A Rolling Conversation with Steve Prince
Hello, my name is Steve Prince and I'm a visual artist living here in Williamsburg, Virginia. And I primarily do drawing and printmaking as my media. The works that I've, I'm put into the show here at Lee Matney Gallery. It was, has been some of my, my relief work in terms of linoleum cuts and woodcuts. And it's a process that I started when I was in undergrad at a University of Louisiana. And then I continued on into grad school and I went to Michigan State, and it's one of the processes that I've done for the bulk of my career. And I chose it because of the, the, the meaning different possibilities in terms of the marks and mark making that you can make with the medium. But I also chose because I had the ability to make multiples I can send out and disseminate to multiple people.
My work at its core has, is very much fixated upon messages or stories. It's fixated on history and the ways in which I'm able to take the stories around me and encapsulate them within the work to not just make a social commentary, but also to begin to use the work as a means to speak about this human condition and basically point us in a direction where I think that we can collectively go beyond the constraints of stereotypes of the ways in which these constructions of black and whiteness has been made and the damaging affects upon in terms of just the repercussions of slavery and, and what this has done to our, not only our nation, but what what has it done to our planet. So my work is very much fixated upon speaking about those past ills but also pointed us towards a more collective and more unified body.
Steve Prince
Sow, 2020
Linoleum cut
84 × 36 in | 213.4 × 91.4 cm
Edition of 1 + 1AP.
Steve Prince, Hallelujah Anyhow, 2021, Linoleum, 36 × 24 in | 91.4 × 61 cm, Edition of 40.
So I think about this idea of the kitchen table often, and I think about the privacy of that in terms of people's homes and in what takes place there. It is a space that is necessary in terms of our everyday growth because we need food to live by, but it's also a site where stories are shared, where history is shared, stories that shape us stories that inspire us, stories that many times may make us angry, but but ultimately it's a space where we, we really live down our hair, where we really are speaking from a casual tone and is not one, is so fixated upon this kind of constructed narrative voice that we purport to the world. So I'm really pushing forward, how can we create more spaces of authenticity where we can share and and then really look at each other through the lens of being a family and being one communal body.
The piece, True Vine that I put into the exhibition it was an image that I created when I was in residence at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. And I was there during the pandemic, and it was a really, you know, beautiful time, but also a very challenging time before our, for our nation, for our world. And so I was on the campus, they put me up in a trustee house by myself, and I would walk across campus about two blocks away, and I would carve at this piece, and I did it in about a week. And so I laid it on top of a table and I'd just be in the carve at this piece, you know, every day for about three days. And then the porn completion of it you know, the art department, you know, printed the piece and printed a small edition off of the block.
But one of the things that I did before I got there, you know, I did my research about the community and one thing I looked at was checking out the black community that was there, and I wanted to learn more about it. And there was a street called Vine Street that was in the community. And Vine Street was a site where it was like the black mecca, you know, it was where the barbershop, the beauty salon the convenience store, the movie theater you know, all those different things that are, that make up the community that everyone goes to, the tributaries to. And so that was at, that was the main strip in that particular community. And I think about communities all across the country. There is these main spaces where it may be the black community or the Latino community, or the Italian community, and they attend the cluster there.
And and then they kind of, they kind of create a world within the world. And so that's one of the things that I researched about the aerial. And so I began, I wanted to create a piece that paid homage to that, but also look back that looked at the present, but also looked forward. And if you interrogate that piece, you'll note that on, on the right hand side there's a Vine Street sign. And right below it you'll see a series of musicians that were playing a song back in the 1940s, I believe. And it was called Vine Street Rag, also known as Vine Street Drag. And those musicians are playing, and one of the musicians has a one of those tub basins that you will watch clothes in, and he has a pole from the bottom and he's playing a bass, and the musicians are playing ILO Jam, and you can find the song I am referencing.
And I thought about the foundations of hip hop. And hip hop has taken those songs from the past and recycling and making them into the present. So they're taking the old and made it new. And so I have this guy on the wheels of steel, and he's mixing. He has a creative albums down beneath the table, but beneath the crate, I also have the floorboards in the room. And they have bodies on the tops of those floorboards alluding to the transplanting slavery. One of those boards is lifting up and it's lifting up in such a way that is, it's meandering of like a spirit and has a spirit of love of heart on its body. And it's wrapping around and it's conspicuously creating the shine of a cross on the pole. And there's a little feather, not a feather, but a little leaf that's stemming out the side of the body.
And that leaf is alluding to the idea that it's the true vine. And if you think about Christ's first miracle, it was his miracle of turning water into wine. He was the true vine, and that his blood was, the, was, was the, was the answer to the, the, the spiritual answer that cracked open the, the whole foundation of Christianity. And so in that image, as I move, as you move through it, you also see there's a couple dancing back and forth, and it embodies I moving in such a way. It's like a calm response. It's a very sensual dance that they're doing between them. As you see the woman's bodies pushing forward, the male's body's pushing back and he's gonna recall and come back at her again, and you'll see her, you know, her leg is kicked out and his legs are kicked out, and they're kind of intertwined as if they're kind of almost making a pretzel like configuration.
If you look at his hand in his right hand, that's casting behind him, he has a handkerchief in it and is alluding to my upbringing in New Orleans. When you see the white handkerchief, the white handkerchief has a symbol of the Holy Spirit. And the way it happens is, is that in the black community it got expensive for them to have doves released at their funerals. And typically they're released three doves and one will represent the God, the follow. So in the Holy Spirit at weddings, they'll release one dove because it was symbolic of the two becoming one. And so that idea, like I say, got expensive, so it got translated into a white handkerchief. So you see them dancing with the white handkerchief and wheeling them around. That white handkerchief, in essence is a dove and it's embodied within them in their movement.
And so if you look at the very edge of that handkerchief in his hand, it actually, I made it look like a bird beak or bird's head off the edge of the handkerchief. And then if you keep moving behind them to the left, you'll see a couples dancing and a two people dancing represent again, the bodies as protests as you see signs coming emanate from their hands. And their movement is about resistance to conformity, resistance to those kinds of construction. And it's this idea that our bodies resist conformity. And the way in which we move goes against these constructions that try to put us within the box and beneath their feet, you'll see that there's an arc of a globe. On the right side is a continent of Africa. Moving to the left is North America and South America and the Caribbean is on top of the globe in which you're dancing on.
And so I'm just speaking again of the global effects of that vine street, the global effects of that true vine, the global effects of that v and connectedness. And if you look very carefully, you'll note that every single thing inside the composition is touching the next thing. It's all connected. And that, again, speaks of that true vine and the interwoven or interwoven nature of the composition that I was trying to put across to my viewers. So it's again, what my, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to tell these stories. I'm trying to tell a story that's specific, but yet universal specific in terms. It speaks a lot about my upbringing, but it also speaks of way in which we all have been raised and that we all can find some space, some wrinkle, some facet that ties to our lives, that connects us. It doesn't matter who you are because we all live in this human experience.