Chioma Ebinama

March 2, 2020

I hadn’t seen Chioma for months when we made plans for our conversation. She had been traveling extensively, drawing and painting along the way, and was in New York for a moment, just long enough to reshuffle her storage unit and collect work for an upcoming solo show. Chioma suggested we meet at the Noguchi Museum. The idea made me anxious. I don’t really “get” sculpture. I’m a reader: I like as much text in my art as possible. Paintings, drawings, and photographs feel legible to me — sculpture not so much. But I agreed and spent the bus ride to Queens combing the Isamu Noguchi Wikipedia page, searching for clues that would unlock his work. Despite my cram session, the sculptures remained inscrutable. I confessed my feeling of ignorance to Chioma as we walked amongst the marble slabs and wooden plinths. She replied with surprise. I got the sense that Chioma doesn’t let art make her feel inadequate or worry about whether she knows what a sculpture is supposed to “mean.”

In the museum café later, Chioma described how she became an artist both intentionally and accidentally. We talked about the difference between her art-making practice (visceral, intimate) and the way her art is consumed (sometimes over-intellectualized, sometimes over-simplified). We discussed what audiences expect from capital a “Art” and how that art is framed for audiences. We bemoaned art world ideas that are tired and confounding, ideas like: Craft is primitive, big pieces in a gallery are complex. Identity explains. This medium is for that kind of person. Work by them must be about x, y, or z. Context is always subtext. In the swirl of this heady conversation, Chioma said something simple, something to the effect of, “I draw and paint because it feels good.” Suddenly my need to read the Noguchi sculptures, like my desire to read Chioma’s work, seemed freighted with other impulses: projection, assumption, and extraction.

Rarely do I enter a gallery and think about the artist’s pleasure or my own. Instead, I’m hunting for a message, looking for answers like I’m doing homework. Putting brush and pen to paper has always been a kind of healing modality for Chioma, a tool for survival, a method of self-soothing. She brings all of her person to the work, her politics and her biography, but her artistic project is to be in tune with her immediate physical and emotional experience, to embody it on the page. In constantly asking, “What is this artist trying to tell me?” I bypass so many other basic modes of engagement like … just feeling. As an artist, Chioma works to liberate herself from the constraints of expectation. She is in constant pursuit of the conditions in which play is possible. It seems clear to me that she wishes the same liberation for her audience — I could feel her wishing it on me, stressed out amongst the Noguchi works. When I look at Chioma’s paintings now (she’s calling them tender gestures lately) I try — and I know trying here is paradoxical — to not try so hard. Much of their magic lies in that imperative to be easy, to let the grace and poetry that they are wash over you.

Chioma Ebinama is a Nigerian-American artist and illustrator. She graduated from Boston College in 2010 and got her MFA in Illustration from SVA in 2016. Since 2018, when her work first started appearing in galleries, she has been blurring the traditional boundary between illustration and fine art by mostly ignoring it. Her latest show Now I only believe in…love opens at Fortnight Institute on March 2.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Georgia Hilmer: A good place to start might be: When did you move to New York and why? What did that transition felt like?

Chioma Ebinama: My background is in sociology. I thought I would go into some sort of law or advertising or super corporate job but by the time I graduated college I realized that I didn’t want to participate, I didn’t want to just be working for the rest of my life. So I thought I would become an artist. Pursuing art seemed like the best way to liberate myself. I had a boyfriend who at the time had dropped out of Georgetown and gotten into art school and I thought, “If he can get into art school, I can definitely do it.” I had drawn my whole life and had wanted to go to art school when I was younger but it didn’t seem realistic for me. I thought I would pursue illustration because it’s art but it’s also commercially aligned, kind of like offering a service, and also because I really love books. A lot of the illustrators that I liked were based in New York. I didn’t have a clear plan but I thought if I just went closer to the source, something good was bound to happen. I figured out that I should try to get into SVA’s MFA illustration program. I had to apply three times before I got in.

In those years first I was nannying and then I got a job working with an artist who makes textiles, Rosie Kanellis, who is still my friend now. I met her through picking up kids from her studio; she did kids’ workshops on the side. It was the first time I had been to a woman’s studio. I was so blown away. I emailed her and said, “I don’t know what I’m doing but I like your job, could I be your assistant?” She hired me and I worked with her until I went to grad school three years later. The job was good for me because it helped pay for a studio share and it got me more in the flow of having a daily practice. Something I always admire about people who have been in art school or have been connected to the arts from the very beginning of their lives is that there’s no mental block to their creativity, they just get up and go do the thing. There’s no philosophical question about it, they just do the work. It’s always an act of devotion. That’s what I was interested in: art as a path, not so much a career.

A path toward something specific? Or a path as a place to be with purpose? 

A place to be with purpose — to be on a path in the way that being a monk is a path to liberation. 

How did you have the faith to keep trying when you were applying to grad school? After your first try didn’t work out, what were you thinking?

I just thought, “I’m not there yet, I don’t have it yet.” But when I say I didn’t want to participate, I mean that I was pursuing art with total abandon, thinking, “I don’t care what happens to me at this point.” Drawing, in a way, kept me alive, it gave my life a sense of purpose. 

