It’s easy to react on a visceral level to the color and content in Katrina Andry’s work, to be amazed at the technical brilliance, because she is drawing figures into wood with a sharp knife, passing paper multiple times through a giant press that fills the ground floor of her Mid-City double. But in the work are lessons and corrections about a painful history that is still underway.
Living with Katrina’s work and being her friend makes me more careful with language, with my assumptions about racial history, my too-casual use of the word Creole, where what is deemed beautiful – less threatening? Less dark? More rare? - becomes a matter of skin tones. What role do I – do we – play in maintaining negative and detrimental stereotypes? As Katrina asked of the reader in a recent interview with BOMB Magazine – why is it still?
Her show at Other Plans explores Colorism, the exoticization of Black bodies, folklore, anthropomorphism, and the injury of dispossession and systemic injustice. Until now, these works have not been on public view in New Orleans.
- Pia Z. Ehrhardt
KATRINA ANDRY x PIA Z. EHRHARDT
Pia Z. Ehrhardt (PZE): The titles for your work are sometimes colloquial, other times, poetic and lyrical. The Promise of the Rainbow Never Came; Depose and Dispose (of); I’m Not Your Chocolate Fantasy: Don’t Touch My Hair; Sirens of Gentrification. They feel spoken, directed at the viewer, and provoke societal norms. Do ideas for your work often begin with words?
Katrina Andry (KA): I normally come up with the titles prior to making the work. I'll have an idea of what I want to do, and then my head will swirl with how many works I want to do, and then I’ll sketch out how they might be composed. You've seen my sketchbooks. They’re mostly words and stick figures. I read to inform my work, so language is a big informant. Also, there’s a lot of symbolism in my work. And as I'm thinking about a series, I'm doing all this mind mapping, and symbolism tends to come up.
PZE: Did The Promise of the Rainbow Never Came begin with research about the Middle Passage?
KA: I had heard a figure that between 600,000 to 2 million people died during the Middle Passage. There's a belief that people jumped overboard just to save themselves from enslavement, right? What I found out is a lot of people died from dysentery, and their bodies were thrown overboard. The white doctors on board started to believe that the African enslaved people were making themselves sick. They called it “fixed melancholia.” The doctors prescribed dance, physical activity, but they also kept them crammed in these quarters where disease and sickness spread rapidly. Most did not jump into open waters to save themselves. Maybe they did while they could still see land, thinking they could save themselves and swim. But most who were thrown overboard were already dead, or sick.
PZE: And babies were thrown over with their mothers.
KA: Babies were not valued like other captives. And pregnant women might not have shown when they embarked, but then the voyages took months.
PZE: Underwater, these discarded bodies become eels. No longer human.
KA: Yes. When I think about promise and water, I think about Noah's ark. How people, like the animals, were being transported not to be saved but to be bred. And the promise of freedom for enslaved people after the Emancipation Proclamation, like the rainbow, never came.
The Rainbow series is linked to Depose and Dispose (of), a series that anthropomorphizes black bodies. Here, I’m referring to police brutality. But also, this promise of freedom, not fulfilled. Post civil rights, post Emancipation Proclamation, post affirmative action. These different ways that legislation is supposed to create equality for all mankind that has still not been realized for a portion of the population.
PZE: The series I’m Not Your Chocolate Fantasy: Don’t Touch My Hair feels immediate, personal.
KA: I actually made that work when I was pregnant, but I didn't print them until afterwards because of the chemicals in the inks. I was very round with twins. And I was letting my hair grow out at that time. But, oh, Pia, I was 70 pounds in the belly. People were touching my belly, and my hair. I wasn't used to all this touching! My skin reacted horridly to being pregnant; I was so broken out. I started to experiment with wearing makeup to try and cover up. I was thrown off by the names of these makeups. Foundation might be, like, Chocolate Supreme. Or Pecan Candy. Caramel Rum. And then you move over to the other scale, and the colors would be numbers, or Alabaster number two –
PZE: - Linen. Ivory. Not dessert things.
KA: Besides being funny, I was just like, “Wow, I'm not edible.” The names exotified people who are tanner, from Olive and beyond. It's this other-world-ness of a person, this Chiquita banana-ness of a person, even in the products they pick for their skincare.
PZE: And then what you do is you cover the hair with mylar, encase it so it can't be touched.
