June Clark: the Toronto-based US artist exploring the American flag and its many meanings

June Clark left the US in 1968, the identical 12 months anti-war pupil protesters occupied Columbia College, and riots broke out in main cities together with Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, DC, following the assassination of the civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr. Clark’s husband on the time was fleeing navy conscription, and so, in a matter of 48 hours, she mentioned goodbye to her household and mates in New York’s Harlem neighbourhood to search out refuge in Canada.

Quickly after arriving, Clark began documenting her new residence by way of pictures, a observe she discovered on her personal as a result of girls weren’t allowed to make use of the darkroom on the College of Toronto, the place she labored in administration. By the Nineteen Seventies, Clark and a number of other different girls had based the Girls’s Images Co-operative, utilizing the basement darkrooms of Toronto’s Baldwin Avenue Gallery to provide their work, and assembly often to assist one another and organise their very own exhibitions. This spirit of self-sufficiency has been integral to Clark’s decades-long profession, particularly contemplating how gradual the broader artwork world has been to take up her work.

That has all modified in recent times, since Clark’s work was included within the Artwork Gallery of Ontario’s 2016 present Toronto: Tributes and Tributaries, 1971-89. Additional publicity got here when her artwork seller Daniel Faria offered her assemblage works and installations at worldwide artwork festivals. In 2021, Harlem Quilt—created throughout a 1996-97 residency on the Studio Museum in New York—was proven at Artwork Basel Miami Seashore. Final 12 months, Perseverance Suite—a brand new sequence utilizing farm and home instruments like irons, rolling pins and shovels—was exhibited at Frieze New York. This summer season, Clark has exhibitions at three main Toronto establishments: the Artwork Gallery of Ontario, the Energy Plant Modern Artwork Gallery and the Museum of Modern Artwork (Moca) Toronto. She has additionally been nominated for this 12 months’s Sobey Artwork Award, Canada’s highest honour for modern artists. Her work is now within the collections of the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, and the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, each in Washington, DC, and different main museums.

The Artwork Newspaper: It has been a busy few years for you. How does it really feel, getting this long-deserved recognition, not simply in Canada, however within the US?

June Clark: I’m nonetheless doing precisely what I’ve been doing for the previous 50 years—attempting to determine stuff and undergo my feelings and make the work that solutions these feelings. So, sure, it’s shocking that abruptly individuals are saying, “Oh, I like that” or “That is actually transferring.” However actually, for me within the studio, nothing has actually modified.

You as soon as mentioned, when talking about making Harlem Quilt and returning to your outdated neighbourhood after nearly 30 years, that nothing had modified and every part had modified. Do you assume that applies to your work too?

Issues have modified. Many, many, many extra eyes are on it and plenty of extra individuals are commenting about it. I believe by way of what I do and the way I see, I’m nonetheless strolling round selecting up rusted items of steel off the bottom and seeing how they’ll slot in to future works. I go searching and nonetheless see items [of ceramics or household tools] that my grandmother had, and I believe, “Oh, I might in all probability use that.”

Whenever you first began within the Nineteen Seventies, you had been doing principally pictures.

Sure, very straight documentary pictures, instructing myself to not crop within the darkroom, however to look at my body and get precisely what I need.

And also you taught your self as a result of girls weren’t allowed within the darkroom on the College of Toronto, which is astounding.

I don’t know what they thought we’d stand up to in there. And to be clear, I used to be taught and taught myself with a bunch of ladies who discovered collectively—some had been extra superior than others. I taught myself to see, after which, with the assistance of different girls, I taught myself find out how to put my knuckle in a tray of water and know if it’s 68°F [the optimal temperature for chemical development].

And it looks as if that form of hands-on schooling fed into the remainder of your profession. You see it within the Whispering Metropolis works, the place you might be straight manipulating how an etched plate will print by wiping ink away from sure areas.