Had you lost faith in something particular or had you … just become an adult who felt more hopeless about the world?

I have always struggled with depression and at that time I thought, “Okay, art is one thing that definitely sparks joy.” I just wanted to do whatever I needed to do to make it sustainable.

And you were thinking about school as a stepping stone to a stable career?

By the time I did get into school I didn’t really want to go anymore. I didn’t think it made sense to take on that much student debt. I was starting to get the idea of leaving New York and moving somewhere that I could afford to fail and experiment with different things. Even at that point I was beginning to wonder if what I was interested in doing was even illustration or if I’d be happier doing fine art. I was always really frustrated by those kind of distinctions anyway. Whether you’re an illustrator or your work is in a gallery, you’re still working within a market and making your work with your own hands and its all dependent on your regular devotion to a craft. The only difference, most of the time, is accessibility. If you’re making an image for The New York Times, everyone gets to see it, whereas if you make an image and it goes into a downtown gallery, that’s cool, but it’s hidden. I started to think about who benefits from those distinctions. Definitely not artists, definitely money people.

Like it’s a false dichotomy that allows people to charge more money for one thing over another?

Yes, but it’s also about value and valuation. If you devalue commercial art and crafts, that also moves a whole bunch of people out of the picture when you think about art and art history — especially women and people of color and non-Western people. It relegates what is valuable to such a small group.

Was your grad program at SVA really practical, mainly studio-based, or was there theory?

My classmates were really thinking about making their work appealing for magazines or children’s books or whatever the commercial demand was. I was just kind of trying to use the time to find my own interests. I was making some soft sculpture, I was playing with ceramics. By the time I did my final year I was thinking about making garments and story-telling in a way that was not so direct, that could exist in a gallery space. 

What was the program like in terms of getting you hired when you were done?

The program has a lot of prestige and gave us access to a lot of people. But I don’t know how much my classmates are working. I feel really lucky, I started getting illustration jobs right after I graduated. People really liked my book. My first job after school was BuzzFeed and The New York Times and then I didn’t have anything for several months and I thought, “I gotta get a job!”

When did you first show your work in a gallery?

That was pretty recent. I guess this is all pretty recent. I graduated in 2016. Wow! It has been a really crazy ride. I got into gallery stuff because I met Raphael Guilbert, who at the time was an associate director of Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, through a friend of mine. She came to my studio and I showed her my thesis project from grad school and she said, “This is amazing, we should put it in SPRING/BREAK,” and I was like, “You think this can go in an art fair?” Because my teachers had said, “We don’t know what kind of jobs you could get from this work.” So Raphael had me apply to SPRING/BREAK and we got in and that was so cool. It was a whole lesson. Afterwards, I was so shell-shocked. It was my first time having my work exist in direct relation to me. Illustration is inward work. It goes out into the world because someone else prints it or puts it online. You don’t have to be so visible. 

Illustration work is supposed to stand alone, apart from the illustrator? Like a task completed, not art expressed?

Yeah. It’s not part of you or any part of your ideas or thinking. It was interesting because, in the art world, especially being an artist of color, identity politics is central. There is no Black artist just painting still lives of flowers. As someone who works with the figure, there’s a lot that is just naturally projected onto it. That work [shown at SPRING/BREAK] also was inspired by mythology. I was starting to research Igbo cosmology, my tribe, pre-colonial tradition. And I like to work with ink and watercolor, so there were people who were surprised that the work was by a Black artist, they thought it was by an Asian artist.

So it was hard to be so directly associated with your work in the SPRING/BREAK setting?

I just want people to take in the work without projecting all of that onto it. I really got obsessed with recognizing performative blackness, the way that in America you’ll sometimes have to perform blackness to make yourself seen or known. It’s hard if you’re someone like me who is first-generation, whose sense of blackness is not rooted in the history of America. And the idea of “this thing is Black” whereas “this thing is not Black” doesn’t always compute. Blackness is a really commodified thing in this country, sold to Black people and also to non-Black people.

Especially to non-Black people.

Yeah, so keeping it within these rigid confines and denying that it’s fluid and not monolithic seems crazy. I was hyper-conscious of visibility and performative blackness and feeling like blackness as I know it was really obscured on purpose. I feel like there is a big difference between the African experience, the Caribbean experience, and the African-American experience. On a cultural level and a macro level, there is a reason why people prefer to think of Africa as inferior. I think it’s part of the systematic oppression of Black people worldwide to think of the continent as an empty, barren place or this dark void, to think of it as this sad place with no history or culture. Except we want to talk about Egypt or North Africa as if it isn’t included. These were things that I was thinking about after SPRING/BREAK as I was preparing to make work for my first solo show [penumbras at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery] that I had later that summer in 2018. 

What was going through your mind when you were offered that solo show so quickly?

I was thinking, “I can’t do this. Are they serious?” It was a lot of pressure. I was feeling like whatever I did wasn’t going to be good enough or honest enough. I feel like work on paper is so humble and I really like it, I like the ephemerality of it and the immediacy of it, but I was really self-conscious about making it. When people are making video art and this very conceptual stuff that’s supposed to embed so many contemporary ideas and I’m looking back and making drawings, it seems like maybe I should just burn all of this! That’s what I think about all the time.

