ArtCrawl Harlem returns to Governors Island this summer with a second artists residency program where Michael Obele, Mario Joyce, and Melissa Sutherland Moss will take turns working from a historic house at Nolan Park. Earlier this month, I visited with the season’s second artist in residence, Mario Joyce, as he was settling into his new temporary studio space.
Joyce, who will be working on Governors Island from July 24 through September 3, is so inspired by his new surroundings that he had already created a dozen works just two weeks into his residency. “It’s been so amazing,” he says of his time on the Island. “I have water behind me and then I have a big lawn and a lot of elements that remind me of the place I grew up, but I’m in this urban space.” His recent works, filled with figures enjoying the great outdoors, radiate with vitality and confidence.
On the first day of his residency, Joyce was inspired by a Black family relaxing on the lawn in front of the ArtCrawl Harlem house. “I started sketching them and that’s how the body of work started being developed. It’s been fun to watch [my work] transition as I discover new things about the space.” For the first time, he’s introduced soft pinks into his palette. “I think as I explore Black joy, it [represents] a sweetness, an innocence, and a youth that I’m bringing to the work,” he says. “I really love pink, juicy lips—like when I was a kid eating a popsicle—that summertime youth and unadulterated joy,” he adds.
Growing Up in the Heartland
Born in Columbus, Ohio to a young single mother Joyce moved with his mother, grandmother, and siblings to a farm in rural Ohio when he was five. “It was literally in the middle of nowhere,” he recalls. “It was really hard. We were the only Black family, and as a queer Black boy in that type of space, I was really alone. I was bullied mercilessly every single day. Art, and being in the fields and crops, became part of my escape…so I associate crops, soil, and nature to peacefulness and breaking things down, unpacking things, unpacking trauma specifically.”
Early on, Joyce’s grandmother provided him with creative outlets, coloring books, watercolors, and art supplies. “She bought me all the materials that I needed. She really fueled that,” he remembers fondly. Joyce started using art to express himself. “It became my language. It was the way I communicated, drawing and creating a narrative within,” he continues. “I would talk it out. As I was drawing the figures I was creating this dialogue between the characters. I would talk to the characters. It was like playing with dolls, but I would draw it. I’ve always kept that within my work.”
Joyce continues that inner dialogue today when he works on his lush, impassioned paintings that illustrate the Black experience. “When I am putting paint on the canvas, I’m really moving it around like a language. I’m verbalizing whatever I’m working through. I’m telling the story with the brush stroke…. I love slapping on the oil paint and dragging it through and mixing the colors on the canvas instead of on a palette. That’s how it comes across so excitable, [because] I’m actively speaking. It’s an internal dialogue that comes through my hand. I really give myself that freedom to tell the story,” he explains.
His evocative paintings are punctuated with vivid patterns and images seamlessly collaged into the scenes. Joyce incorporates “vintage collage materials specifically between 1965 and 1999” from books or old copies of Reader’s Digest and National Geographic, onto his canvases. “I do that for two reasons. I love the ink quality, it’s very matte, it’s very ‘60s,” he notes, adding that the specific timeframe references his grandfathers’ generation. “It’s kind of like when they were my age and coming of age and going through the same things.”
Exploring His Roots
Joyce has been investigating his family tree since childhood, and genealogy plays an integral role in his artwork. “I research my family history and I have since I was ten years old. It was a part of breaking down traumatic experience, like who am I? Why do I look this way? The history of my own skin and DNA.”
As a child, his grandmother regularly brought him to the library where he would pore over the genealogical records. “I would look for the names of our family and I would interview aunts and uncles in other states,” he said. “I learned a lot before I was even 12 years old. I have all those records still.”
Complementing the information he gathered from the library and relatives, Joyce also drew family photographs, copying pictures he borrowed from his great-grandmother. “After Alex Haley created the movie Roots, [my great-grandmother] created a little study and filled it with photos of our ancestors,” he says. “I would borrow them from her—I had to promise to give them back—and I would draw them. I would practice drawing my ancestors, the shapes of their faces and their noses. That comes into my practice today because as you can see…every Black male figure, is me. I’m the model…. I manipulate the physical characteristics to make alter egos of myself and they represent specific ancestors within my lineage.”
Placing his male ancestors into a contemporary context in his paintings, Joyce examines the parallels between their lives and his own. He tries to uncover “What has changed within my life?” and “What has changed within the Black experience in America?” The answers are often disappointing. “Sadly, I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t think it’s that much, so it’s my mission to closely examine what being Black in America looks like today, right now, by looking in our past and in our DNA, which is not in history books. It’s all in our ancestry, in our grandparents’ heads, and it needs to be documented.”
Other themes that recur in Joyce’s work include vast, jewel-toned skies. “I love the sky because I grew up in the Midwest,” he says, where “you could see for miles…. It was all big sky. They were so beautiful and ever evolving. I can just keep going and keep painting them forever. It was freedom.”
Trees also figure prominently on his canvases “because I grew up with trees,” he explains. [They were] such a part of my background and I love them. I’m very comfortable with them, but also, it’s that rooted aspect. I always do my figures barefoot because I want them connected to the earth, like a free energy flow from the soles of their feet to the ancient soil.”
It was a poignant work by Joyce featuring a figure amid a forest of trees that first caught the eye of ArtCrawl Executive Director Ulysses Williams. Entitled Strange Fruit, the artist created the painting in response to the 2016 election. “When Trump got into office I was just so shocked,” Joyce recalls. “It shifted my work to something that was a little passive and straight into activism. I started with a very familiar image of a Black man being lynched and below him was a crowd that was joyously celebrating it at a picnic.”
