Kousha Navidar: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Kousha Navidar. You may have walked through Madison Square Park or Inwood Hill Park over the last few months and noticed some sculptures you hadn't seen before. The sculptures are the work of indigenous artist Rose B. Simpson, made from weathered steel and bronze. Simpson joined me earlier this year around the opening of her outdoor public exhibit, it's called Seed.

Every so often on the show, we like to re-air conversations as part of what we call producer picks, where one of our producers selects one of their favorite segments they've worked on, and they give us some background and behind the scenes stories. We're lucky to have my colleague, Luke Green, in the studio right now across from me, who produced this interview with Rose.

Hey, Luke, how are you doing?

Luke Green: Hey, Kousha. I'm good. Yes, I chose this interview because, as you said, Rose B. Simpson's work is outside, it's free, it's in the park right now, and I want to encourage people to go check it out. The weather's a little more bearable now, so it's a good weekend activity to take family or friends.

The other reason I chose this for my producer pick conversation, and you'll hear this in the interview, is that Rose was just a very good talker and an interesting person. I think a lot of the times I work with a lot of visual artists, and they're so in another world of their imagination and creativity and talent that sometimes it can be difficult for them to explain their amazing ideas in a way that makes sense to someone who isn't in the arts world. Rose was just very sensitive to her feelings, and emotions, and explaining her work in a way that you don't even have to like art to really appreciate. I know you felt a similar way when talking to her. What did you [unintelligible 00:01:47]

Kousha Navidar: Absolutely, Luke, I think you hit the nail on the head. When I was sitting across from Rose and listening to her describe not just what she made, but why she made it, she makes specific references to how we're all connected and where we come from. Plus her talking about just working on cars back in the day.

Luke Green: Right, and you're a fan of cars. I know.

Kousha Navidar: I am a fan of cars. Just understanding how she thinks about metalwork and the weather, steel and the bronze and the way that it looks and what it represents. I was moved when I was listening to it.

Luke Green: The last thing I'll say, which we'll hear about in this interview, is that after you go see her work in the park, you can also see her work in the Whitney Biennial this year. She's one of 71 artists who was selected in the [unintelligible 00:02:27] Prestigious Exhibition. After you go check out her work in Madison Square Park, in Inwood Hill Park, you can go to the Whitney and see Rose B. Simpson's work there as well.

Kousha Navidar: It's in all different places that we can see it. We're lucky to be able to, and we're lucky to have you to bring this back up to listeners. Thanks so much, Luke. We really appreciate it.

Luke Green: No problem.

Kousha Navidar: Seed is on view in Madison Square Park and in Wood Hill Park through September 22nd. You have just over a month left to check out the sculptures. Let's get into the conversation now.

My guests are artists Rose B. Simpson and Brooke Kamin Rapaport, the Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. I began by asking Rose about the title of the exhibit, Seed, and what that title means to her, and how it relates to her sculptures.

Rose B. Simpson: I love that question because it really is about our holistic relationship to each other, to place, to our understanding of identity, community, history, and future. Seed is hope. Seed is rooting. Seed is how we go deep into something in order to grow above and understand and become. The piece is a seed. It is planted there at Madison Square Park, but it's also planting concept, feeling, consciousness and presence.

Kousha Navidar: I love that idea of going deep, to go high, I guess, is what I heard you say as well. Brooke, anything to add to that?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I think that Rose's practice has been seeded and nurtured through indigenous tradition from a multigenerational and a matrilineal lineage of artists who have worked in clay as makers. Rose is a mother, a daughter, a granddaughter, a great granddaughter. She's described to us all along the way around this project about that connectivity going back 70 generations. That's incredibly powerful when you think about what this project is in the two public parks in New York City.

Kousha Navidar: Yes. This installation celebrates 20 years of the Madison Square Parks Conservancy program. Why is art an important part of the mission for the conservancy?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Public art has complete access to all people works of art on view in Madison Square Park and now in Inwood Hill Park. It's a great collective, democratic experience for people viewing works by exceptional contemporary artists like Rose B. Simpson. Sometimes people don't go into a museum or have comfort or access to a Chelsea gallery. This is a way to bring a outstanding works to many different communities.

Kousha Navidar: Rose, for this installation, you used some really cool materials, weathered steel, bronze. Where do you source all that?

Rose B. Simpson: When I'm working in my creative practice, which is mainly ceramics, so most of my work is in clay, but I've used steel for a long time, mostly working on cars. It started with working on cars and welding. I often think about how we can honor the resources that are gifted to us for our creative process and for our creative voice, and see how far those resources can take that voice. Right. With ceramic, there's so much fragility in it. There's a lot of engineering to figure out how this fragile material can speak, can communicate, can do its job for as long as possible.

