Office Hours

Nora:
Hi guys, I'm Nora. You're listening to Office Hours and I'm here with Tamara Johnson. Tamara, could you introduce yourself please?

Tamara Johnson:
Sure. Hi, I'm Tamara Johnson. I am an assistant professor and the sculpture area head at Texas State University.

Nora:
And to start Office Hours, we always have an icebreaker.

Tamara Johnson:
Great.

Nora:
So you and I met over Zoom a couple of weeks ago and I noticed that you had a dog. I wanted to ask you what your dog's name was and where your favorite place to take your dog is.

Tamara Johnson:
Okay. My dog's name is Louie and he is five. He's a Aussie. His favorite place is probably just in any crevice, like the couch crevice, like in between my leg, my arm. He really just wants to be tucked into any little corner.

Nora:
Sweet.

Tamara Johnson:
Mostly, and if it's more inappropriate, he is more drawn to it.

Nora:
Are there any good places in San Marcos you take him?

Tamara Johnson:
We take him everywhere. We just kind of put him on the leash. We have a big loop in our neighborhood where we walk him around, but there's a lot of deer in the area where we live. We live really close to campus, about less than a mile. And we have a big backyard, so if there's often deer in the backyard, he's very excited to go chase them and watch them jump over the fence.

Nora:
Oh, cute.

Tamara Johnson:
Yeah, he's easily entertained, anywhere.

Nora:
You teach art here at Texas State, but my first question, before we get into that, I wanted to ask you where you're from and how the place that you're from shaped you.

Tamara Johnson:
Well, I grew up in Waco, Texas. I was born in 1984. So I kind of came into being as a child in the '90s in Waco, which was an interesting time. It's pretty Christian, it was very Christian, pretty conservative. So I think I was always kind of trying to find my place there. And I didn't really grow up religious, but a lot of my community was, so kind of trying to understand how to navigate around that. And I also really loved making art and there weren't a lot of examples of that around. So it was just kind of like trying to figure out how do I do this thing that I want to do, and I knew I had to maybe get out of Waco quickly.

Nora:
So you brought up art. I wanted to ask you, do you have a first memory of when you tried something artistic and you realized, oh, this feels right?

Tamara Johnson:
I mean, I think some of my earliest memory, and maybe this is just, you know how sometimes when you're younger, stories get retold to you and then they kind of become memories, I feel like this is one of those. My mom, we would always color in coloring books together. I was really into my coloring books as like a young tot. And I remember my mom would always do this thing where she would take the crayon and outline whatever the shape was with pressure. So it was like a darker line and then color it in with like lighter.
And I remember seeing that as a little kid thinking like, "This is the most incredible technique I've ever seen." And I tried to replicate that. So I think from an early age, I was always trying to kind of mimic or replicate. And I started out drawing and painting, and so I would just try to replicate other paintings that I saw, copy other drawings. I was very much like, if I can kind of imitate or mimic something that I'm really drawn to, this was like the quest at an early age. And then I think that I still kind of carry that on to now, but I think it was just that desire to mimic.

Nora:
So was your mom artistic then?

Tamara Johnson:
I mean, she's super creative. She's an artist in her own right, not necessarily in the visual arts. Her mom, my grandma, who we called mama, she did paintings and I own, own, I have some of them now. But they were always kind of like maybe something you would see in the lobby of a hotel, like in the ’80s, it was like a beach hotel. So I had kind of that like, "Oh, mama", she uses pastels and she paints. So that was kind of there. But yeah, my parents were very entrepreneurial and so they were a little skeptical that I really wanted to try to have a career in the arts.

Nora:
So let's talk about that. So you told me before filming that you're a first generation student. What was that like first realizing that art was what you wanted to study and pursue for the rest of your life? And then also, what was it like kind of convincing the people around you that it was a worthwhile feat?

