Perseverance Sweet

The Art of June Clark

In 1996 June Clark returned to her birthplace to do a residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem. She had lived in Toronto for 29 years, and while she regularly visited New York during that period, she hadn’t lived in Harlem for any extended length of time. Her year-long artist-in-residency in 1996–97 changed that. Clark has always used photography as a way of understanding where she is, so when she first arrived in Toronto she walked around taking photographs she hoped would provide familiar faces and gestures. She used the same process in Harlem but with a signicant difference. In Harlem she walked between 110th and 168th streets and took pictures where the camera wasn’t at her eye but at her hip. She didn’t know what the images would look like until they were processed. Her intention was to avoid any sense of romanticization. “It was me putting my feet on that soil and trying to understand where I was and how it was affecting me to return after so many years,” she says in the following interview. “My work with a camera had trained me to see in frames and I didn’t want to do that. I needed to render Harlem in a way that made it a rediscovery.” What resulted was a work called Harlem Quilt, a room-sized installation of over 300 images that were photo-transferred onto fragments of material from clothes she had purchased in a local Salvation Army store. Each image-and-swatch combination is lit from the top by a light bulb; the effect is a portrait of a neighbourhood that, for all of its secular content, is inescapably reminiscent of a religious shrine. It addresses a central question for Clark: What is memory and how do we construct it?

In 1997 she also made a sculpture that used the Stars and Stripes as its subject and material. From her childhood she had been told that the American ag was an enduring symbol of America’s power and fairness. By the time she was an adult she had thoroughly questioned that understanding, and her relationship with the flag had moved from reverence to betrayal. Returning to the US reanimated her reflection on its meaning. Her first incorporation was in A Family Secret in 1991, where she folded a ag and placed it in a box, as if it were a personal and precious object.

In From Harlem, 1997, the flag became her focus again; this time she took it apart, as though studying its component parts would give her a better understanding of the emotional hold it had on her. In a mini-exhibition at the Studio Museum in honour of Martin Luther King’s birthday, she dropped the white stars, red and white stripes and blue canton onto the floor. Her gesture had nothing to do with politics or disrespect; she was using the object as a point of departure for self-reflection. That inquiry has continued for over 30 years. “I went through my own therapy with the flag,” she says. The sculptures produced from that therapy were rst shown together in “Unrequited Love” at the Daniel Faria Gallery in 2020 and are on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 5, 2025. The ag is an especially powerful and, given recent political and judicial developments in the US, relevant subject for contemporary art.

Clark describes her work as meditative. In a number of works she has been able to take objects, words and images that have a personal significance and make them serve a social and political purpose. In Wedding Portrait, 1987, she juxtaposes two couples doing different things; the right-hand side of the image is her parents’ wedding photograph and the left-hand side records another ritual, enacted by two White men, one 19 and the other 20, who, after failing to shoot a deer on a hunting trip, decide to hunt and kill a Black man. In Sandra Bland, 2021, she lets the colours of the American flag infiltrate the mantric text where she repeatedly writes the name of a young woman who was found hanged while in police custody in Texas in 2015. By obsessively writing her name, Clark assumes Bland’s identity. Her more directly political pieces have a way of circling back to nd personal points of activation. In a series of 11 photo-etchings called “Whispering City,” 1994, Clark’s combination of texts and images functioned like memory; the images were taken in Toronto in the ’70s and the texts were disconnected phrases remembered from her childhood in Harlem. The series was the first time that she combined photographs and words, and marrying the two was “a way to illustrate the elusiveness of memory.” In truth, “Whispering City” was an autobiographical tale of two cities. It recognized that the idea of homecoming, while complicated, was possible.

Her take on that event was in opposition to the cultural wisdom embodied in Thomas Wolfe’s posthumous novel, You Can’t Go Home Again, published in 1940. George Webber, the novel’s protagonist, concludes that you can’t go back home to your family, to your childhood, to dreams of glory and fame, and “you can’t go back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.” Were Clark a novelist, her book would be called You Can Go Home Again. The question that comes out of that affirmation is how you walk the soil of the place you arrive at after you return. Clark’s solution has been to use whatever material fits the story she wants to tell. In “Homecominghome,” a series of 18 collages she made during her 1996–97 Harlem residency, she uses newsprint on paper towels to inscribe concepts and conditions that were part of the Black experience in late 20th-century America. The words are cautionary descriptions and warnings—“Delusion,” “Fantasy,” “Underwhelmed” and “Mistrust”—that seem as applicable today as they were in 1997 when they were composed. Clark fully understands the intersections of time and memory. In her artist’s talk in Sarasota she articulated how they are linked: “When I went back to Harlem I found that everything had changed and absolutely nothing had changed.” Inside that contradiction, her art does its thinking.

