4 Female Artists from the Rust Belt

Skip to: Rachel Mica Weiss, Mimi Kato, Julia Christensen

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The western side of the state, much closer to Ohio (and West Virginia!) than it is to New York. Pittsburgh, like so much on that side of Pennsylvania, was a steel town, and, like so much of the so-called Rust Belt, it’s seen better times.

While you might not peg this post-industrial city for an art mecca (in comparison to the gentility of its eastern counterpoint, Philadelphia, it’s its own beast), but with a dash of fate, and more than a dash of industrialist money, it holds its own. Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh in 1928, but perhaps most importantly, Andrew Carnegie established the Carnegie Steel Company, the reason for this city’s flourishing, in downtown Pittsburgh in 1892. Though these two giants’ (albeit in vastly different fields) timelines did not overlap, their museums—the Andy Warhol Museum and the Carnegie Museum of Art, respectively— are a mere three miles from each other.

This is the backdrop for my first two interviews (both of which took place before COVID-19!). My first interview was with a young artist, Julia Betts, just a few years out of art school. We met at a coffee shop, a stone’s throw from the Mattress Factory, a contemporary art space, and down the block from the local landmark Randyland (think something like the Heidelberg project in Detroit).

Julia Betts

is slight and unassuming, with a subtle, quiet way of talking. It is perhaps in defiance of her size that she does what she does. “[My body] is a tool,” she says, “it’s a limit...I’m interested in when it’s overcome.”

If you had to call her something, you would say Betts is a performance artist, though she refines that label by saying, “I think of the things I make as [either] traces of a performance or live performances.” She goes on to explain: “If I can make an object that can hold the performance I will do that. If it can’t, then I’ll do the performance.” (This makes sense of the fact she, like many other performers at RISD, did her MFA in sculpture.)

In the piece titled 2015-2017 the “performance” is contained within plaster blocks in which the artist cast her personal effects. These blocks gathered the contents of her RISD studio, amassed over the time of her MFA, and separated them by color. Stacked, some piles are larger than others, depending on the color they contain (“I wouldn’t expect to find so much red,” the artist mused). Her thesis advisor called this a “lived performance,” as if every action whose vestige ended up in her studio—that cup of dining hall coffee, crumpled and discarded, the (many) parking tickets from the Providence PD—were all culminating in this piece, a reminder of a specific life’s activity. In this case, the result is greater than the sum of its paltry performed parts, as the visualized build up expresses more than the actions required to create it.

The story of this piece, is contained in a list of the work’s “materials” (“white and blue-spotted RISD check stained with yellow substance” and “blue tarp became a more muted blue from collecting dust” among them), a several page document which reads like an Modernist poem and describes the contours of Betts’s life in objects.

Sometimes, however, the object-distilled performance can be contained to a few short words describing its material—such as in Detritus (2015), which consists of “grated self images,” or the dust resulting from running photographs of Betts’s body parts through a cheesegrater. Again separated by color and arranged artfully on the gallery floor, the aftermath of the action is contained in the remnants, which tell of a discomfort with the self and the society which made such dissatisfaction possible. But why not show the action itself, the slow determined grating away, or else the frenzied hatred, the pathological need to obliterate the self, to smooth out its unseemly contours so that it becomes unrecognizable? Why, in other words, did Betts believe this object could “hold the performance”?

In shredded pile form rather than performance form, the statement is matter-of-fact, unemotional. A “this is what you’ve done to me” abdication of responsibility. There is something beautiful in the way she has arranged what is left of these images, as the pile appears to be a brilliantly colored mold, blooming across the gallery floor. Is it a comment on a society’s sick fascination with female self-destruction? Or the insistence on the thin line between beauty and decay? By leaving out the performance Betts allows our imagination to find the answers for these questions.

But not all works are of a kind that their meaning can be contained in objects. When labor is the work’s subject, it must be a performance. In Window Screens (2016), Betts stands in a screened-in box. She removes the screens which make up its walls one by one and then dips them into a pool of ink at her feet, before hanging them back up to “dry,” as if doing laundry. She repeats this again and again, over the course of three and a half hours.

We often enjoy the fruits of labor without acknowledging their sources—cleanliness after all is the absence of something, the state of appearing pure—untouched. If maid or mother has done her job well, we don’t notice her hand in the order she has left behind. By performing Window Screens, the artist records the labor which so often goes unacknowledged.

But by the end of this performance the tarp which held the ink broke, something the artist had anticipated (she says it was a question of when not if), and trickled out into the area where her audience sat. In breaking the fourth wall, Window Screens seemed to say that some pieces are overcome by their content and are unable to be contained—neither in object nor performance.

