Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. It's hard to know where to start a conversation with artist Karyn Olivier because she has so much going on. We could talk about the recent reveal of her huge installation at Newark Airport Terminal A, 17 photographic floating metal rings about 52 feet in length or we could discuss her being chosen to design a memorial at Philadelphia's Bethel Burying Ground, a 19th-century cemetery where an estimated 5,000 Black Americans were interred. She has a new show in Chelsea called How A Home Is Made at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery on West 21st Street. That's up until July 28th.

It's a series of pieces all from 2023, each telling a different part of a story, of migration and displacement. Using found and discarded items plus photography, the pieces have depth and texture. Some of pathos, others concern others' beauty. Karyn Olivier was born in Trinidad and Tobago and raised in Brooklyn. She's now based in Philadelphia, where she's a professor of sculpture at Temple and she joins us now from Rhode Island, where she's on a site survey. Karyn, thanks for making time.

Karyn: Thanks for having me. Greetings from your alma mater.

Alison: Love to hear it. A lot of your work involves history. How is art a good way to consider history?

Karyn: I think art allows an openness. It starts with an openness. It starts with questions. The wonderful thing for me about art is that there are no answers. We are offering propositions. We're in the business of the what-ifs. We allow questions to be revealed that could maybe spark conversations. Maybe there's sights for discourse or maybe it confronts you to deal with the answers you don't want to necessarily face or maybe you come up with new questions as a result.

Alison: You grew up in Brooklyn, New York spent a lot of time at the Brooklyn Museum as a kid. What about those trips still influences your work and your practice today?

Karyn: It's amazing. We would spend half of our summers in Trinidad back home and the rest of the time at the Brooklyn Museum. It felt as though it was my backyard. Groups of students would come in and I'd say, "Oh, I've already been there for this past week, I'm going to go to this other section." It felt like it was mine. It was a strange thing. Then I have such memories, my parents would just send us out for the day. I have such memories of rolling down the back hill in the parking lot, which wasn't as vast as it is now.

It was something where it was a sight of play. It was a sight of discovery. It was a sight of questioning, but I didn't even realize that it was imbuing me with this idea of history being overlapping, history existing within opposite walls with each other. What does it mean to have the African wing next to the Asian? There's something about a possibility or I had access to all and maybe these stories could make me think about my own history. I didn't think about that as a child, but I think I was very aware of being able to be in these different spaces and knowing I wasn't from America, I grew up somewhere else.

This thing of being in two places, what does it mean to have these artifacts at the Brooklyn Museum that are actually from another place? I think all those things whether or not you're conscious of it becomes part of your body. It becomes in your consciousness.

Alison: Now, you didn't get a degree in art or history. You got a degree in psychology from Dartmouth.

Karyn: Yes, I did.

Alison: Does that psychology degree ever come in handy?

Karyn: I think it does. It's funny. When I got to Dartmouth-- at first, I thought I was going to be an engineer because I did this Carnegie Mellon summer program before college. Then when I got there, I thought our history was interesting and my mom who's-- they left Trinidad when I was one years old, they left for a purpose. My mom said to me, "What about psychology? You're good with people." At the time, I didn't think-- I mean, my mom's always right, so of course, I did that but I had no idea that it was going to inform my practice.

I start from a place of intuition, but I think about my own internal struggles and joys. I'm always thinking too of the social dynamic. You start off with your own, say, you go in front of a work of art and you're having your own interaction with it in thoughts, but then someone else enters so then it becomes a social exchange. I think the psychology figures in the work all the time, I think early on, it was very explicit. The work was dealing with nostalgia, I was dealing with the memory. I think that's still there. I think I'm indebted to my background, not being art even though I had to learn how to catch up to everyone else.

Alison: You didn't get to art school, any sort of formal art school until you were 30 years old. What did you do in between and what brought you to the realization that you did want to go to art school?

Karyn: After Dartmouth, I entered an executive training program at Bloomingdale's. I was assistant buyer of designer handbags. I was living in New York, and I did that. Then I left to work for this designer who's incredible, J Morgan Puett who used to have a shop in Soho. She has since left the fashion business and started this amazing social practice project based in Pennsylvania, but I was sitting there one day and I came in and her home was also the side of her business. There was something about watching her.

She's waking up as I'm coming to my desk and seeing this woman who found a way to have an art practice as business. I just started to think maybe I could think of another way to live. I was very good at numbers and managing. I went from there. I also worked at Urban Outfitters as a store manager in the city but I realized that maybe there was another way to be and, of course, we had multiple identities, multiple lives. I started taking a ceramics class at the 92nd Street. Why? Just to get out of work one day a week and that led to me taking more classes.

Then the third day, I decided, "Let me go back to school and take some undergraduate classes in ceramics." I think something about ceramics is important. It seems as though it's a material that anyone can use, anyone has access to, it doesn't cost much. I think something about clay from the earth, it's dirt and I feel like it encapsulates everything I think about art. It starts with nothing or it starts with something unresolved, unformed, and it can become anything. That was my starting point with ceramics.

Alison: My guest is Karyn Olivier. She is an artist. Her new exhibition is called How A Home Is Made. Before we get into the exhibition, if you had to think about what was a piece or a commission or a grant that really was the breakthrough moment for you as an artist, what was that and when was that?

Karyn: I would say it's two work, two grants that happened around the same time. One was at Socrates Sculpture Park. It's this amazing place in Long Island City. I love that it's an artist sculpture park, but it's also a community park, it's also a dog park. I just love how it engages the community. I was given the opportunity to make it work, and I didn't have much money. I ran up my credit card bill but I kept thinking about this park and I started thinking about other parks and I thought, "Oh, an amusement park."

I decided to make a carousel and I thought, "Well, if I'm going to make a carousel as an adult, what should it be?" I made a carousel for one just for me. It also has one seat. It doesn't have the bells and whistles. It's a really streamlined carousel. Instead of going counterclockwise, I have it going clockwise so it's not getting too caught up in nostalgia. That piece just opened up the world of public art for me. There's something about that piece where there's so many inherit possible narratives that happened.

I thought I was making a fun object and then I realized it was basically me going in circles and thinking about this horrible breakup with that. It was something about me thinking about, "Wow, in the public realm is a funny place with the public and private." The private can happen in the public. You're having these internal thoughts and me thinking about amusement park is there to bombard your senses to the point where you lose yourself but in that act of sitting alone, you lose yourself with yourself.

That piece really opened up my idea about what public art could be. I did an exhibition. I was part of a fellowship emerging artists show at Socrates Sculpture Park. That was a piece where I first started thinking about history. I didn't know what to make. I thought, "Well, let me just research the building." It was an old trolley repair shop. I used that history as my starting off point. I was in the lower level where it had these arched ceilings that were obviously where the trolley cars came and I decided, "Why don't I just make a street with embedded trolley tracks to harken back to its history?"

Although it's no longer there, all of a sudden, you're there and you see, "Oh, wait, was this always here?" Then you could think about the history. What was amazing for me about that piece that I didn't expect is the history I was honing in on to the history of that place but I had a Holocaust survivor come to me at the opening and climb my arms, talking about how it made her think about the tunnels, the trains not knowing where you're going to end up. It had this historical bent but it was also allowed people to think about journey in many different ways.

Alison: My guest is Karyn Olivier, the artist. We're going to talk about your art show. I want people-- you can go to our Instagram @allofitwnyc and you can see some of the pieces that we're going to talk about to give you a little bit of a visual. First of all, the title of the show How A Home Is Made, what does that refer to?

Karyn: That was a tricky one. I knew the title had to have the word home in it and the first title actually that came up was How to Make a Home but there was something about that title that felt too like a recipe or a kid or it was too much in the present or is too prescriptive or instructional so then the variation of How A Home Is Made, there was something about it that felt to me as though there was an openness or an invitation. I'm not good at grammar. I should have asked my wife. I think it's the present tense, I think it's the present particle.

There's something about the tense that made it both present and past, so it's allowing an imagining of different kinds of home, different kinds of imagining of home, and it led me to think about different ways we think about home. I can think about being back home in Trinidad, I can think about home as a location, home could be in your heart, home could be family, we could think about home as shelter, we could think about home as the building, we could think about home in an American context of say the American dream so I felt like the title left room for different imaginings of what home is and what it means.

Alison: There's a piece called Driftwood, Door, Man, and Boat and it's a large piece, a very beautiful driftwood on top of a metallic-like photo of the ocean and a man and a boat and under these metal steel step risers to the side. Where is this a photo of? Who is this a photo of?

Karyn: This piece I would say it's 13 years in the making. In 2010, I was invited to be part of this exhibition of the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture in Senegal, and of course, I had to go to Gorée Island and I had to go to that House of Slaves and I had a moment alone. I don't know where the tourists were. I was alone at the door of no return which is a very famous door, where the last exit point where Africans were boarded for the Transatlantic Middle Passage Voyage.

I stood there for a while, and as you can imagine as a Black woman, as someone from the Caribbean, someone who's part of the African diaspora, it was pretty emotional. I'm there and I'm just watching the sea and this man is in a boat and just drifting by, and we just looked at each other. I don't think I waved but we just watched each other. It's kind of emotional and it's really-- I don't know what made me do this but before he was out of my frame, I decided to capture a moment.