Because this work had to be outside, it had to be durable, it also had to hold space, had to be strong enough to withstand the elements, and also be in a community of lots of people. I consider those things when I created this work, when we considered the scale. When you use and you utilize the gifts of natural resources to make art, I often think about the environmental impact of art making. Part of the conceptual development of this work itself was how to make this work monumental and still use the least amount of material. The pieces are actually like jigsaw puzzle pieces from sheets of steel, and they all were put back together to engineer them to stand tall and strong.

Kousha Navidar: I want to get into the installation. I've got to pick up on something. I heard you say, though, you've got your start working on cars. I'm a big fan of cars. I think that's so cool. What did you learn about working with steel on cars that you apply now to your work today?

Rose B. Simpson: Don't get me started on cars.

Kousha Navidar: Unfortunately, I have, so go for it.

Rose B. Simpson: I have a deep love. I come from Espanola, New Mexico, which is a lowrider capital of the world. Where I come from, cars are art. I went to graduate school, the Rhode Island School of Design. When I was there, I studied relational aesthetics, aesthetics of the everyday. I was trying to understand how to explain indigenous aesthetics in a community that didn't fully understand what I saw as deeply applied and spiritual aesthetic. I really saw the link between cars, lowrider custom cars, and applied aesthetics or relational aesthetics. When I finished at Rhode Island School of Design, I went to school for automotive science and auto body.

I think, to come back to Steele, is that working on cars and having a car breakdown, understanding how it works and being able to fix it, is a very empowering thing, especially in a world where females and women haven't been necessarily a part of that world. Certain materials, like massive pieces of steel, et cetera, have been out of reach for a lot of women. Culturally, we've built that, and I don't think it's healthy, but I feel like working on cars and working with large scale steel things is empowering. Because of working on cars and fixing cars, and they break down and feeling capable and able to do that, I think that's what allows me to envision and understand that, I think the engineering for something of this scale, it's a familiar thing, and it's possible. It's doable. I understand how it can be done. That allows me to dream those things into reality.

Kousha Navidar: Kind of like the jigsaw pieces that you were talking about before to make efficient use of materials a little bit.

Rose B. Simpson: Right.

Kousha Navidar: These sculptures on view and the piece at the Whitney, they all feature faces in some way. Rose, what kind of emotion or meaning, specifically, are you trying to capture with face?

Rose B. Simpson: It's about relationship. As an indigenous person who grew up in northern New Mexico in my ancestral homelands, since very young age, I was aware of colonization and the impacts. Living in postcolonial stress disorder environment, I wanted to find out what makes people hurt each other. What I found out was that when we objectify, when we stereotype, when we [unintelligible 00:10:36] something, that's when we're able to hurt it. When we have an empathic relationship with something or someone, all of a sudden it's no longer something, it's someone, then we have less of a desire to injure and hurt and inflict pain.

With my artwork, I am trying to elicit an empathic response from people so that my work, when you give it eyes and it's watching, all of a sudden, something that is an object is de-objectified. We give animation to the inanimate. I believe it's a step towards understanding that we're in a deep, holistic relationship with the world around us. If the art can start watching us, what else is watching us, and how do we act when we're being watched? There's reverence, accountability, responsibility.

Kousha Navidar: Making animate what is inanimate.

Rose B. Simpson: Or what we think, what we have deemed is.

Kousha Navidar: I love that. Thank you for that. Sorry, brooke. Is that part of what drew you to Rose's work? How did you first engage with it? What do you appreciate about it yourself?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I first saw Rose's exhibition, and we reached out to her first in 2021 to start the conversation, and Rose immediately when we began talking about bringing Rose B. Simpson's sculpture to public parkland in New York City, she was very drawn to a certain space on the lawn in Madison Square park. In that space, there are 718ft each high sentinels, and they circle a female form in bronze who emerges from the ground. That relationship of encircling that central figure is a relationship of nurturing and great strength from the female figure.

When you go to Inwood Hill Park in upper Manhattan, there are two sculptures. They're side by side, as Rose says, they're shoulder to shoulder. One of those work faces the ancient wood in Inwood Hill park, in acknowledgement of native histories deeply associated with the land." The other work looks out into the Hudson River, the part of the trade route that brought settlers to that area who really worked to obliterate native people beginning in the 1600s. This project is acknowledging all of those complicated, contested, genocidal histories.

Kousha Navidar: Inwood Hill Park is thought to be the site where the Dutch colonial governor, and I'm using air quotes here, "Purchased the island of Manhattan from the Lenape people. Brooke, can you go into a little bit more about why in Wood Hill Park, where that idea came from?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: When we first started conversation with Rose and we thought about this important milestone of the 20th anniversary of our public art program, we had been working, for several years before, with the Lenape Center here in New York City, and collaborating and writing and researching and drafting a land acknowledgement. When speaking with the Lenape Center, they guided us to work with Inwood Hill Park because of the contested history of that site. Just what you mentioned before, about the Dutch colonial governor taking that land from the native people.