Rachel Mica Weiss

has been commissioned to make work for The US Embassy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Airbnb, The University of Washington, and the Pittsburgh Airport (to name just a few), but behind the impressive roster and high visibility of her work is the no less impressive technical acumen needed to pull off these massive installations. These skills the artist possesses in spades, despite the fact that, as a woman, she is often doubted on the job site. “I often feel that I must spend the first hour on site throwing out all my construction lingo so that I can to prove myself,” Weiss says, but still her colleagues are sometimes stunned when she pulls out her tools, even when it’s something as simple as a tape measure. To this microaggression, the artist responds, with a wink, “wait until you see my laser measure.”

It is easy to look at her work and emphasize its diaphanous qualities. From Weiss’s thread-based portals to hanging topography pieces, the permeability of light and air is at her work’s core. The calm and contemplative, however, is not achieved without healthy doses of intuition, calculation and, of course, some elbow grease.

The artist installs Two Paned Scaffolding at Asya Geisberg Gallery in 2019 — The artist installs *Two Paned Scaffolding* at Asya Geisberg Gallery in 2019

The beautiful, transcendent portal pieces, for example, achieve their stunning, subtle shift between colors through concentration and counting. The artist describes the methods to achieve her gradient (and the hours of labor involved), which demand a detail-focused mind to make sure the permutations are consistent. Like many fiber artists since the 1970s, Weiss has removed her threads from the structure of the loom, but unlike others (I think of Sheila Hicks, for example), she has maintained the coded elements of the machine and weaving’s dependence on patterns.

In her recent commission for the Pittsburgh Airport, Recto Verso, Weiss has created a work of inert grace, itself an accomplishment of meticulous planning. When she showed me the blueprints for this work, pages of notations and calculations, I was stunned to learn she has no background in engineering or architecture. This piece of public art is the closest Weiss comes to addressing the feat she has accomplished, though it is in homage to something bigger than the artist, namely the arched architectural forms which repeat across civilizations. The piece’s suspended arcs of rope, which appear frozen in their leap past each other, also evoke the city’s famous bridges, though they replace rigid steel with threads. Post-industrial Pittsburgh, historically a steel town, is entering a new phase of its story and must find ways to thrive in a rapidly changing 21st century. Weiss’s use of a pliable, but sturdy material elegantly suggests the ways in which the city can move into the future.

Recto Verso (2019) — *Recto Verso* (2019)

Weiss uses her engineering skills to address the more transcendent aspects of life (light and nature among them). The monumentality of her work demands that you feel it physically. “The body’s interaction with the art is so key” she says, which accounts for her framed pieces' size: sixty six inches, the height of the artist herself. An interest in “controlling the body” is why “it’s been so hard for me to work small,” she continues, particularly as her work’s ambitious interaction with architecture accounts for much of its impact. For example, in an installation at Fridman Gallery, she blocked off the space between two central columns, obstructing the room’s natural passageway. In another show at Asya Geisberg in Chelsea, she used the height of the gallery’s window to draw the eye diagonally upwards, as if tracing the trajectory of a shaft of light. “Echoing the dimensions of the space is essential,” she insists, “in order to draw attention to how the space is navigated.”

But now that I’ve let you peek behind the curtain, I want you to forget all that I’ve told you. Forget the plans and the math and the glute strength required to climb up and down a ladder stringing threads for hours. Forget the hardhats and the power drills and the other earthly laws by which all artists—no matter their skill—must abide.

Because as a truly great engineer builds a skyscraper which appears to reach toward the heavens, not slump back toward earth, Rachel Mica Weiss makes the mechanism disappear and has you believe there was simply nothing to it.

Mimi Kato

works out of her studio in a suburban neighborhood of Cleveland, where she has been producing large scale digital images, complex multi-character panoramas set in scenes of nature. The landscapes that come out of this space only vaguely pertain to the shrubby, flat Ohio land that surrounds her, but rather harken back to the places she grew up, in Nara, Japan. “The American landscape is very foreign to me,” the artist explains. (She moved to Ohio in 2011 when her partner got a job at the Cleveland Institute of Art.)

Her most recent completed work, a series of seven photo collages titled Wild Corporation, give the young women in this fantasyland the space to perform their grand epic: a war that rages between the yellow team—girls dressed in the common Japanese corporate uniforms, who value above all else the high heeled shoe—and the blue team, also in uniform complete with vest and pencil skirt, who are covetous of the most lustrous of hair, which they can be seen shearing from their rivals’ heads.