June Clark’s recent exhibitions include “Harlem Quilt” at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota in 2022; “June Clark: Photographs” at Daniel Faria Gallery in 2023; “Witness” at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto from May 3 to August 11, 2024; and “Unrequited Love” at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 5, 2025. June Clark is also shortlisted for the 2024 Sobey Art Award.

She was interviewed by phone in Toronto on June 19, 2024.

BORDER CROSSINGS: In the past you have talked about your rich, delightful and protected childhood. What are your memories of that time?

JUNE CLARK: They’re extremely clear. I continue to believe that the upbringing I had in my community should be a model for the country because it was, in truth, a village. I can’t think of a better childhood for feeling safe; there was always someone, whether a merchant in a store or someone sitting on their stoop, whom you could go to if you needed help or a chat or whatever.

Through your mother’s influence, you said, you developed a thirst for learning and books.

My son, who is now 54, says that he remembers me not wanting them to put books on the floor. Books were sacred to me. In elementary school I was taught by Jewish and Italian women. If you think of the late ’40s, early ’50s, they were most likely refugees or had people in their families who were refugees from the Second World War. We know about what happened to books during and before the war. So they were literally sacred. I look around my house and think, what are my kids going to do with all these books when I’m gone?

The wedding picture of your parents makes them look utterly glamorous. They could be part of the Harlem Renaissance.

They both understood clothing. My mother was a milliner and she taught me to sew, what to wear, how to put together an outfit. My father always wore a Stetson and Florsheim shoes. They felt that how you presented yourself was important. They’re 18 or 19 years old in that portrait and they do look gorgeous.

You say both your parents worked, and so “The Perseverance Suite” (2023) was about their dedication and sacrifice.

Everyone’s parents worked, not just mine. All the pieces in “The Perseverance Suite” marry the domestic with the field or the docks. My grandfather worked on the New York City docks and my paternal grandfather owned a farm in North Carolina. So work was very important. I didn’t grow up with my mother being home; she had to work, and so did my aunt and uncle. It was a time when men and women worked together to pay the rent and support a family. There wasn’t a gender separation. So it was important for me to intertwine the farm and the kitchen utensils. The silver tray, the plate, the fork and the Depression glass all belonged to my maternal grandmother. They had been collecting dust on the top shelf of my kitchen since my mother died in 2007. I began “The Perseverance Suite” because I thought one of the pieces was going to be a centrepiece for a table. It was Daniel Faria who loved it and said, “Are you going to make any more metal pieces?” It hadn’t occurred to me. Then I looked around and thought, that’s probably a good idea.

Let’s go from relative domestic calm to drama. In 1968 you were living in New York, working at Columbia, where your husband was an architecture student, and he gets drafted. You had only 48 hours to get out of America?

He had been in International Affairs where he was safe from the draft, but that changed when he shifted to architecture. He got the notice and tried to defer it. He had to go to a veterans’ tribunal for the deference, and he walked in and none of the people in the room had all their limbs, so he knew his was a lost cause. We packed everything up and initially went to live in Amsterdam, but the extradition agreement wasn’t clear for us, and we didn’t want to take any chances. A professor he’d had at Columbia was at the University of Toronto, and he said, “Come here and finish your degree.” I had no idea where Toronto was.

Of course, 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, so things were really ramping up in Vietnam.

We were terrified. At that time, you could apply for landed immigrant status at the Canada/US border, but all an agent had to do was say, “No,” and you would turn your car around. I still can conjure the fear and terror of that week. It was an extremely difficult period for me. I could go back, and I did two or three times a year for 10 years. But my whole life was wrapped in this wonderful blanket of community and then I was here, and I had to find my community. I had to create my community, which is what I did, truly and slowly.

Your husband gave you a camera and you started walking around Toronto, taking pictures. Were you using the camera as a way of acclimatizing yourself to a new country?

Yes. That’s the thing I do. It happened with Harlem Quilt (1997) because I was feeling a bit schizophrenic when I moved back. I did it with the Paris Pages or 42 Thursdays in Paris (2004) as well. It’s a grounding, a way of putting my feet flat on the surface of the earth and saying, “This is where I am.” But I wasn’t thinking about art. I was just hoping to find faces and gestures of people I missed, whom I had been wrenched from. All I needed was some encouragement. It was Patsy Zolf who said, “There’s a gallery on Baldwin Street run by a woman. Maybe you should go and see if you can show your images there.” As it turns out, Lisa Steele and Laura Jones were also refugees from the United States, having followed men here. They helped me; I helped them. We began teaching each other how to make and process photographs.

Did you think of what you were doing with your camera as documentary?

Not at all. The only word I had with regard to photography was “portrait.” I didn’t learn the word “documentary” until after I met Laura and started working in the basement of the Baldwin Street Gallery. I began learning about Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and, of course, Diane Arbus. I was reading everything I could about photography.

Was the Women’s Photography Co-op an unofficial art school for you?