Tamara Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, it was definitely, there's challenges there. I think any first gen student kind of has that. It's exciting, there's also pressure. And oftentimes the pressure is for you to really kind of elevate the family or do something that is going to kind of be this really incredible career and degree. And I really wanted to do art. And so my parents were worried and scared, I think, but they were very supportive. So it was kind of a funny combination of, I was supported, I didn't want to do anything else. I don't know where that drive came from, but I always was just like, "I will figure this out. There is a way to do it." Like I said, I didn't have a lot of examples, so I think I was always kind of seeking those out.
And my parents, I think they thought the highest level of an art degree was to draw caricatures at Six Flags. That was always the like, "What are you going to do? Draw characters at Six Flags?" And I thought, "Surely there's some other things to do with an art degree," so I had to get a business minor. And so I think my parents were hesitant, supportive, but it was really important for me to figure out how to do that and carve that out for myself.

Nora:
So you said that you got a business minor and you were having to kind of figure out how to pursue art in a career. So where did you find those avenues? Where did you figure out where you could fit in?

Tamara Johnson:
Well, the business degree at the time was really difficult. It was like accounting and finance. I got terrible grades. I was always trying to get extra credit. I remember I went to my, I think it was accounting and I'm not a math person. So I went to the office hours and I was like, "Look, can I do an extra credit art project?"

Nora:
For accounting?

Tamara Johnson:
For accounting. And he was like, "No." So I was always trying to be like, oh my God, it was kind of dragging me down, dragging my GPA down, but whatever. I finished it and at the time it didn't really feel like it was going to have any kind of relation or correlate to the things that I cared about in my visual arts path. But I think later as I got older, I graduated from UT and I lived in Austin for a while after I graduated and I had a studio there. And I kind of came to this crossroad where I was like, "How am I going to make this work?" I mean, that was right at 2007, 2008, so the economy kind of had that big crash. And Austin was like, if you weren't like a graphic designer, there weren't at that time at the level I was, I was kind of like, "What am I going to do?"
And so I knew it was going to have to be kind of this combination of taking my career to the next level. I was interested in teaching, so I thought, "I'll get my MFA. I'll go back to school." So I think kind of steering myself towards that, and then some of the things I did after my MFA kind of helped. Again too, it's like a crafted thing. There's freedom in that because there's not like a silver bullet. Even if you get your MFA, it's not like, and now you're a teacher. So there's freedom in that and that's very exciting, but it's also scary because you really have to make it up.

Nora:
So you brought up that you went to get your MFA and this was to kind of like further your possibilities for what you could do in your career. You studied in Rhode Island. Could you talk a little bit about Rhode Island and then how that experience and then specifically that place shaped your creative?

Tamara Johnson:
Yeah, so I knew I wanted to go to grad school. I had been out of undergrad for about three years. And I think it was a combination of going back to school, focusing really specifically on sculpture, finding programs that would support that. I was interested in teaching and I was ready to get out of Texas. So I applied to a lot of schools. I think I applied to like maybe eight or nine grad programs and had interviews and things and decided to go to RISD. So I packed up and I drove up with my parents to Rhode Island. It was very hillbilly. We had like my mattress tied to the top of my dad's truck and we made our way up there.
And yeah, it was a shock because if you know the geographical size of Rhode Island, it's very small compared to Texas. So I had this really large kind of geological shift of space and kind of time. And you could drive across the entire state in 30 minutes. Or like I lived in Providence, but when I went to the closest grocery store to get groceries, I was in Massachusetts. I was like in another state, which was just an eight minute drive to get groceries. So space was really interesting and different and it was a big adjustment. There was also just like a real winter, which I was not prepared for at all the first winter I was there. It was like the worst winter in a hundred years.
And so there was a lot of adjustments. And I think that definitely affected my work, affected my endurance and taught me that I needed to have a thick skin and be able to adjust and shift kind of on a dime if I wanted to make a career in the arts work.

Nora:
So you said that during this program, that's whenever you first really started exploring sculpture. What was your first project that was seen, that was... and then I know that you've also done public art projects. Was that at this time as well?

Tamara Johnson:
Yeah. So at UT, at the time, you didn't really have to specify a specific discipline or genre. It was just studio art. So after I had kind of done my basics, I really was like loving sculpture. I had incredible sculpture teachers. So I took a lot of sculpture and was making all kinds of crazy things at UT. And then when I got to RISD, I think I was really focused on, again, to this idea of putting sculptures in alternative spaces and outdoor spaces.
One project that was really kind of pivotal in a way, not that it was very good, but I think just taught me a lot about the direction that I wanted to keep going was there was this really beautiful scaffolding in downtown Providence, this big kind of square stock steel scaffolding that was holding up the facade of, I want to say it was an old bank. And there were plans to save the facade and then I think they were going to build a hotel or something. The space behind the facade was just an empty lot, and it was right on the street.
So it just was this really beautiful architectural kind of eyesore. People were like annoyed because it kind of like made traffic weird, but it was like just this beautiful thing, but it was holding up this other thing. I mean, it was very sculptural to me.
And so I had done a project, I had done a couple of projects that were kind of performative and I had like my blue Dickies worksuit that I would wear and I would create sculptures that looked like fragments of existing architecture. And then I would take them outside and I would like, I don't know, do stuff with them like I was at work, like I was on an eight to five job, like I was a construction worker or a contractor.
So I made this like fake steel beam out of foam and I want to say it was like 20 feet long and I put magnets on the end of it, like on this hinge. And so I carried it out there and I'm carrying it and it looks, I mean, to my whatever, I was pretty good at faux finishing. It looked very convincing. And so I carried it out there and I attached it to that scaffolding and stood there with it on my shoulder.

Nora:
For how long?

Tamara Johnson:
All day. I don't even know if I have this on my website, but the reaction of people walking by, concerned, confused, asking me questions, did I have people coming to help me? Because it looked like I was just holding up this gigantic steel beam. So I think that project did a lot for me.

Nora:
Why was that important to you? Why were you like, I need to go do this?

Tamara Johnson:
Why is anything important to me? I don't know. I mean, I think what I was really trying to do was like, how can I make sculpture have like an echo? How can I make sculpture look both magical, confusing, convincing, functional, non-functional, performative, connected to the body? I was trying to figure out a lot of the answers to a lot of these questions in grad school.

Nora:
Because I like what you said about how can I make it have an echo, so then whenever you came to Texas State, which could you tell us when that was? But then how did that influence your time here and your teaching and then also... well, yeah.

Tamara Johnson:
Okay. Spring 2024, almost a year and a half now I've been here. So I still feel like I'm pretty fresh. Before San Marcos, I was living in Dallas. Before Dallas, I was living in New York. So I moved to New York right after RISD, stayed there for a while. And I think that idea of always trying to figure out a way to make sculpture have that kind of echo, and the echo always had maybe a different kind of vibe or tone to it, is something that I still think about a lot. And whether that's something that's in the public art field or when I make things for galleries or museum shows or alternative spaces, I'm always thinking about how to kind of have the image or the object affect a broad audience and be able to kind of speak to people who don't necessarily know me or know my history, but can be very intrigued by an object.
And I think when I started teaching, I didn't start teaching. I graduated from grad school in 2012, I didn't start teaching with that degree that I went to school for to teach until 2018. And that was in Dallas at Southern Methodist University, SMU.

Nora:
What were you doing?

Tamara Johnson:
So I was living in New York and I had my own studio and I also worked for a sculptor who had a big studio in the city and learned a lot from him. I didn't know I was going to stay in New York as long as I did, again to like the winters, just things that were always just the battles of like being in a place that isn't naturally comfortable. But I think I was willing to stick with it because New York brought so many highs, like the highs and the amazing things that happen when you can kind of tough it out in New York are really incredible. And then the lows are like the worst thing you've ever experienced. It's like very emotional living there.
But yeah, I got a teaching job, moved back to Texas. And I think that idea of trying to, how can I like take the things that I really care about and kind of echo that into other people? Maybe that's brainwashing, but-

Nora:
Okay, I like that. I like that you said, how can I echo it into other people? So a couple of months ago now, I got to attend your first ever Fab Friday, which was the first time you've ever done it. And you're planning on doing another one in April?