One Step Ahead (2018) — *One Step Ahead* (2018)

This series though forged in the image of the great battles of both Eastern and Western art history (I think of various Japanese byobu, depicting scenes of battle, as well as the Bayeux Tapestry), is meant to be a little bit funny, given how trivial these women’s aims are and how earnestly they compete for them. (I especially love the snowy scene in the panel One Step Ahead, in which the blue team escorts hostages—tied up in pink duct tape and lashed together by their braids—across an icy brook, unaware of the ambush into which they are walking.) It is in this humor—pink duct tape and all—that we are to find the work’s meaning.

Perhaps you noticed that there are no men to be seen across the series (in fact, the artist performs all the characters herself). What Kato has constructed is a metaphorical landscape of womanhood. “Women are totally capable,” Kato insists—and her images don’t deny it: her girls chase off a bear and slay their dinner with weapons of their own ingenious divising. And yet, “they are so trapped in the uniform and the mindset” that they are ultimately held back by them, a reality which Kato wants to expose as “unproductive.”

Women, by the invisible hand of man, curtail themselves by finding enemies in each other rather than ways to lift each other up. The heels and hair here are symbols for their oppression, but in our reality these trappings of stereotypical beauty are a distraction, or else an excuse to dismiss a woman if she refuses to honor them and thereby defies expectations of her gender.

This set of images was not the artist’s first foray into dressing as characters of her own devising. (The word “fantasy” came up often in our conversation—in reference to both her art and life—and clearly plays an important role in the way Kato thinks.) In 2008, after grad school, she began a series called the Secret Life of Hubbits, a chronicle of a species of rabbit-humans, living out their days in the desert of New Mexico. “I wanted to give something secret back to the landscape,” she said, referring to the fact that the land, which appears desolate, is a overlapping map of legal rights—mineral rights, water rights, drilling rights—and not the unknown of fantasy.

The artist, however, bemoans this project, believing it to be an unsuccessful trial run for a now more developed idea. If I am to agree with her (which I am reluctant to do, as I have such a fondness for rabbits), it’s because of this work’s tenuous connection to reality. With executive orders diminishing the size of federally preserved land, the possibility of an unknown and untouched facet of wilderness seems too good to be true. On the other hand, her Wild Corporation series, however absurd it appears (the weapons the women wield are made of office supplies after all, thumbtacks refashioned into the head of a mace) is a reality immediately understood, a real and devastating drama that plays out not in the snowy forests of Japan, but in the lives of everyday women in their workplace, on the Internet, and on the street.

These works were shown last year at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, the digital images displayed alongside the very props Kato used in the montages—the cheiftaness’s necklace made of high heels, a crossbow made of rubber bands and rulers—the objects of the fantasy land crossing into our reality as if asking us to suit up, reminding us that this is war. But this time, let’s remember who the real enemy is.

Julia Christensen

is a professor of New Media in the studio art department at Oberlin College, about 45 minutes from Cleveland. Oberlin itself boasts an impressive art gallery, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, which hosts the archives of Eva Hesse, though these facts (and the geography of Ohio more generally) are certainly not relevant to the ensuing profile, since the work Christensen does is out of this world—literally.

We tend to get slotted into a path in high school. Are you a math person or an arts person? Are you analytical or creative? At my alma mater STEM students had to walk a mile (up a hill!) to get to the science labs, which ensured they didn’t mix much with those in the humanities. But it cannot be denied, no matter the layout of college campuses, that technology and art are in pursuit of the same goal: bringing human endeavor into the future.

My interview with Julia Christensen, an artist whose practice is built at the nexus of art and science, was thrilling. It summoned in me the same youthful sunshine-and-espresso-fueled heart palpitations I first remember feeling when images of the Hagia Sophia flashed up in the dim auditorium of a long ago intro art history lecture. In that millenia old cathedral, art and architecture were pushed to their outermost limits. In the soaring arches and floating dome, the people of Constantinople built something that stretched itself towards the Divine. Julia Chirstensen does similarly, but instead she reaches not to heaven, but to outer space, toward extraterrestrial life rather than toward God.

We know that art is concerned with the big questions, questions of existence and meaning, but it’s not often that we’re reminded of it in a literal sense. The challenge for an artist to convincingly illustrate what it means to be human is one thing when those in need of convincing are also human, but what about when they’re not? These are the not-so-small questions Christensen confronts in her studio practice, specifically in her work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.

