There was no small talk at this group hang. Each artist in the BOOM Concepts at Radiant Hall residency show, debuting as Group Hang on June 8 at Emerald City in downtown Pittsburgh, dove deep in both their work and their statements in the accompanying artist talk.
Rachel Stachelrodt, Imani Batts, Sandra Gould Ford, and Rici Brockinson worked across textile, photography, collage, and multimedia, finding common ground while also allowing their individuality to shine through. The down-to-earth fluidity that the artists spoke about their practice with was striking. Even if they had said nothing, the work could stand on its own. But Group Hang allowed for interactive dialogue around the work on display in a refreshing way. There were no sterile, stagnant wall text-reliant art. Everything in the show felt alive.
Sandra Gould Ford Finds Strength in Storytelling
Enchanted Forest by Sandra Gould Ford is a standout piece, with gazelles and zebras leaping out of paisley and pearls. I saw echoes of both contemporary artists like Azzah Sultan and Candida Alvarez and the tapestry traditions of the medieval past like The Unicorn in Captivity. Ford took from her writing practice and interest in storytelling for her quilting, using cyclical images and motifs from Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Though the patterns feel fantastical, the whimsy and mysticism you feel from looking at them is universal. Ford’s Turtle Quilt sees three-dimensional turtles leaping out of the mirage of fabric.
But Ford’s own story is as compelling as any myth. She has had a career as a photojournalist, a lunchroom cashier, a typist at the Poison Control Center, and at a major television station. She was one of the few women to work at the Jones & Laughin steel mill in the South Side, balancing the daily grind of work as a steelworker with being a young mother. Ford recently launched Steel Genesis, a photo-memoir series about working in the mill that sees “iron and steel production as metaphors for human mettle.”
Too often, we portray Pittsburgh’s industrial history as manliness, like Steelers mascot Steely McBeam at the football game. Even Tim Kaulen’s industrial sculptures commemorating the South Side’s steel production history look masculine. But that doesn’t reflect reality. Over time, Ford has become interested in how different cultures’ mythology centers women. “It’s important to know that in other belief systems women are thought of as powerful,” she explained. Ford takes her creativity with the utmost seriousness, believing the humanities to be essential tools for shaping the world we want.
Get Ready with Imani Batts
Fashion designer Imani Batts runs a secondhand clothing business she calls Catherine Trendz. “Catherine was my aunt’s name, and my middle name. I wanted to separate my business from my actual name. But, ironically, people call me ‘Catherine’ now, which makes me feel like I’m in trouble with my family,” she said, laughing.
Batts called the collection she worked on during the residency “Get Ready with Me.” The beauty supply store, where you can buy barrettes, hair dye, liquid liner, and any manner of tonics. I bought my first makeup there, on the corner of 181 and Wadsworth as a teenager in New York. As a young woman, the cluster of products in the beauty supply store are a sort of guidebook to learning to come into your femininity. “I feel like I’ve lived so many lives just in the beauty supply store,” Batts said.
Batts often renders the clothes as a sort of anthropomorphic body of their own. “Play Time uses hair barrettes as an accessory over a jumpsuit, “Around the Way” is made of bamboo hoop earrings on top of denim. “Play Time” covers a thrifted jumpsuit with a rainbow of barrettes. “We Are History” collages magazine covers from Black history with bedazzled modpodge. It’s the joyful glitz of Y2K girlhood with the weight of history behind it.
“It was only through this residency I realized my work was art,” Batts said. Though it’s wearable, it tells stories, and her practice connects her to both her inner life and her faith. “I see being in the studio as God just comes into the space and uses me as a vessel,” she said.
Rachel Stachelrodt Believes “Art Will Find a Way”
Every morning, Rachel Stachelrodt makes a collage. Often, it’s on a 2 inch by 2 inch strip. Then, she pastes it into her calendar. “I call it ‘wake and make,’” she said. Like her contemporaries in Group Hang, Stachelrodt also makes beadwork and sculpture, but Group Hang featured her digital collages from her “Black and Heavenly Bodies” series. “They’re inspired by the way I see myself and the way I see Black women in general. I joke that there’s sometimes a ‘man for scale’ in my collages. When there is a man, they’re small. The women are titans,” she said.
Though the women in her collages are titanic, Stachelrodt struggles with imposter syndrome in the face of the constant appropriation and re-packaging of Black creativity. Her collages wrestle with the question of how to assert yourself when the world around you wants to take your narrative over. “’Ghetto’ is nothing but creativity that hasn’t been stolen yet,” she said, quoting the writer Nezariel Scott.
During the artist talk, Stachelrodt highlighted the value of having a space just to work. “I live in a studio apartment, and my creative practice had spilled into every aspect of my life,” she said. The BOOM Universe residency forced her to plan for when to make and to create more of a balance between her work and her life. At the conclusion of the talk, the topic turned to grassroots arts advocacy in Pittsburgh, and if there’s a way forward. Though Stachelrodt noted she’s from Franklin, hours outside of the city, she poignantly articulated that “art will always find a way” and that if marginalized people get the right resources to be creative, they will.
Rici Brockinson Feels Most Free When She Gets Lost
Before the BOOM Universe residency, Rici Brockinson was about to stop marking art altogether. “I hadn’t worked on anything in close to a year,” she shared. Brockinson is a teaching artist and photojournalist from the Hill District whose photography has taken her all over the world. She shared that for her, where she feels most in touch with her creativity is when she has the freedom to drive around and get away from her surroundings. But when she got to Radiant Hall, Brockinson she had to just “sit in the space” to finally allow herself some stillness.
She was in the process of starting a production company and moving away from her photography practice when she got the call about the BOOM Universe residency. She chose to show a series of photos of women that she took to process her own feelings about her identity.
“There was a time that I thought, as a Black girl growing up, I was unworthy to better myself because of where I came from—‘the Hill District’—an area and its occupants perceived negatively,” she wrote in the context of a video she took of Louise Batiste Nedege, a teacher and community leader in Haiti who trained herself in disaster relief. Nedege created a fire drill system for buildings in Haiti for better, quicker, safer evacuations.
Brockinson’s photography centers women of multiple generations in joy and despair, in rushes of joy or in moments of peace. It almost felt like a mirror to Group Hang itself, women of different ages and life stages together in conversation. “I want to speak to what Black women can do,” Brockinson said. “And that’s everything.”
Story by Emma Riva
Cover image: Heat Waves by Rachel Stachelrodt
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