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The Art of Care Cameron Russell Mei Tao
Mother Stories

The Art of Care

The Art of Care Cameron Russell Mei Tao

Written by Katie Hintz-Zambrano

Photography by The Art of Care

A new exhibit by Cameron Russell and Mei Tao celebrates the creativity, art, and magic-making inherent in caretaking.

What inspired this exhibit?

CAMERON + MEI: "The wisdom of caregivers is urgent and grounding. As we grapple with grief and powerlessness at preventing the ongoing violence of impossibly broken systems operating as though life is disposable, we found comfort and rigor in the dedication of caregivers to sustaining and celebrating life."

"Learning from those whose practice of caregiving was an art, whose cultural work, creativity, and rigor sustained generations and communities, met a deep yearning we had ourselves to figure out how to move through this time. And we wanted to open the door for audiences to be able to identify and share learnings from the people who ensured their families survived and thrived."

"We installed this show two weeks before a most uncaring political leader was sworn in as president, over a year into a genocide in Gaza, and as wild fires ripped through Los Angeles. Diving into the creative practice of each of these caregivers was revealing that what holds the world up might be more abundant than we think." 

How did the two of you team up and start collaborating on the project?

CAMERON: "We've known each other for nearly twenty years, working together for fashion clients and also often collaborating on small independent projects. Two years ago, I called Mei with a framework for this project investigating care work as art."

"For many years, Mei had shared private photo sessions of her daughter, extended family, and close friends. She would return to these subjects over decades in a way that was so opposite to the fashion work we did together where the premise was always trendy, new, and fresh. And suddenly it was like a light bulb went off—the creative work we wanted to investigate was ongoing, often unseen, and Mei had been cultivating a visual language for it for years."

“We want to open the door for audiences to be able to identify and share learnings from the people who ensured their families survived and thrived.”

What were your first steps in getting the work together?

CAMERON: "The first place we went together for the project was to visit my grandmother, Shirley Gustafson Chase, in Florida. She was a prolific artist whose art practice informed and infused every part of her life, from raising six children to working as a physical therapist. We took photos of her in home where everything was art, discarded plastic cups became canvases and new homes to propagate plants, broken glass could be glued to windows, and her neighbor joked if anyone stayed too long they’d get painted too…and yes, at one point while we were shooting, she started to decorate my sister!"

"When she passed, I found this resume my grandmother had written where she didn't mention art making at all. It was so surprising, the most visible thing about her, to me, wasn't something she thought to include in her public work."

"We talked about how so much of the incredible skilled artistry of caregivers was only known by their families, was often ephemeral, and few records of it even exist. This was why, Mei said, that the most precious art she has are the audio recordings of her dad telling family history. As a young man he had worked as a stage actor and hosted a popular radio show that came on every night at 7 p.m., but when her family left China, he never worked as an artist in public again. Yet, in private, he continued this work her entire childhood. He was the story-teller, the political historian, the giver of advice, which, he told her, always comes in the form of poetry."

How did it all turn into an exhibit?

CAMERON: "This fall we decided to see if we might put on a show at a small gallery in my hometown of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where we could source more stories from the community I grew up in and tell more stories of people we knew. "

"Mei and I are deeply committed (and have been for two decades) to challenging notions of sole ownership/authority. Mei took all the big photos in this show, and we visited all of the subjects, except her father, together and I wrote most of the text. But it was entirely collaborative. Mei also wrote text, and I also thought about and initially had sketched some of the images we might make. We considered how the larger show might work and installed it together."

"And we let contributions from our community change it. For example: the night before we were going to put it up, our dear friend Tien Tran sent us a letter about her mother, with scanned photos of her at work. Her contribution was the perfect note to end on because it really challenged and expanded on the body of work being shown. She talked about how at first when she saw our email she didn’t think she could submit her mother’s work because she didn’t have time to play and make artwork with her or her siblings. But the more she thought about it, she knew that her mother was a wildly creative person who, as a single mother of four young children and refugee of the Vietnam war, knew how to find beauty and make a way out of no way."

How would you describe the exhibit (in a nutshell)?

CAMERON + MEI: "To share the art of caregivers, we couldn't take a one-size-fits-all approach. Their work happens in so many different mediums, from food to song, teaching to tending plants, puppet shows and imaginative play, storytelling, upcycling, and repair. We anchored the show by focusing on eight people we were able to photograph, using text and QR codes and collaging archival images of their work to let the audience peek into full complex lifelong creative practices. We also asked our community to share work they might know about from their own lives, and then worked with those who responded to develop text, and share recordings and scans. We let those fill out, change, and grow the narrative we had the bones of from our first round of research and documentation. At the gallery, we have a printer and mounting and labeling material available so that visitors can help us build this important archive."

"As artist-caregivers ourselves, we really took the same approach to making art as we take to caring: understanding that it is ongoing, that it requires maintenance and revision and responsiveness to the needs of each new day. We meant for this exhibit to care for people who visited. We have eye-spy gallery tours for kids, we installed a couch, chairs, coffee tables, built a library that also had books for children, hung some of the art very low especially for kids to see. One of the artists we profiled, Suhaly Bautista-Carolina, is an herbalist and she gave us a tea that we brew so guests can have a warm treat when they come in from the snow. We hope that it feels like an introspective, calm, caring place to gestate new ideas and narratives about what makes our living possible and how to be inside this painful moment in history." 

What are some favorite examples of "the art of care" in your own lives, from when you were children?

CAMERON: "My paternal grandmother, Nancy Meyer Russell, was an early childhood educator, mother of six, grandmother of 13, great grandmother of 3, and life long artist. One of my earliest memories is going to the daycare where she worked when I was seven. She had a big iguana in her classroom crawling around, and she’d set up a whole woodshop with real saws and drills and hammers and wood glue for all the little kids. I thought she was the coolest. She was always singing, opening her bag to pull out musical instruments, or a weaving project she was working on with the materials for a child to make one alongside her. She taught me how to throw a pot and build a bench. Her joy in making art with and for children, and making things that were often needed (like a wheelchair ramp) with such joyful artistry (painted with an intricate scaly dragon) inspires my own art practice of caregiving to this day."

MEI: "My dad is a storyteller—no, I mean literally his job was to tell stories at one point in his life. From a young age, I noticed the way my dad could retell an incident and manage to weave it into some epic tale about a school pickup or how my brother got his skinned knee. He had a way of sharing family stories. These stories make up my childhood memories. We are an immigrant family and sometimes I feel homesick, so I am forever grateful for his vivid stories of our family. Because of his stories I can see us all together in my mind and feel them in my heart."

What about now that you are parents yourselves?

CAMERON: "I love making art with our kids. We make books and movies together, we cook together, and do lots of open ended upcycling (a.k.a. trash to treasure!). I’ve been iterating on a workshop I’ve done a couple times now with their classrooms all about cyanotypes, quilting, and exploring new narrative structures inspired by nature. There’s so much interesting artwork that comes from collaborating with children as equals, especially in this moment of intense change. They are so present in the world and in their imagination, and I think we need them to help us find a way through."

MEI: "I photograph my daughter...a lot. Not just in snapshots, but photo sessions where I materialize ideas or images I have in my head. At 22 she has an extensive catalog of her childhood in photos and videos which she appreciates...I hope. Maybe I get it from my dad—I have this need to preserve family history, I want to give that to my daughter and nurture her to appreciate it. My dad tells stories with his voice, I tell stories with my camera."

What are your hopes for the exhibit?

CAMERON + MEI: "Our collaboration and our interest in art as care work are ongoing."

"At the end of February we’re installing a pop-up version of the show in Mexico City at Jardin Prim as part of the feminist Decididas festival. We would love for this exhibition to travel to different locations so we can continue to learn from many more caregivers, and build a shared archive of their craft and teachings."

Read more about The Art of Care and see it in person here!

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