The situation is as follows: NASA is planning to launch an unmanned spacecraft (called a CubeSat) in 2069, the one hundredth anniversary of the moon landing. The craft’s destination is Proxima B, an exoplanet of the star Proxima Centauri, 4.2 lightyears from Earth. (Yes, I do feel very cool writing this.) If scientists’ predictions are correct, the CubeSat will arrive 42 years after the launch.

Some of you will remember that in 1977, the Voyager missions were launched, onto which were attached the Golden Records—discs (along with instructions on how to build a record player), that contained information about the world in the last quarter of the 20th century—on it Jimmy Carter gives an address, the people of the world say “hello” in their native languages, and Glenn Gould plays some Bach. (For a full list of the contents of the records, click here.)

However, a few words from a one term president and a couple of tunes of an era do not a perfect portrait of the Earth make (even if those tunes are from Louis Armstrong and Beethoven, among others). It is Christensen’s task, in collaboration with the scientists at JPL, to create a new version of the Golden Records, one that will give an accurate picture of life on Earth both at the moment the spacecraft is launched, as well as at any time during its decades long journey. At the center of this investigation is the question, “how do you get around representation?” The ways in which we represent ourselves and others, after all, change faster than our technology does.

It turns out that Christensen is the perfect woman for the job. An investigation of lifetimes—of people, of buildings, of objects—has always been at the center of her work, as the artist has been thinking about the rate of society’s change for decades. (In 2008, for example, she published a book about what happens to big box stores once their original function ceases to be of use to the society’s they’ve served.) “I’m interested in mindless actions and thinking of them in a different timescale,” the artist explains.

Planned technological obsolescence, or the way the devices to which we are increasingly attached are programmed to rapidly become outdated, is one such example of this mindlessness. The technological lives of objects (say, five years for a laptop) are minuscule in comparison to the lives of humans (which accounts for that box full of old MacBooks, iPads, Treos, and Walkmen you have in your closet) and devastatingly short in the lifespan of the planet (which accounts for the e-waste processing centers in India, which got the artist thinking about this project in the first place). The decisions we make today to upgrade to a new iPhone can have massive implications for the future.

But wait, weren’t we just talking about spaceships and aliens? Let’s get back to that.

Christensen’s answer to Operation: Golden Records 2.0 (my term, not hers) was nothing short of brilliant. “This is where things get crazy, if they’re not crazy already,” the artist says before going on to explain her solution, which started with thinking about the basic misalignment of human timescales with the timescale of the project itself. “Humans come and go, scientists retire,” she mused. Given these inconsistencies, she had to ask, “who are we to send this message? Maybe it should come from another species.”

Enter some of the Earth’s longest living creatures: trees. Though they live independently, trees are “bellwethers of us,” responding to shifting environmental conditions, both natural and anthropogenic. The world’s oldest living tree is believed to be Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in California, which is 4700 years old. Imagine the stories its trunk could tell! (This tree, which was already 3200 years old when the Hagia Sophia was built, will not be used in Christensen’s project, but does put the timescales in question into context.)

This thinking about trees resulted in NASA’s Tree of Life mission, which has “augmented” trees to become antennae, able to broadcast their electric frequencies (think of the electricity used to power your potato clock in that long ago school science experiment) as data. Sonified, this data, binging back and forth between the CubeSat floating through the universe, becomes a duet—the planet singing to the heavens and the heavens returning the serenade.

Just as it is hard to conceptualize the hundreds of millions of iPods that are currently sitting in the bottom of drawers, in boxes, or else in a landfill somewhere, it’s hard to hold all of Christensen’s work in your mind at once, so ambitious is its scope. What does it mean that there will be a spaceship the size of a toaster oven receiving information about the health of Earth’s trees, especially as our planet is hurtling toward environmental catastrophe?

This is perhaps where Christensen’s role as an artist is most vital, and why her contribution to the project is more than helping scientists brainstorm (as essential as this work is). “How does art help us move meaning and lived experience into the future as opposed to information?” the artist asks. Another way to ask this question is, “What transmission is this project sending back to us, on earth?”

The message received is a humbling one—it points out something that humanity has always skirted around and which most art, in its egoist’s quest to justify man’s existence, fully ignores: “We are in the song,” of course, but humanity is only one voice in the chorus of existence.

More on Julia here.
To purchase her book on this project, Upgrade Available (from the fantastic Dancing Foxes Press), go here.

Women Artists of the Rust Belt

Julia Betts

Rachel Mica Weiss

Mimi Kato

Julia Christensen

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Women Artists of the Rust Belt

Julia Betts

Rachel Mica Weiss

Mimi Kato

Julia Christensen

Women Artists of Northern California

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