Tamara Johnson:
Yeah, April 24.

Nora:
Okay. Can you tell the people listening what Fab Friday is, why you're doing it, and why they should come?

Tamara Johnson:
Okay. So Fab Friday, short for Fabrication Friday, is a new program that I started at Texas State to have something that existed outside of the classroom that could be accessible to all Texas State students, again to, I want everyone to love sculpture as much as I do. Brainwash, teaching, fine line, I don't know. Cult. I mean, I don't know. You can maybe read into it how you want.
But for me, it was like a way to say, let's do a short class workshop format, two to three hours based on a theme or material, and you could kind of come at any skill level as long as you're curious and interested. You could come and take this workshop, and it would be taught by either me or another one of the sculpture faculty or one of our technicians or student workers. So I did kind of our proof of concept last semester and it was great having you, and you made a really beautiful object.

Nora:
It was so much fun.

Tamara Johnson:
So yeah, this was like a way for me to reach out beyond the art and design school and beyond the studio classroom and sculpture classroom, but also to kind of like just have this informal space where people could kind of come and like have a hands-on demo or workshop. And get people interested in thinking about objects and sculpture and maybe interested in taking an art class as an elective. Because I think if you can kind of put yourself in the place where you're learning how to look at things and observe things and analyze things, describe things, that's something that you can kind of take into any field. So I think sometimes people think, "Oh, well, I can't draw. I'm not an artist." So I'm always trying to kind of show people that you can, like anybody can do, can make an object or make a sculpture.

Nora:
So you belong to the Committee of Public Art, which is COPA. How did you get involved in that and what do you do?

Tamara Johnson:
So COPA is a really great committee that is run by Nisa Barger. And what this committee does is, I don't know exactly how many people are in it, but it's a big group. It's, I want to say around 20 people. And it's faculty, staff, various admin, administrators at different levels. And we help select artists and commission possibilities for public art on Texas State campus, both in San Marcos and in Round Rock.
So it's awesome. We get to nominate artists that we would want to work with. Everybody puts those artists together, that list gets narrowed down, we vote, and then those selections get put up to the chancellor and the president. And eventually through all these different funnels and conversations, we select different artist projects. Sometimes they are existing works and sometimes they're new commissions.

Nora:
Are you working on anything right now?

Tamara Johnson:
Yes. Always, always working, Nora, always working. I have two things that I'm working on right now that have some deadlines in the future. One is a public art project at the Elisabet Ney Museum, so I'm working with Art and Public Places on that. And then I have a solo project at Women and Their Work, which is a gallery also located in Austin, in 2027 in about a year. So longer term scale, both Austin projects coming up.

Nora:
Okay. We've started at the beginning and we've kind of ended up with the present where you are now. Looking back, what advice would you give your freshman self?

Tamara Johnson:
Me as a freshman, I kind of had weird confidence in myself. So I think I would tell her to just keep going, compare to spare. So not to compare yourself to other people. I think in the art world, it's very hard to let jealousy and envy kind of make you jaded. You see your friends getting stuff or you see this person over here or that person and I'm not getting this, and it can feel very competitive at times. Sometimes competition can be healthy and good and motivating. Sometimes if you can let it, it can kind of really drag you down. And there's so many people working as artists now, there's only so many opportunities.
So it can be daunting, but I think sticking with the things that you care about, nobody is making the things in the way that you're making them. Even if you're making something or working in a similar style, you kind of have your own handwriting in a way. So I think I would tell her to just lean into that style that just kind of comes naturally and not be too worried about trying to chase what's popular.

Nora:
Well, thank you so much. This has been a lovely conversation. I really appreciate you being here.

Tamara Johnson:
Thanks, Nora.

Nora:
Thank you.