Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice is a series of informed, sustained, and enriching dialogues looking at how environmental toxicity and risk disproportionately impact populations based on race, ethnicity, nationality, and social standing. Environmental Justice brings awareness to these disparities, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future.

Guest: Karen Hampton
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Public Podcasting in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.

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[00:00:03] Karen Hampton: I had, like everyone at that point, I think, heard about the water crisis in Flint. That touched me in a really, really deep way because of the environmental degradation of a community. I was really thinking about-- because I always tend to put a lens of women and children on it, and really thinking about what this was like to be raising a family and to be in a situation where their water was so polluted.

[00:00:42] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Heritage Future present Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on Environmental Justice. This series explores environmental racism and climate injustice. Since the industrial revolution, we have been choking our waters with waste, poisoning our soil, and contaminating the air we breathe all in the name of progress.

The most vulnerable communities with the least amount of representation and power suffer through the worst effects. Environmental Justice brings awareness to these marginalized communities, their activism, and the path forward, fighting to ensure that every voice is heard, every challenge is addressed, and every community has a seat at the table for a greener future.

In this episode, we connect with textile artist Karen Hampton, whose piece titled Prayers for Flint, honoring the families who suffered through the disaster of the Flint water crisis is on view at Chapman University as part of the Permanent Escalette Collection of Art. Here is Karen Hampton. As a textile artist, you work with cloth and weaving and sewing. I would love for you to talk about where that inspiration came from, to decide that this is going to be the medium.

[00:02:08] Karen: It really goes back to my grandmother and my mother. Actually, maybe I'll start with my mother and I'll start with the fact that she died in 2002. Towards the end of her life, there was a conversation that we had, and for the first time, I got the feeling that she really got what I was doing. She had really, really this great sense of pride because she felt like I had tapped into my family's lineage, and the lineage was passed from my grandmother to her to me.

My grandmother was a seamstress. That was how she supported herself and supported her family in New York. She moved to New York in 1925, from Jamaica. When she first arrived on the shores of the US, she was with her best friend, and she had trained to be a secretary. They were getting on the train. My grandmother had a very light complexion, but I guess her friend had a much lighter complexion.

The two of them were separated on the train. Her friend was seated up in the front, and my grandmother was taken to the back of the train where all the women were Black, and were domestics, et cetera. She didn't have any food on her because she told me that this was the first time she ever tasted frogs' legs because she had grown up in a very middle-class family.

I envisioned that these women sat her down and they said, "Oh, honey, you're not going to get a job as a secretary. You're either going to get a job as a domestic or you're going to be a seamstress and sewing." That's how she entered New York and found her way into being a dressmaker for wealthy women eventually.

[00:04:20] Host: Your mom took on that mantle as well?

[00:04:23] Karen: No. My mother and her sisters, they all went to college and everything. My mother was an accountant. We always had a sewing room in our house and my mother was happy when she was sewing. That was like the magic that even as a young child, I could see what brought her joy. I wanted so much to be in that sewing room that she and my grandmother worked in and so they had to figure out a way to teach me how to sew.

I made my first dress at eight years old and was proficient by the time I was in junior high. Then I stopped sewing. Then I decided I wanted to be a hippie, so then I had to stop sewing. Then I started doing some macramé and embroidering my jeans and stuff like that.

[00:05:24] Host: You were introduced to weaving around that time too.

[00:05:28] Karen: Yes. The way I put it is that I was raised by these two old women, my grandmother and her sister who was my auntie. It was right at the point where in I was a senior in high school, and we took auntie to the hospital. She was going to have "exploratory surgery". We sat there and I had my very first sketchbook. I was taking life drawing for the first time. It's just the beginning of the second semester of my senior year.

I started drawing. Her picture was like the second one in my sketchbook, and she never woke up from that. It was right at that same moment when I first even heard the word "weaving", I think. I was taking a life drawing class. I really think that it was because there was such a loss inside of me not having her anymore that I needed to be working with my hands in order to process.

I started weaving and it was about halfway through that semester, weaving my first weaving, it was like I had an epiphany one day on the bus because I would take it on the public bus with me every day. It was like, "Oh my God, I could do this for the rest of my life."

[00:07:00] Host: These are art forms that almost have another time. Definitely, they feel like they're out of time.

[00:07:11] Karen: I wasn't there right away. I was not there right away. The way I put it is that my first weavings were very freeform. I loved them and I wanted to work large. I was working on scale and doing different things like that.

[00:07:31] Host: You knew it was art that you were making.

[00:07:33] Karen: I knew it was art. I knew it was art.

[00:07:36] Host: You were making fabric. You weren't making blankets.

[00:07:39] Karen: No, I didn't want to make blankets. I didn't want to make fabric. I wanted to make art. I had the opportunity to meet artists when I was a senior in high-- I'd say probably my last year in high school, and then the next couple years, where I got to meet artists that were really being artists and were living a different life. It was like, "Oh my God, it just drew me in."

