CORNER STORE COLUMN

The Trees Allow Me to Be Among Them

An Interview with Gloria Klaiman

by Sara Mae Henke

Gloria Klaiman is a mixed media artist and member at Da Vinci. She had a piece recently in a show I curated at CultureWorks, a collaged portrait called Women, Life, Freedom, with a bold red background. Spending time with Gloria is immediately soothing. We discussed spirituality, feminist rage, and art as medicine in times of grief.

“When you’re young, you think oh it should just come out perfect! I should write a few paragraphs and that should be sterling! Of course we all know it does not work that way! At all.”

SM: In your writing, you talk about the idiosyncratic in the world. Could you give some specific examples of the idiosyncratic that you’ve harnessed to make these pieces?

GK: I do tend to like things that are a little different, askew, not rigid or regular or expected. So as you’ve seen I work with mixed media and I gather different materials, sea glass, stone, canvas that’s cut up or fabric. I like the textures and colors in the world. I appreciate people and environments that are not canned, I guess working against the algorithms of the world you could say.

SM: I love that. I think you’re starting to speak to this a little bit, but you mentioned the role of the spiritual in your work, which resonated with me personally, but I think that’s something that is a generative place to make work from, for a lot of people. The spiritual to me feels inextricable from, like you say, the natural world, the world around you “songs, dreams, ideas, fears, and aspirations of the people around us.” You talked about that. What is your definition of, or relationship with spirituality and how does that inform your work?

GK: My view of the world is interconnected. It’s all interwoven. We’re all cells and molecules and, I’m not a scientist, but thoughts and emotions and perceptions permeate everything. If I’m walking in a wooded area, and there are trees, I’m so graced by the presence of the trees, and feel like they’re infused with all this life, and I’m sort of this peripheral thing. It’s not like, “I’m there to see the trees,” the trees are allowing me to be among them! Everything is infused with life and really, this holiness, and I don’t mean that in any particular religious way, any sect or religion, I just feel that everything is so precious and sacred. It’s a privilege, if I can even try to evoke some of that, and I don’t even think I succeed at that, but just to try and look for that and hint at it, I try to do.

“I was just so angry, and I was far from alone in that.”

SM: That’s really cool, it’s always nice to hear about peoples’ processes, and it sounds like [collage] is part of the initial making process, and it also makes me think about editing.

GK: You took the words right out of my mouth! Because I also am a writer. You could write something and you end up going someplace you didn’t plan to go. And then going back and revising and revising and crossing everything out. It’s the same thought process. In the beginning of writing or doing art, when you’re young, you think oh it should just come out perfect! I should write a few paragraphs and that should be sterling! Of course we all know it does not work that way! At all. And then it’s this tightness of, oh you could keep revising one sentence and never write the second sentence. I think I’ve become looser in accepting that process. The writing helped me accept it in visual art and vice versa. I always did visual art but not in a concentrated way. When I was younger I didn’t have the time and I felt imposter syndrome. I think I was more playful because I didn’t feel like I had as much at stake, but over time I realized in all kinds of art forms, it’s good to just be open and make mistakes. The way I started doing collage was, but I would take big sheets of Japanese paper and I would wash them faintly with watercolor, I would use Sumi ink to just make marks, and sometimes this whole big sheet of paper, I would say this is a disaster, but this one corner I would say, oh I really like that, so I’d cut it out.

SM: It also sounds like it’s kind of tuning your attention, and it makes you more observant to have started collaging. In a lot of your work, the piece in CultureWorks recently, you portray women through collage. What is the role of gender in your work, and when you’re doing portraiture what are you hoping to get across?

GK: I have to say first I don’t draw very well. I’m not a great draftsperson. I use collage a lot because that’s the way I can try and get as close as I want to. I’m trying to get across a lot of feminist ideas, I have a lot of anger. I have this one big head in the catalog, it was in the show at Da Vinci about a year ago, it’s in a show at City Hall right now. A friend of mine put it together, she’s great at networking. It was a show about gender diversity. So I had these three figures which were pretty abstract, the basic outline was the universal sign for male and female in front of restrooms. So part of it was just being cynical around all this nonsense about unisex bathrooms, like oh the end of the world is coming. So one was the male figure, one was in transition, half a skirt half not, and the last one was just female. So those three and this big women I made right after the DOJ decision, I got this big piece of wood and was going crazy because I was just so angry, and I was far from alone in that. They asked me to talk about it, and you know it’s all interconnected to me, it’s about having autonomy and rights and rights to identity, and rights to be who they are and how they are in the world. This whole idea of oppressing people, I will tell you how to live in the world, I will tell you what rights you have, it’s all one big picture to me. And anybody who’s oppressing anybody, you know it’s all connected.

“Really art has been… You just go into another world. You go into another place.”

SM: I had initially planned this to be my first question, but I feel like we’re talking about a political consciousness. Am I right that you came from a background in medical publications?

GK: Yes!

SM: Okay, so, do you feel like you make art at all in reaction to that career, or in response to that work. How does that inform the art that you make now?

GK: When I was young I wanted to work in publishing. I studied journalism in the early 70s. It was the time of Watergate. Pretty early on I realized I’m not built to like investigate people and ask them…

SM: …the hard-hitting questions!

GK: Exactly! Investigate crime or knock on somebody's door and say your relative was just squashed in the street and how do you feel about it. I always love books, I always love writing, the physicality of that. That was the case way back when. I wasn’t a graphic artist or designer but I worked closely with people who did that, it’s part of the editorial process. In Philadelphia, the biggest places you could find employment in publishing is in medicine and science. There were a couple really big medical publishers in the city, and they used to all be in Washington Square, and people used to go back and forth across the square to try and get another $50. It’s like any other little subculture. Everybody knew each other. So I wound up working a lot in medical publishing and then I worked for an organization of physicians. I learned a lot about medicine just from reading about the stuff, textbooks, monographs. And then I worked for a big international company, that was like the devil. Corporate America. So first of all, part of it was, I was very resistant to that whole culture, where people aren’t treated as people. They would lay off whole departments because there was a new CEO and the budget was changing, you know all that stuff we all know about. I liked the work I was doing and the people I was working with. Especially in the 80s it was so patriarchal, it was so male centered and male powered and conservative. I was shocked. I didn’t know anything about medicine or the medical establishment, that they were fighting against insurance and aspects of medicare to expand. You think, these are people who are healing people, they probably should want to be fighting for all these things.. But not only were there white men in charge, much more so than today, but the way women were treated, I mean they still are today, we know about the mortality rates for giving birth especially for Black women. Women were treated like, what do they know? They didn’t even do clinical trials on women. The anatomy was different, so they didn’t try cardiac medicine on women. They just extrapolated from mens’ studies and adjusted dosage because women’s bodies are smaller, but it's different [in every aspect.] So that was really eye-opening to me and really infuriating. There’s been a lot of progress but still we’re not where we should be. So that just really helped me all together see in society, things people took for granted, that this is just the way it is.

SM: It sounds like there was a good rage woken up in you from this, and so maybe that’s where some of the art comes from?

GK: Yes, that’s very perceptive of you, I would say that’s true.

SM: Well one last sweet question, what has been healing for you lately? What has been good medicine for you lately?

GK: Well that’s a pertinent question. It’s been a hard year for me personally. My husband passed away in May after we had been together 50 years. 

SM: I’m so sorry.

GK: Well I’ve been very fortunate, because people like you, people at Da Vinci, friends, family have been wonderful, and really art has been… I don’t know what I would do without that. It’s such a great outlet, but also you just go into another world. You go into another place. Somebody can be next to you and you don’t even realize they’re here talking. You have no idea what they’re saying. They could be talking about you. So that has been incredibly healing, and incredibly wonderful. I feel lucky to have that.

SM: Oh, Gloria it’s been so nice to talk with you.

GK: It’s so good that you’re here!

SM: It’s good to be here. 

Woman, Life, Freedom will be on view until March 14 at the CultureWorks co-working office space at 13th and Walnut. The work hangs alongside archival Philadelphia history and architecture in the office space, conference room, and break out spaces.

If you have questions about dvaa’s SHOP, please direct them to our Executive Assistant Sara Mae Henke at saramae@davinciartalliance.org

Sara Mae Henke (They/Them) is a genderqueer writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. Their creative writing and research orbits around horror and the surreal as it contextualizes gender. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Scholar and 2022 Tinhouse Summer Writing Workshops alum. Recently, they were a finalist for the Loraine Williams Prize and have work forthcoming or published in Passages North, the Georgia Review, the Offing, and FENCE. They write music as The Noisy and received their MFA from UT Knoxville. They are currently an Adjunct English Professor at Drexel and an Executive Assistant at Da Vinci Art Alliance.