That’s where I learned everything. I remember Laura teaching me to put my knuckles in so that I could test the temperature. It was very useful because I did that with my kids and their milk.

Was there a point where you realized what you were doing was something that could be art?

Definitely. Once we organized, we decided we wanted to make exhibitions. We solicited work from people all over. The Art Gallery of Ontario has all those archives now, which included the letters we got from women who were so appreciative for the opportunity to show and be published. I showed my work in these exhibitions and it was very exciting. One of my images was stolen from an exhibition at the University of Toronto. At the time, I think the insurance value in the early ’70s for an 8 by 10 photograph was $250. I received a phone call from a very grave insurance guy saying, “Mrs Greenberg”—I was Mrs Greenberg at that time—“We’re very sorry to tell you that your photograph has been stolen from the exhibition. But not to worry, you will get the insurance value of it.” I was elated. My photograph was the only one that was stolen.

When does the realization come that words could enter into the frame of artmaking? You said the text began to rise to the surface once you learned printmaking. It’s as if language was waiting for the opportunity to get said.

I went to university thinking I was going to study photography, but I fell into printmaking and I loved it. Eugenio Tellez was the best printmaking teacher in the entire world and he taught me so much. I was also influenced by a book of Saul Steinberg’s Photoworks, where he had drawn on photographs of dresser drawers set out in a New York street. That gave me permission to adulterate photographs. That’s where “Whispering City” (1994) comes in. That was the first set of photographs where the text rose to the surface. I wanted to find a way to illustrate the elusiveness of memory by marrying the text with the imagery.

The language you use runs a wide range: the poignancy of confusing moans coming from a neighbour’s apartment as sexual pleasure when they’re from a person dying of AIDS. Or it can be a story about Louise “doing it in the hallway standing up.” Or Miss Ruby adding some phlegm to the food of a woman who used the “N” word. There’s something going on where language is its own thing. It’s not dependent on anything else.

My culture is a language culture. Where I grew up someone was always telling a story or a joke. Whether in the barbershop or the beauty salon or the supermarket, there’s always a story coming out of someone. It gets fleshed out and becomes three-dimensional in the telling.

In the light box transparencies called Formative Triptych (1989), you use language in a very interesting way.

I have used the first photograph of me several times; in the second one my aunt is behind me and my mother was taking the photograph. The third one is Bessie Smith. The story was that she was on tour in the South and was in a car accident, and she bled to death on a gurney in the hospital because no one wanted to deal with her. I’ve since learned that may not be true, but it is the story I was told as a kid. That’s when I made a determination that if I got sick and was in hospital, people would recognize and not ignore me because I had Black skin. The thing is if you are born in my skin, you’re born to be on alert 24/7. It doesn’t matter who you are. That’s part of your marrow. Those three texts are my words and my way of dealing with possible micro-aggressions.

When you’re a child you develop a deep appreciation of the American flag, a symbol that has played a significant and ongoing role in your life as an artist.

I wouldn’t call it appreciation as much as reverence. On the first day of school, you were asked to stand, put your hand over your heart and pledge allegiance to the flag. Not to the president but to this symbol. You did that religiously every day until you graduated high school in grade 12, no matter who you were. I mean, I was five years old, and they say if you have a child, until they’re seven, they’re yours. The flag was a symbol of the hope and dreams of every child. So I really revered the flag until I realized it had betrayed me. ‘

You’ve made your flag sculptures over decades. You just mentioned betrayal, and the exhibition at Daniel Faria in 2020 was called “Unrequited Love.” Tell me about the nature of the heartbreak.

I wouldn’t even say heartbreak. It is shock. And the shock is the 48-star flag in the museum case, called My Precious 1946 – 28 August 1955 (2017). The measure in the title is from the first day of school until Emmett Till was killed. I took notice because Emmett Till was born in 1941 and he was exactly my age. When you’re a kid you read the newspaper, but nothing really relates to you. But when you read this person was 15 years old and you’re 15 years old, that hits you at your core. That’s when the shock began. Not heartbreak, because I didn’t understand it at first. I didn’t relate the symbol to what had happened to him. I just knew that I related to this murder. We are talking about two different series here, “Family Secrets” and “Unrequited Love.” Once I began making art, the first series was “Family Secrets” (1992), comprising elements in cigar boxes. I decided to put a flag in a box together with the rest of these pieces. I can’t remember what the second flag piece was, but it seems that almost every year when I had downtime, some form of flag emerged. It wasn’t until Moral Disengagement (2014–2017), the one that the National Gallery owns, where I was pulling threads, that I looked around and was surprised at how many flags, in one form or another, I had made.

You never set out to do a series that would deal with the flag?

Not at all. I did From Harlem (1997) at the Studio Museum when they asked me to do a mini exhibition for Martin Luther King’s birthday. I just thought, this is the way I’m feeling. I took it apart, went into the gallery and let it float to the floor. Except for Inherent (2017), they were all real flags.

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