I knew that and I would go to galleries and stuff and go to exhibition spaces. I was in LA. I grew up in LA. When I saw those pieces, they drew me in and they made me-- I wanted to be doing that. I remember the first-- I can't remember her name, but she actually was an art teacher at my high school. Though I never had her as a teacher, I got to know her. When she left, she left the school because she got a curatorial job, and that would give her the freedom to be able to take on large commissions. She made a piece that was 35 feet tall. I got to see it and it was like, "Oh my God, I know the person that did that. That's the world I want to be in."

[00:09:13] Host: Then when you decided to pursue it academically, what was the trajectory?

[00:09:21] Karen: It was a really unusual route. I started by just moving up to the Bay Area and I went to a junior college, Laney College there. Lo and behold, as I was registering, they offered weaving, and it was offered on Saturday. It was all day Saturday, and that became my sanctuary. In that time, I learned a whole lot about the history of textiles in the Bay Area because Weaving was then the second largest craft in the country.

The Bay Area was the "it" place because just all the different colleges and their proximity and then as graduate students graduated and started other programs, there was just so much happening. Then all the weaving stores, which were really popular then. I would just go and get-- going into-- once I was introduced to these different places to buy materials and stuff, I was just interested in the raw materials and the materials that were not machine spun that had all sorts of texture and color and everything else. Then I started spinning and dying on top of that.

[00:10:50] Host: That texture, that-- I don't want to say imperfection, but there is that raw feeling like you say. I think that's what gives it that other timely out-of-time feel.

[00:11:06] Karen: I used to call myself the queen of making things look old so that I can take, whether it's a new cloth or an old cloth or whatever, and I know how to distress it, I know what I want. It's like I think about what I want to imbue it with that I want it to have a certain degree of grit of life, that you can just feel in the cloth so that the cloth itself speaks, even before I begin if I'm stitching to stitch on a piece or something.

[00:11:44] Host: With regards to the weaving, you would spin your own yarn?

[00:11:50] Karen: Yes, that's how I started. I would spin and then I would-- I started working with natural dyes. After about four years, I apprenticed with a master weaver for a year and a half. That's when I learned how to weave on a loom and how to do it. I was very conflicted about it. It was not-- while I felt like it was training I needed, I wasn't sure that I knew how to bring my creativity through it at the time, but a year and a half into it, I felt pretty comfortable.

[00:12:31] Host: You've said that you find a certain level of meditation while you're weaving.

[00:12:39] Karen: Yes, weaving is-- I think all hand work, but I think that textiles really, really appeal to people because there is something that goes on when your hands are working and you're working with fibers and really feeling them that allows you to step into a different realm while you're working.

[00:13:06] Host: I imagine there's a rhythm that you find too that's almost musical.

[00:13:12] Karen: When you're working on a floor loom, it's very much like-- I describe it to students as being an organ in a lot of ways because your feet are doing their motion and you're throwing-- everything has a rhythm to it, they're these different things that are really felt in your body as well. I will usually start and go really slow when I'm starting because I'm looking at the interactional color.

I'm going through many different things to decide whether I like how something's-- if it's going to work or not. Then I'll take it out, do whatever I'm going to do, but then once I start getting into it and I start building up a rhythm that there's the early rhythm, then there's the middle rhythm where I'm totally confident, and I'm going at it. Then there's when I can see the end in sight and then I'm speeding up.

[00:14:22] Host: With this other timely feel of these woven pieces, these fabric pieces that you make, it fits in with the narrative of your work as well, which is essentially telling your history and telling your ancestor's history. It creates these pieces, like I said again, that they just feel like they're from another time, from another place.

[00:14:47] Karen: I mean, I had been weaving for 15 years by the time I first started approaching narratives, as I was first starting to think of my work in the slightest way of being conceptual, that I had a story to tell. When I worked on those, I first was just enthralled with color and texture. My first pieces were very much inspired by kente cloth from Ghana because the one thing that I really came to terms with was the fact that people of color make the majority of textiles around the world.

In this country, the textiles, at least at that point that I was exposed to, were so Eurocentric, and there was really nowhere for me to fit in. My aesthetic wasn't accepted, that I made my own work. I just was a little too different. As I kept working on it, I kept digging deeper into culture and began to find my own voice in it. As I was doing that, I wanted to have those layers of grit in it.

I would be working on-- when I was buying yarn and stuff, when I had access to really beautiful, gritty yarn to use cottons, that's what I wanted. Then I couldn't get it anymore. I had to stop working in that vein. I would just change everything, and then I would find the next way to be able to have to create that kind of depth because that grit to me is creating depth, and imbuing history and imbuing people and stories, real people's stories into the clock. I just was so fascinated with the whole aspect of telling stories that were never told.

[00:17:21] Host: I'd love to jump into your residency at Michigan State University. Why don't you tell us what brought you there in the first place, and how your work evolved while you were there?