Precisely. The factor is, it’s a tougher journey to show your self. However when you do it, you don’t overlook it. And once more, you’re not studying from another person and their technique; you be taught your individual technique, and it stays with you, nobody can ever take that away from you. So actually, not being allowed within the darkroom was a favour to us, in some methods. And it allowed me to accumulate lifelong mates.

The present on the Energy Plant has numerous private works that draw on recollections about your loved ones and your neighborhood. A few of these return to the Nineteen Nineties. What’s it like revisiting these older works?

After I’m within the studio, I’m a specific particular person. When the work is that outdated, I actually do have to succeed in again and determine who that particular person was who made that work. It’s extremely thrilling to revisit work that I did years and years in the past, and conjure the feelings and the individuals I used to be attempting to honour.

Going again to Harlem Quilt; on the time, my mom and my sister had been nonetheless alive. So that you get wound again into the household circle, and so they’re treating you such as you’re seven once more; my mom consistently requested me if my coat was heat sufficient throughout that 12 months. My mom additionally taught me find out how to sew as a child—she was a milliner—and when she went to the exhibition on the Studio Museum, she walked into the room with the Harlem Quilt and mentioned, “That’s not a quilt.” Whenever you return residence, it’s a must to bear in mind who you had been—or they make you bear in mind.

Harlem Quilt might not be a conventional quilt, however it shares numerous the needs of a quilt— recording a reminiscence or a convention by way of textiles. It additionally has a votive high quality to it. It’s nearly like strolling right into a chapel.

Sure, precisely, and it’s enveloping you. I’m more than happy with the best way it turned out within the sense that I actually needed to conjure the sensation of rising up there and being surrounded by the entire individuals who cared about me and needed me to be protected.

The Artwork Gallery of Ontario exhibition, Unrequited Love, centres on a sequence of flag works that you’ve been creating all through your profession.

It was once I was making the Ethical Disengagement piece, the place I’m sitting there, pulling threads, that I appeared round and noticed what number of flags I truly had performed. I needed to come to phrases with how I felt about that image, and the way that image had permeated my very being as a toddler. After which, with Colin Kaepernick [the American football player and civil rights activist who knelt during the national anthem in protest against racial injustice], I realised that folks actually weren’t understanding his gesture, the best way I understood it—that’s why I’ve devoted it to him. As a result of all of us grew up with our fingers each morning throughout our hearts, pledging allegiance to not our nation, to not our president, however to the flag. And what the flag meant to us. And the way it betrayed many people, within the sense that we didn’t discover ourselves within the flag.

As an American-born artist, who left the nation throughout a troublesome interval in historical past, and who has spent most of your grownup life exterior the US, how has your notion of American identification modified over time?

I wouldn’t say it has modified. America has modified. I nonetheless really feel very, very related to the soil there, which in fact is why I do these flags and why I make this work. I really like the nation I grew up in. I don’t love the nation that has been taken over by mean-spirited individuals. That’s an issue.

Do you assume the American flag is one thing you’ll maintain returning to?

I by no means know. I believed that I used to be completed with the Perseverance Suite, however there are a number of new items I’m doing now. I by no means know concerning the Homage items, that might proceed. You simply by no means know what occurs if you go into the studio—I can go in and anticipate to work on one piece, however one other piece rises to the floor and takes my consideration.

• Better Toronto Artwork 2024: Triennial Exhibition, Museum of Modern Artwork Toronto, till 28 July

• June Clark: Witness, Energy Plant Modern Artwork Gallery, Toronto, till 11 August

• June Clark: Unrequited Love, Artwork Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, till 5 January 2025

Biography

Born: 1941, Harlem, New York

Lives and works: Toronto, Canada

Schooling: 1988, BFA, York College, Toronto; 1990, MFA, York College, Toronto

Key Exhibits: 1990, Mnemosyne, Mercer Union, Toronto; 1994, Koffler Gallery, North York, Ontario; 1997, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; 2000, Girls’s Artwork Useful resource Centre, Toronto; 2018, Artwork Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; 2022-23, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Artwork, Sarasota, Florida

Represented by: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto