SOMA Living June 2022

ARTIST OF THE MONTH

BARBARA BICKART

Barbara Bickart is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and activist and is the founder of Fire In the Belly Artmaking. Please describe your work, your medium/media, and your tools.

I am passionate about creating spaces where people of all ages come together to make process-based art that’s an expression of who they are and what they care about in one way or another. I’ve spent my career doing this through making project-based work that engages communities of people and ideas of social justice, through teaching, as well as making my own interdisciplinary work which includes video installations, video-performance and, in recent years, working on a smaller scale in mixed media with paper, gouache, water color, graphite, salt and eggshells. Plus, I play and make work alongside my Fire in the Belly Artmaking I founded Fire in the Belly Artmaking in 2019 and then began to offer workshops regularly at the beginning of the pandemic, when many families were eager for their children to have artmaking opportunities with other kids. I teach the workshops out of my studio, where I have a range of materials at my fingertips, allowing me to generate a broad range of curricular offerings. Once the content and framework for the workshop is introduced, everyone is working at their own pace, developing their own vision. I am in the role of mentor and guide, just as when working with undergraduate and graduate students who have done independent studies with me. At the end of every workshop session with the student-artists, we set up a gallery and invite parents and families to come see the work and hear the artists give a talk about their work. No matter how young the artists, they always have something to share about what they learned or did in any particular piece of work. I love working with students to teach them that being an artist is about a way of thinking and learning to see, as much as it’s about learning to manipulate materials and to transform them from one thing into something else. What is your process of creation? I have always felt that art is a conversation and that making art is about beginning a conversation – sometimes I am in conversation with myself and, when working on collaborative, community-based projects, with many others. Sometimes I start a piece or a project with a big idea or a big question I have that I want to explore and dig into deeply through the process of making. I start the action of making with whatever I’m most drawn to – sometimes that’s about putting color on a surface or tearing paper or just getting my hands moving with a graphite stick or painting over an old photograph. It’s through the act of getting my hands moving that I’m able to bump my internal editor out of the way and to immerse myself in the flow of my practice without being self-conscious. This is perhaps a long way of saying that my process is very organic. And this is the way I teach, working to support students to move past their internal editors and judges, so that they too can discover new aspects of their creative voices that they didn’t know were there. What other artists do you draw inspiration from or are you interested in? Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell – both process-based artists. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the work of Mark Bradford and his layers and layers of torn paper. I love the lyrical video work of Mona Hatoum, the simplified forms and colors of Milton Avery, Jennifer Packer’s political sassiness with beauty that knocks you out, Calder’s playfulness always. And I’m inspired by Simone Leigh’s power - what she’s celebrating and the range of mediums she works in. Have you always wanted to be an artist? Yes. I have always been obsessed with making things. I love to invent with materials. making all manner of things - making things alone and making things in collaboration with other people has always been my way of tapping into the joy of being alive and finding my voice, in response to the world we’re living in. students in many different mediums. Tell us more about Fire in the Belly!

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JUNE 2022 | SOMA LIVING 11

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