[00:17:39] Karen: I saw the residency, the description for the residency, and I thought, "Oh my God, that's perfect for me." It was a residency, it was critical race history in-- they had two of them, two positions. It was the premier year, and one was in studio art and one was in textiles. I decided to go in textiles because I figured they'd probably be less competition.

They asked for a proposal and I really knew very little about Michigan. I had been to Michigan once because I had been in a show in 2012. Otherwise, I didn't know anything about Michigan. Like everyone at that point, I think had heard about the water crisis in Flint. That touched me in a really, really deep way because of the environmental degradation of a community.

I was really thinking about-- because I always tend to put a lens of, especially at that point, of women and children on it, and really thinking about what this was like to be raising a family and to be in this situation where their water was so polluted. I was an outsider, and I had no problem knowing that I was an outsider. I think my original proposal was my walk in Flint, something like that. Really, I just envisioned myself walking and talking with residents there.

I guess I did it in a similar way in the end. I did a lot of research before. I spoke to a lot of people who lived, grew up in Flint, who had worked in Flint that had a lot of relationships to Flint. With that, I was able to meet people who gave me leads of people to speak with in person.

[00:20:17] Host: This is in 2017. You're there right in the middle, nothing has been resolved at this point?

[00:20:24] Karen: No, it's not resolved at all. It's absolutely not resolved. Their coping is where it was. They were going and picking up water. One of the things that I learned that really stuck with me was I had to learn Flint history, I had to learn Detroit history. I had to learn about the auto industry. Flint in 1957 was the second wealthiest community in the US.

Here we were in 2017, and it was the poorest place in the US. It was down with a population of less than 100,000 people. You would just drive around and you would see so many houses that were boarded up and so many-- it looked like farmland around-- but it was where houses had once stood, where communities had been really flourishing. That was my first touchstone.

Then I met with a community leader and went to a community gathering in Flint. That was really, really touching. That was amazing to get it from her perspective. Then I was put in touch with the history librarian, and he spent three hours with my class. That was this amazing thing because he broke down the history of the auto crisis really from the first 30,000 people.

Well, he broke it down from the turn of the century, then these major, major things of these layoffs. I think one of the things that I really look at when I look at telling these stories is that I really pay attention to how the stories make me feel. I internalize that emotional stuff, that empathy, and really try to channel so much of it into where these-- with what it was like to have been a first person in those situations.

I look at myself as a translator in many ways of translating their stories into something visual that will hold people's attention, will draw attention, and make it something that they will want to explore further.

[00:23:27] Host: Your piece, Prayers for Flint, you actually used some of the water to affect cloth.

[00:23:38] Karen: I went through as many photos as I could of the water, of all the different colors of water. My goal was to create cloth that was dyed in those colors. I was using a lot of symbology, so using those colors, and I knew right away that I wanted to use the rough edges of the cloth, it was really important that it be on the exterior. I didn't know it was going to be one of the hardest pieces to assemble that I've ever had to do.

It was this whole process of thinking, "Okay, how can I say what I want to say and make it interesting and yet make it something that is rooted in the ground?" That tree, it was really important that there'd be a tree in it because I wanted it to be rooted in the ground. Then I also wanted it to be a bottled tree because bottled trees were part of African American history in the South in terms of prayer and protection. I wanted this piece to have protection like the way that amulets would've been used in different cultures to protect people.

[00:25:26] Host: At this time, in this time that you're in your residency, there's an entirely different ecological environmental disaster that's happening thousands of miles away. You are inspired to make another piece, We Will Never Forget.

[00:25:45] Karen: Smack in the middle of this is Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and my head is swirling. I just can't just focus on Flint. Now, it's like here it is, another water crisis. We're looking at a culture that is-- my mother's family being from Jamaica and so close to Puerto Rico, there's so much emotion for me tied into the Caribbean, and just looking at the devastation and thinking about how our then-president was just not giving them any aid.

I wanted to do whatever I could do to help make them a focus as well. Really, I think that was really when the theme of my show and everything, which was water is a human right, is really was-- it was something I thought about before because ever since I first heard about water being privatized, I was like, "That is so wrong." In actuality, when you're actually watching it and thinking about how people are having to survive, the devastation is just so horrific. That was where I became impassioned with including Puerto Rico and thinking about-- that one day Puerto Rico's going to rise, and they're going to be such a major power again.

[00:27:44] Host: I'd love for you to finish-- in your lecture, there was this wonderful line that I believe, and I love that you imbue this in your art, but that art starts a conversation. I believe that this is your credo and this is what you want to share as starting conversations. Art doesn't necessarily solve the problem, but it does make you think, it does make you reflect, and your work does that beautifully.

[00:28:19] Karen: Well, I am not an artist that-- I don't force feed people and I don't just tell topical stories, that I really have intent with all of my work that I am able to use my work to reach into people and to grab their attention, grab their sense of humanity, and bring that into focus.

[00:29:01] Host: If you would like to continue the conversation, visit kdhampton.com to view Karen's work or chapman.edu/wilkinson to watch her full lecture. For more socially conscious content, visit publicpodcasting.org or follow us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.