After ruminating on the image, Joyce decided to change the narrative. “I eliminated the crowd. I took that… very seen image of a Black man hanging in the trees and I wanted to reclaim that. What I wanted to do with that was make it ours again and make that represent something different.”
Joyce recalled a hateful incident from childhood that helped influence this work. “I’ll never forget on a bus ride, I was very, very little and new to the space and it was such a rural school, you rode on the bus with high school kids,” he reflected. “There was a high school kid that sat in front of me. The windows were fogged up…and he drew a lynched man on the window and peered back at me and laughed. I knew right then…that was a way to intimidate us as Black kids…. So that image has always been, since I was five, it has always been ingrained in my mind as fear and ‘you’re less than,’ so I had to take that back.”
He revised Strange Fruit (above) not to show the figure as a victim but to honor him as a martyr. “I painted the same image but I had him ascending out of the trees and rising above,” Joyce notes. The painting illustrates “this is what we come from, something greater,” Joyce says of the moving work. “We are not reduced to being lynched in the woods. We’re something special.”
Putting Down Roots in NYC
Joyce made the big move to New York City with his husband eight years ago. “We just wanted to feel comfortable,” he says of their relocation. “I wanted to hold his hand in public. I wanted to kiss him in public…. Just to feel comfortable in your own skin is something that I don’t take for granted because I didn’t always have it.”
Sexuality and religion are themes Joyce also addresses in his deeply personal artwork. Growing up in rural Ohio, Joyce’s grandmother raised him as a Jehovah’s Witness. “My personality—growing up queer and Black—[the church] just didn’t really make sense for me,” he says. “It was further suppressing me…. It was just like you’re not supposed to be you, so be better and try to be someone else. I tried and I tried but it just didn’t work out.” Joyce decided to leave the church at 15. “It just wasn’t for me and I knew it. Some things just didn’t make sense…. I didn’t fit in to what they needed me to be.”
Today, Joyce is a certified genealogist through Boston University’s Genealogy Studies Program and is currently delving into his father’s lineage since his dad and mother recently “rekindled their relationship from when they were teenagers.” Joyce explains that they “never really fell out of love and finally made it work.” Older and wiser, they married three years ago, allowing Joyce to build a relationship with his father. “It just keeps evolving, the story keeps going,” he says of his family history.
Joyce’s paternal side of the family hail from the Deep South in Alabama, “what’s called the Black Belt,” according to the artist, where he says investigating his roots is challenging. “When I do genealogical research in the South, it is really hard...I don’t think they destroyed records—they just didn’t care about Black people,” he says, so record keeping was lax.
When studying his mother’s roots in North Carolina and Virginia, he discovered that some of her ancestors were slaves but “most of them were free people of color,” Joyce says. “I can only trace those roots back to 1660 because they weren’t really slaves, they were indentured servants, so they got their freedom after a lifetime of labor and then they bought land. These are things that I don’t think people know. They don’t know that there are African Americans who have been free since the 1660s,” he notes.
Each day, as Joyce travels via ferry to Governors Island, he is reminded of the country’s history of slavery. The pier in lower Manhattan where he catches the ferry “sold Black bodies” centuries ago, he adds. “And I think about the fact that I’m on a ferry with this amazing opportunity as an artist. This isn’t something that my ancestors would have been able to do. They would have been on the auction block.”
Art and Activism
Boundaries & Connections: Art and Activism is the theme of this year’s ArtCrawl Harlem residency. “I think just by being Black and alive in America is its own activism. Just mentally surviving.” Joyce says when asked how he plans to interpret the theme. “I’m exploring the soil and how deep and rich that is [as well as] the genealogy of the soil that Black Americans worked through the generations and how I grew up.”
ArtCrawl Harlem Executive Director Ulysses Williams is pleasantly surprised with the direction that the artists in residence are taking. “In my head I’m thinking they’re going to be doing stories about people in the street and things like that,” he said. “What’s so interesting is that [Joyce] along with Michael Obele [this year’s first artist in residence]—they decided to honor people with the images that they’re creating, remember people…leave a legacy along with the story. Whatever I was thinking, they totally wiped the slate and just made it so personal.”
“As our generation, we’re sick of it,” Joyce added. “We’re sick of seeing these classic images of protests…we keep seeing them and we’re not getting what we need fast enough. We’re just people. We’re just Americans. This isn’t that hard and yet it’s such a challenge.”
“But I have to smile. I have to feel joy. That is a huge part of being Black,” he continues. “I don’t sit around [with my family] and talk about how sad I am about being Black in America. We laugh. We eat. It’s very real. It’s a real existence. We’re just people like everybody else in this country, and I want to show that, but I also want you to know this is what happened…and if it makes you uncomfortable, maybe think about that.”
Hyper-realist portraitist Michael Obele preceded Joyce at ArtCrawl Harlem’s Governors Island residency this summer. Following Joyce’s residency at Nolan Park, multidisciplinary artist Melissa Sutherland Moss will work from the house September 3 through October 17. Works by all three artists will be exhibited at the house during the last two weeks of October.
Selected by a five-person jury, the three artists represent the diversity of the Black experience in America. “They all represent a certain portion of the diaspora,” Williams says, noting that Joyce hails from Ohio, Obele from Lagos, Nigeria, and Sutherland Moss has roots in Costa Rica.
“We got along immediately,” Joyce notes of the tight-knit group. “We are all so supportive. It was like a brother- and sisterhood immediately.”
Be sure to visit the ArtCrawl Harlem 2021 Artist Residency house at 4B Nolan Park before Governors Island closes for the season on October 31. Learn more about ArtCrawl Harlem’s 2021 Artist Residency Program and the three artists at artcrawlharlem.org.
Read about ArtCrawl Harlem's inaugural 2020 Artist Residency at Governors Island here.
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