What kind of work did you end up making for that first solo show?

I did my penumbras. I was so nervous. They were all immediate drawings, I did them very quickly, which was very different from the work that was in SPRING/BREAK, which involved a much more laborious way of making images. I would draw on vellum and then press it as very rudimentary print-making. Whereas the first solo show felt very immediate and more poetic, more inward, I think. I guess all of my figures are Black, but I had never tried to address any blackness in my work. I think of myself more as a storyteller, interested in stories. I felt a lot of pressure to be a Black artist, I guess. 

How could you have done that? What would have been the way to represent your blackness “properly”? 

Well, at the time I was thinking about performative blackness and reading James Baldwin’s Another Country. The premise of the book is that a sort of successful and known Black jazz musician in the New York scene kills himself. He had a white girlfriend and had been existing between these white and Black spaces; he grew up in Harlem but then was living in Greenwich Village. He kills himself in the beginning of the book and then his younger sister who had idolized him decides she wants to enter the scene and pursue singing. There’s a scene in the book where she sings for the first time — a jazz standard — and it’s well-received. Then she sings a mourning song and, mind you, everyone knows that she is so-and-so’s sister, so there’s a darkness about it. James Baldwin describes the discomfort the white audience has with her blatant vulnerability. The work that I was making was more interested in that. Softness and pain, but not pain that was performative or sentimental or tragic, but just pain in a way that is universal in the sense that we are all suffering. But Black suffering, and especially Black female suffering, often goes ignored or minimized. 

Were you anticipating an audience reaction like the one in the Baldwin book? Was that a fear? 

No. I was thinking, “Maybe this is shit! I like these images but maybe, also: shit!”

That might be the forever feeling.

Oh yeah, it is.

Have you become better-equipped to deal with that doubt? Has it become a shorter path from “Maybe shit” to “Whatever!”?

It’s definitely become a shorter path. Even now, the work for this new show is so different from that work and from the work that I showed this summer [mammywater at BAF Gallery and Anunu: Notes on the Divine Feminine at Boys’ Quarters Project Space]. I’ve also had a lot of other shows since then and been in group shows. It’s really been kind of mind-boggling because I’m always thinking, “If people like this, do I have to make more of this?” The work that I’m making now is more narrative and playful, kind of more like the work I was making in grad school. I don’t think race is a big part of it, although it will be interpreted that way.

Does anticipating a response affect the way you make things?

Yeah, of course. Expectation kills everything, whatever it is that you’re doing. For someone like me, I have a great imagination, which is good for making art, but also really bad for when your thoughts go dark, when you can really deep-dive into all the different permutations of shit happening. The really nice thing about not being in New York recently is having the space to reconnect with that initial thought, which is that I don’t want to work. I realized that I was only able to do all of this because I maintained a spirit of play. If I can keep taking this not too seriously, then I can keep going. That’s what has worked. Whenever I have tried to carry a lot of expectation or deep seriousness, it doesn’t really work, it makes me resentful and bitter. 

When you haven’t been able to access that feeling of play does it just jam up your hand for painting or does it make you unhappy everywhere? 

It makes me unhappy. When those thoughts come up, I begin to question why I’m doing this, why I’m making drawings, why I’m even on this path. I start to feel like the work I’m making is stupid. I go really low and then maybe I see something or I hear something that I really like or have an experience of oneness and I realize that it doesn’t really matter. This is all just a game. Lately, actually, I just think of one specific painting I saw at the Armory Show (I won’t say the name of the artist) and I was like, “Okay, so one can literally make anything.” This is all bullshit, just be nice and play nice. 

In the past year, and definitely in this time away, I’ve been returning to the central idea, which is that the making is really healing for me. Pursuing art took me out of this dark place. And ultimately the materials I like and the things that I like to do are forms of meditation. Whether it’s watercolor or ink or marbling, which I’ve been playing with, or sewing, it’s all slow work that helps to center the mind because it’s so focused. That’s what is most important to me. At the end of the day, it is this devotional, meditative practice. That’s why, with my images, I don’t really do sketches or anything, I just kind of hold an idea in my mind for as long as I can and then start to work on it. I’m absorbing ideas as I’m working but I don’t think I make good work by going, “Oh, I want to make work about women,” and then executing it. That’s more how I have to think when I’m working as an illustrator.

I think about my practice and I’ve found two metaphors that work. One is the spiral, something that is always expanding around a certain set of ideas. And I remember listening to an interview about Grace Paley or Joan Didion and how they are constantly making little notes and how those notes become a short story. I think that’s kind of me too, I’m clocking ideas and images and then whatever makes sense makes it in. 

The new show is called Now I only believe in…love and it was made in the context of a lot of thinking about ecology and liberation theologies and how to reconnect people with the earth in a way that makes them feel. The way we live now really disconnects us from our humanity. But also, just play. This work is very playful and some of the images are just downright silly.