Over the course of her now 25-year career, Lisa Anne Auerbach has worked in many different mediums - including self-publishing, photography, gouache on paper, and knitting. She is perhaps most recognized for her knitted bookshelf portraits, included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Auerbach's work has been featured in recent exhibitions at The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA (2018); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn NY (2018); Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Baden-Baden, Germany (2017); Mona Bismarck American Culture Center, Paris, France (2016); Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2016); Parasophia Kyoto International Festival of Culture, Kyoto, Japan (2015); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2014); The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK (2014); Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, SE (2012); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2012); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, UK (2009); University of Michigan Art Museum, Ann Arbor, MI (2009); Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO (2008). She is represented by Gavlak Gallery
For more information, please see: lisaanneauerbach.com, Gavlak Gallery, and on Instagram @auerbachtoberfest.
Please note this interview was submitted prior to the wild fires breaking out across the West Coast, and thus Auerbach’s text does not reflect the current state of conditions.
Lisa Anne Auerbach’s in progress 2020 Vision hand-knit sweater. Image courtesy of the artist.
First, and most importantly, how are you doing? How are you navigating the highs and lows?
All things considered, I’m doing pretty well. I’m in a bit of a limbo zone; my shows and projects have been postponed and the work I was supposed to make feels a bit irrelevant now, so I’m trying to figure things out. I’m already getting nostalgic for early covidtimes, when I spent a lot of time going on walks in my neighborhood with my boyfriend and figuring out how to get food. We still go on walks, but not every day, and the logistics of keeping fed have been ironed out.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Living Loving Party Going, 2015. Merino wool stitched onto stretched linen. 80 x 63 in (203.2 x 160 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Gavlak Gallery.
It's my experience that most artists engage with some level of self-isolation in their day to day art practice. Has this been your experience? And if so, have you found these innate rhythms to be helpful during this larger, world-wide experience of isolation?
I really love staying home. I used to have a serial publication called American Homebody centered around the joys of being home. The motto of the publication was “Stay home” and I made a bumper sticker, which has become much more relevant now. I’m an only child, and I value solitude. This aspect of covidtimes has been a real joy for me.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Detail of Living Loving Party Going, 2015. Merino wool stitched onto stretched linen. 80 x 63 in (203.2 x 160 cm). Image courtesy of the artist and Gavlak Gallery.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Be Here Now Now, 2020. Gouache on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
It would be great if you could briefly talk us through your practice. Understanding it is integral to appreciating the multivalence of your work.
Every day is different. I have some ongoing series of works, or ways of working, that I return to. Ideas float in on the wind or percolate through reading, listening, or writing. I prefer to work at home, but I go to the studio when I want to make something on the knitting machine and to the darkroom at school to make photographs. I don’t have any windows in my studio, which can be great for working late, but it’s never been a place I really want to spend time.
Has any of your imagery shifted in a reflection to what's currently happening? And why, or why not?
My work is most always responsive to current realities, both personal and political. At the beginning of covidtimes, the photographs I was making were of things around the house and yard. I was using the tricolor process so making the photographs was slowed down, reflecting what felt like the current reality.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Social Distance Social Practice, 2020. Gouache on paper. Image courtesy of the artist.
I’m handknitting a sweater that started pre-covid as a “2020 Vision” sweater but soon became a document of everything happening now. The sweater is inspired by the Hønsestrik tradition, which is both nimble and political, and the sleeves I’m working on now have images of protesters and people wearing masks. One of my continuing projects is to bring this kind of knitting to a larger audience and to encourage others to knit their present in order to keep them warm in the future.
I’m also continuing a series of four word gouache pieces that I began the day after the 2016 election that I give to people who donate $500 to various organizations. The project has raised over 20K. I think a lot about how art can function as a way to change the world. Raising money is one concrete way that my work can have a direct effect.
A while ago I knit a Black Lives Matter banner for the fence at the elementary school. I had the idea that people would add to it, bring their own statements of affinity and protest and that the fence could act as an artspace for the neighborhood. In this spirit, I knit a bookshelf of antiracist titles to hang on the fence, too. I’ve been knitting images of bookshelves for a few years now. Usually they are related to one person’s collection, but this one was meant to function more as a list of suggestions of what to read now. But then my Black Lives Banner was stolen and I realized that the banner would likely not last very long either, which is disappointing. I didn’t put it on the fence, but I’m hoping it will find a space to inspire people elsewhere.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Black Lives Matter, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Are you thinking differently? Coping differently? Inspired differently?