Kousha Navidar: Rose, how did you respond to that history? How did you try to bring it into your work that we can see at Inwood Hill Park right now?

Rose B. Simpson: One of the things that I'm considering, I am not from here, I am not indigenous to this place. I am a visitor, like so many other people here. Because I come from a place that has been colonized, I know what it's like to have people come into your living room and act like they own the place. I'm hoping that because I know the feeling, that I can offer a new way of approaching space, and approaching relationship, and approaching histories, and the consciousness, or the understanding of who we are in relationship to place and stories. I'm not here to tell the native story as a Pan-Indian thing. That bothers me. That isn't the way we do this.

What I can offer is a way back to our own humanity so that the more self aware we can be, the better decisions we can make in relationship to other people, to the story of place, but also energies and what might be supernatural. As I learn how to be a good person in the world, and as I work with my art and I allow my art to teach me about myself, that in that process, maybe, just maybe, I can show other people that it's possible to go to those places that are difficult, to pick up the tool, be it spiritual, psychological, emotional, that allows us to evolve and transform the way that we be in the world. We need to change, this is not going to work.

Kousha Navidar: When you say that your art teaches you something about yourself, are you thinking of something specifically?

Rose B. Simpson: I think the biggest tool in my art making process is witnessing and listening. The first time I walked into Madison Square Park, I asked the park what needed to be set there. I didn't say I think I need. I think I know what this place needs. I had to stop and quiet myself down really deeply and ask and then wait for an answer and listen for it. Because I don't feel like I am making this work, I am only a tool for this work to be made, that when it becomes, when the work comes to manifestation, to fruition, and I stand and witness it as it witnesses me back, I am sent into my feelings. I am sent into a humble places. I am sent into some uncomfortable feelings, and I have to be with that. I feel like I put the work in the world and it turns around and shows me something that I've been looking for. I think that's why I keep returning to these processes. Sometimes I laugh, maybe I haven't got it yet, and that's why it just keeps getting bigger.

Kousha Navidar: Oh, sorry, Brooke, were you going to say something?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I was going to say, it's also significant to think of Rose's work in the context of the contemporary art world and how Rose and other artists of her generation are really resetting the conversation about these long entrenched interpretations of what is the figure in sculpture, what can the figure be in sculpture. By making these towering objects, they are formidable. That lets us reassess ideas around the human form in sculptural language.

Kousha Navidar: To put a point on it, why do you think it's so important to make an effort to display art in public spaces in our city, within spaces like Madison Square Park? Brooke.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: People come to Madison Square Park and to other public settings, and when they see a project like this, they can be inspired, challenged, or provoked. These are where very significant conversations about contemporary culture, and life and politics and society, they grow from seeing works of art. That's what the best artists can do for us.

Kousha Navidar: Rose, some folks may already be familiar with your work in the city. People may have already seen your work in this year's Whitney Biennial. For it, you made a piece called Daughter's Reverence, which includes four sculptures of figures with materials like clay and steel, all facing inwards towards each other. As an artist, what does it mean to you to have your work shown in a Whitney Biennial? What was your reaction when they first reached out to you?

Rose B. Simpson: It really is the honor we all search for, in a sense, if we're on this journey. It's an incredible honor to be there. The anxiety is often, will I do it justice, and will I meet that challenge? There's so many. For Brooke to come to me and ask if I am ready to take on this challenge, this work here at Madison Square Park. Or two, make work for the Whitney Biennial. I feel like what has kept me grounded in some of these really-- There's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. That pressure can really crumble and cripple me, I will speak for myself, if I let it. I feel like I search more for those moments of listening again, back to witnessing what is trying to be told in those spaces. I feel like you want to see something intimidating. Listen for something bigger than what is human, what is bigger than our ideas and stories we tell ourselves of the life that we live?

Kousha Navidar: I've heard you say the first step is listening multiple times in this interview, which I think is lovely. How do you listen effectively?

Rose B. Simpson: I'm kind of a loud person in lots of ways. I'm bubbly, and I can get goofy and crazy. I think listening has been my life goal and the challenge in my life. Listening to me is so much about turning on and then off our different senses until you listen with something bigger and stronger than what we're used to. I think often there is intuition, there's trust, and there might even be faith that has to be opened up to allow a trust for something that isn't as concrete as we're so used to in this three dimensional existence.

Kousha Navidar: Well said. We've been talking to Rose B. Simpson, the artist, and Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. If you would like to go to Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, you will see Seed on view now through September 22nd. Thank you both so much for being here.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Thank you. Thank you, Kousha.

Rose B. Simpson: Thank you.

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