Quite a few people, especially kids, ended up sitting down with me and I would do the map thing with them. I asked them to find themselves and where they are on the map. I would point out where the Inner Harbor was on that map. I’d show them that the place where I was pointing to on the map was right there where they were sitting at the Inner Harbor. Even the adults would be astonished that the Inner Harbor was part of this big body of water. I remember this one kid said “and that goes all the way out to the ocean?” That is what I care about. Yes! That body of water that is polluted and not seen as incredible is the Chesapeake Bay Estuary. It goes to the ocean! That was what I was trying to get to with the Charm City Merfolk project. But I wasn’t quite able to visualize that for people.

A number of my projects, even the Professor Bluegill, somehow relate to the Chesapeake Bay. In my experience oftentimes people think that an artist makes work to communicate ideas about a certain issue. Yes they do, but also we have our days where we are just trying to figure out our own relationship to our work and what story we’re trying to tell. Also how do we tell it in a way that connects with people? We are constantly re-iterating themes or ideas in different ways. I’m not even consciously doing it. Yet here I am doing a show about barnacles, yet another show about water and our relationship to the water. I am just trying to get people to think about these filter feeder creatures that live in the Chesapeake Bay.

To return to the Charm City Merfolk, people were much more willing to throw garbage and trash into the hoop that we were holding up the nets that we were carrying. In that regard it was an intervention to make the idea of picking up garbage and putting it where it belongs more fun and magical. Because people are dealing with so many different things and it’s hard to ask them to think about something as abstract as the Chesapeake Bay when they don’t currently experience the relevance of it.

Bekah Fontz: Being a lover of the Chesapeake Bay myself and a kayaker as well, I am someone who spends a lot of time on the water. I enjoy how you've embedded it into all of your work and everything that you do. That is what drew me to your work.

I also wanted to ask you if you feel that your art has been enhanced by performance?

Valeska Populoh: Well to put it simply, I enjoy it. I just love the space of performance and I feel that it’s so magical. When I was growing up in Germany, we had a lot of processions and festivals where we would be out with other people dressed up in costumes and singing songs. I also grew up in the Catholic Church which has a lot of procession and pageantry. I think both of those things draw me to that.

What really strikes me in the United States as compared to some of my experiences I had in Europe is that in Baltimore particularly there is not a profusion of street performance. I think that we are lucky to have step groups or marching bands. I think that they are an amazing part of outdoor performance we have in this city’s culture. I am just really drawn to being with other people in celebratory context.

There is a book that I read some years ago called Dancing in the Streets. It reflects on the research that different people have done (historians, biologists, anthropologists) about the deeply important experience of collective celebration for humans. I think that performance just allows people to let go of the day to day and immerse themselves in an experience. We are also tuned to storytelling. Many of us grew up with stories, so that feeling of someone telling a story is deeply in our tissue. I think that I have just found that something happens when you bring people into that space. They are more open. They aren’t as guarded. I think that storytelling in a performative context just opens people up in a different way. I love that feeling and the space it creates for myself as well.

Bekah Fontz: Thank you for sharing that. What future events are you planning and how can my fellow peers and I get involved?

Valeska Populoh: Good question. I am participating in a couple of projects in the next month. One of them is with Diane Kuthy called In All Transparency. It’s a mail art project that is going to be projected, it will be art envelopes that go across the light table that scans the message so it will be more visible. Those scans will be photographed and shown at Area 405 in Baltimore.

What I just sent out to a few people, that is in it’s very early stages, is a project compelling me to give my art skills to movement work. I reached out to a bunch of musicians, artists and organizers. I told them I would love to connect with them and see how we can use our skill sets to uplift the stories of people that are really being affected by the pandemic, in a very granular kind of way. Because it’s very easy for these people to just be abstractions. So I reached out to my friends to see who might want to connect to bring these stories forward. Whether it’s through forms of puppetry, visual storytelling or animation. So we’ll see what that brings.

I would also really love to do some kind of art build. A workshop on building large scale puppets for parades, processions and demonstrations. I would like to offer a workshop that is free. Nothing on the books yet but I’m hoping to do something like that in the spring.

Bekah Fontz: I love that idea. Thank you for sharing that. As citizens of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and as aspiring artists how do you think my peers and I can make a difference by bringing awareness and environmental change to the communities around us?

Valeska Populoh: I think that you know what speaks to your peer group and you should trust that. It’s easy to feel like you have to come up with some sort of master vision or that you have to know certain things to be able to be engaged. That feeling that you have to reach a certain level of knowledge or mastery to be able to contribute. But I think that there are so many examples where just your knowledge and expertise as someone who’s in their early 20’s is helpful. You know what your peer group is into.

One thing I’m trying to figure out when I’m making some of my projects is how to tell stories I am very passionate about in a way that I know how to. I’m not a graphic designer. I’m not a film maker. I wish that I had those skill sets because I think they’re very powerful tools. I think that what I’m seeing on social media is how, for example, the sustainable fashion community is just on fire. This is mostly due to young people, who are in their early 20s and are savvy. They know how to use social media effectively. They think about styling, visual imagery, and know how to tell a story in that context. Think about yourself being someone who loves the Chesapeake Bay and nature, who realizes that so many people don’t know what an estuary is. So many people don’t realize that they live next to one of the most magnificent bodies of water on the planet. Think about how to inspire your peers with what you love about it. Coming from your authentic self and telling your own story, speaking from where you know you are can have a huge impact. We are so accustomed to being marketed to, that an authentic story has a different power over us. It cuts through all the media stuff that we are just saturated with. That’s the challenge of our time.

Thinking about inter-disciplinary partnerships, ask yourself how can you collaborate with people and build new ways of communicating together and communicating the incredible importance of nurturing and protecting our local Watershed? The specificity of stories is what you have the capacity to tell.

Bekah Fontz: Is there anything else that we haven’t already covered that you feel is important for others to know about you or your work?

Valeska Populoh: I would just say community is so important for maintaining your motivation. Not underestimating the importance of having friendships and collaborative relationships with people who share your values and your desire for change making, and also with people who share your interest in art making and design. It is important to have regular connections with those folks. That’s my last parting thought. Thinking about how incredibly important it is to maintain the relationships that feed, nourish and inspire you. Seek them out. Intentionally building your community is something that I would advise. I wish I had been more aware of how I could have intentionally cultivated community in my early 20s.

Artist's Website: https://www.valeskapopuloh.net