There's something I needed to evidence or I wanted to have a record of that moment so I had this photo and I never thought I was going to use it in artwork. Then I collected that piece of driftwood which took work and I think about driftwood, I'm interested in driftwood for many reasons. They're beautiful objects but I think about driftwood and how they come to be. They're remains of trees, a part of a tree who has gone through this potentially turbulent travel through history and time and how it's almost like wearing its scars of its travel and washes up on shores and on rivers.

I had this piece of driftwood I recovered from Matinicus Isle in Maine, a small fishing island, and I didn't know what to do with that either. Then all of a sudden, one moment, it just made sense to juxtapose them. They're from three different locales, both islands are very different when you think about the Maine demographic and the man on Gorée Island. There was something about those two objects, they seem to do something where they can allow for us to consider different histories, consider the overlaps of what happens.

Like, I am here in America through the history of the slave trade and it was hard because I knew that they had to be together but I didn't know why. Then that the plinth, I wanted it to feel the photograph is flat on that plinth and I wanted to feel this like the stillness but also the smoothness of the secret was very, very still the water. Then that driftwood almost as though you can imagine, he's coming out of it. Then the steps just seemed to me to make sense-- I wanted to do something maybe to make reference to that door and descending and now the inverse of you're ascending.

Alison: There's another piece it's about five feet wide of concentric circles and these circles appears to be a different material called Powers of Ten. What materials make up the circles and then if you could talk a little bit about the choice to put these materials inside a very natural square box?

Karyn: This came out of me working as an artist and residence at RAIR. It's Recycled Artist in Residency program that's positions artists inside a construction and demolition recycling center called Revolution Recovery. I was at this site, and every day, something like 500 tons of materials come through. I kept thinking about all of these, trucks would bring materials from demolitions and constructions but also you'd have these 1-800 junk trucks that are the evidence in what's leftover of someone who's died at home.

I kept thinking about home in terms of that but also the construction and demands for more and more construction and thinking about how today that's happening in many cities, the poor and pretty prolific building that's happening at the speed and these materials that some of them are quite toxic. I kept thinking I wanted it so much of that place was about home and I thought how I'm indebted to these things too. I own a home, there's problematics to how I spend my consumption but I thought at the same time, we need a home.

Home is where the love is. I chose 10 materials that I thought were materials that you see often in a home and I think I'm going to try to remember them and they were pretty much all discarded. I got them at the end of their life or after the extraction that the new-- there's this asphalt roofing, there's gypsum powder which is ubiquitous that's in dry wall where we see everywhere. Sawdust, I had on conduit flexible wire which we don't notice that but every electrical box has this wire. There's crushed glass, there's cement which, of course, is the foundation.

There's carpet padding, there's this plastic that was shredded that was from like all the cables that keep us connected, the wires, the residue of that so it's something about having these abstract and these concentric circles but I kept thinking about time and extraction how some of these materials, say, asphalt roofing comes from a tar pit, and that material has been around for thousands of years. I was thinking about the life, think about a tree that's been around for 100 years have been cut down.

I was thinking about time and layers of time but I felt it was also in a way almost like this portal but also in a way of thinking too about IKEA and the whole kit and you get this kit to build your home. There's something about making it the reference to putting in this box and having a reference because we all can recognize that but now, it's been abstracted in a way. I made this custom dolly and the idea that it's movable and portable, and I feel as though too that speaks to an American or a Western way of where we don't sit still, we're often moving and living in different locations and that sort of thing.

Alison: Before I let you go, I did want to ask in the back room of the gallery is this enormous piece. The floor-to-ceiling orange construction barriers. Some of your other pieces are really, really big. There's one at Hunter's Point South Park, The Tetherball Monument. What do you like about working in a giant scale?

Karyn: It allows people to have access in a certain way. I think it allows people to be enveloped. I am interested in large works too because more than one sense is often involved but it's particularly that piece where there's sound, there's your body. I like that you're aware of your presentness, you're aware of being human. I think that something else about large works of these works where you're engaging touch with a haptic which reminds us that we're human.

In that piece in particular, you have these construction barriers that we see everywhere but we don't consider them so what happens if you just do a simple shift and make them taller, now it's a scale of a building and you reimagine or think about it in a new way.

Alison: The name of the show is How A Home Is Made. It's at the Tanya Bonakdar Art Gallery on West 21st Street. It is up until July 28th. My guest has been artist Karyn Olivier. Karyn, thank you for making time today.

Karyn: Thank you so much for having me. Take care.

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