The events of the last few months have felt a little whiplash-y. I don’t know if my process of thinking is that different, but I’m definitely thinking about different things. In terms of coping, yoga and cooking have likely been helpful as moments of slowing down and staying present.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, TriXTriColor: Tartan, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
What is bringing you solace, or even joy, in this moment?
I have a shed in my backyard called The Meow, which hosts temporary artist-run small businesses. It’s been a record store and a tattoo shop in the past, and at the beginning of covidtimes I turned it into a yoga studio large enough for only one person.
My mornings are the most rigid part of the day. They begin around 5:30 with my cat Daisy meowing outside the bedroom door. After hoping she will eventually go away (she does not), I get up around 6, and walk up the front stairs outside to get the newspaper. Then the cats get fed while I make some coffee, in a stovetop espresso maker. One of my cats then sits by the window and watches birds while the other one follows me upstairs and sits in my lap while I read the newspaper and drink coffee. During covidtimes, I’ve been keeping a journal, which gets updated in the morning. After that, I head down to The Meow for yoga. I practice every day, with the exceptions of Saturdays and moon days. The Meow has been a wonderful space for yoga. It’s almost at the bottom of the canyon and surrounded by trees. In its new incarnation, the floor is painted blue and the walls are slightly off-white. I have a bell collection in there, candles, photographs, and a few curious items. I sign in every morning, just as I do at the yoga studio I go to during non-covidtimes. I’m trying to get through the yoga sutras with attention, so I’ve been reading one every day.
This morning routine has gotten longer and longer during this time home. Somehow I thought that not having to drive to yoga every day would be a time saver, but it’s actually the opposite. I sit upstairs with the cat for hours, reading way more of the newspaper than I used. I’m not sure I even retain that much more information, but I enjoy the time with Daisy. I find the consistency of repetition to be a helpful grounding in a world filled with uncertainty.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, TriXTriColor: Filters and Notebook, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
What research or writing are you doing that you find compelling?
I have been learning about early color photography and have been making color photographs from black and white film, using colored filters to make multiple negatives and then recombining them digitally to produce full color. All color photographs are basically constructed this way, either via the emulsion layers of color film or in the way that sensors separate wavelengths and then recombine them digitally to produce color. The technology obscures what is actually a very simple process, the idea of which has not changed in over a century. Walking back to these very fundamental beginnings is the closest to magic that I’ve ever found.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Vote Joe (front), 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Vote Joe (side), 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Are you reading anything?
There are stacks of books that I am trying to get through. During earlier covidtimes, I read parts of The History of Three-Color Photography (E.J. Wall) novels - Doxology (Nell Zink), books on the photographer Paul Outerbridge, who was a pioneer in tricolor technology and Sam McPheeter’s new book, Mutations, essays about hardcore punk.
Since the 2016 election, I’ve been more interested in reading about American history, trying to connect the dots of the past into an unknown future. Trying to get through These Truthsby Jill Lepore, but for me history can be a pretty slow slog. Over the last few years, trying to understand how our country elected the current president, I read Strangers in Their Own Land, White Trash, Hillbilly Elegy, Educated, and Fantasyland. In the later part of early covidtimes (I’m pretty sure it’s still earlycovid, but hard to say exactly…), after George Floyd was murdered and the streets erupted in protests, I reread parts of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States and Citizen, and Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. I’m ashamed of how much I don’t know or didn’t really truly comprehend about the Black experience in America. Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad, which I read at the beginning of covid, remained at the forefront of my mind as conversations about race and the postings of required reading started to pop up in the press and on social media. I’m bringing myself up to speed as best I can. I just started reading Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: Blackness and Being, which is beautifully written and incredibly poignant. I picked up Saturations in July, a new book in the Critical Anthologies of Art and Culture series published by MIT Press.
As a guilty pleasure, I devoured The End of October (Stephen Wright) this week. It’s the novel about a fictional pandemic that came out at the beginning of the actual pandemic. I’ve always loved pandemic fiction, and now is a great time for it. Novels in general have always been more impactful for me than non-fiction, even though I do read a lot of both. To start getting ready for teaching I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which is our official first-year book. My stack of unread and soon-to-be read books continues to grow.
Lisa Anne Auerbach, Vote Joe (back), 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.