KA: The mylar makes it stand out. It makes it this non-human element. It’s supposed to be hair, but it doesn't look like hair. Which is sometimes what folks with really curly hair hear about their hair. Like - is it? Really? Hair? To me - because I live with it – it’s just hair. But I do remember when I was younger, with the white girls in my class, I always wanted to touch their hair. It looked so silky and soft. But, yeah, it's the otherness of the other person. You don't act on it, but there’s this want, this desire to touch what’s not yours –
PZE: - to use another sense, too? To touch beauty? Without a baby bump, no one would just put their hand on your stomach. But because there's a baby in there, you want to do that.
KA: I mean, my belly was already hitting things left and right. I’m not surprised people were drawn to it, because it was just like, wow, what is in there?
PZE: I know you’ve been displaced while your house is being raised, and you’re away from your big press. Can you talk about the smaller, newer works?
KA: I was playing around with different ways to represent a human person using Southern Gothic symbols. I didn't want to do them big. So, these are little studies for the next work, and smaller because they're just busts.
PZE: Are all three of them self-portraits?
KA: The woman whose head is in the vase, and has braids that turn into carnations, that's me. And the one with the pearl veil is also me. Pearls are my birthstone. I have a ton of pearls my grandmother gave me because I was born in June, and she told me they're the ultimate stone of femininity. Maybe to encourage me to be more feminine?
PZE: I'm internalizing the whole notion of a self-portrait, because I’m wondering, when the work is on the wall, do you feel exposed or shielded? Do you feel in control and inviting of the stares, but on your terms? An embodiment of you that’s not necessarily you?
KA: When the works are on the wall, sometimes I wish it wasn't me, and other times I don't mind. Because I'm not telling my story necessarily, and they're not meant to be representations of my lived experience. So, the idea that the pieces are self-portraits can be misleading in that way. And when I talk about my work, and I talk about the collective experiences and collective enduring, if it's just me popping up, it can feel flat and maybe even a little narcissistic.
I'm already preparing for the next series when I get back in my studio. They're big works again. I like to put more than one person in the work, different textures, maybe just one block of color, so that the viewer's eye can rest somewhere. Recently, I've been trying to incorporate more printmaking in the work, besides woodcut. When I get back set up, I'll be experimenting with monotype and lithography, drawing on top of the works, and making unique prints.
PZE: Can you talk about the title for this show – Collective Enduring?
KA: I'm thinking about individualism and how the ideology of individualism permeates throughout our society and endures. What does that mean for people who are seen as part of a group? You can think about any person, but they're not a person alone. You’re enduring in what a society promotes as individualism, but-in reality-there are boundaries, political, systemic boundaries placed on folks based on their gender, their sexual orientation, the color of their skin. And the reality is that individualism is not going to save you. You can't work your way to a place based on your own merits.
We all live in a society that informs our life, and it could be something you can thrive in, or something to be endured, whether that be the creative aspect of it, or the economic aspect of it, or where you are in your life cycle, your age, whether you're a new artist or a mid-career. These boundaries can affect your practice in ways that are beyond your control.
PZE: We all want to be singular, different, even unique. Do artists maybe have a better chance at this?
KA: Something informs everybody's practice. Am I so unique? Is anybody so unique? I'm leaning into, no. I can take a 360 view, and I'm a mom, wife, yep. I have similar struggles to other parents, to other middle-class Americans, similar struggles to other Black people. I want to say some things with my art. And sure, someone else has maybe said this in a different way, whether they wrote it, or visualized it, but I visualized it this way, manifested a thought in an original way. I’m often thinking, What story do I need to tell to fill in the gaps of our understanding?
Born in New Orleans, LA, Katrina Andry challenges the ideology of individualism by examining inequalities and resulting degradation as the result of our color-based prejudices. She argues the belief in individualism allows Americans to turn a blind eye to inequality, suggesting barriers to well-being lie with the individual and not also within our social structures, in spite of documentation of the collective experiences of these groups and data on the outcomes of disfavored groups.
Andry earned an MFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. She has participated in exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, NY, and Marc Straus Gallery, New York, NY, as well as had solo exhibitions at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, SC, and the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, GA. In 2021, Andry was a participating artist in Prospect.5. Andry’s work can be found in the prominent art collections of 21c Museum, Saint Louis, MO, the Petrucci Family Foundation, the New Orleans Museum of Art, Union College, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA. Andry currently lives and works in New Orleans where she maintains a studio.
Pia Z. Ehrhardt is the author of FAMOUS FATHERS & OTHER STORIES and NOW WE ARE SIXTY. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Oxford American, Narrative Magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in New Orleans, LA, and Queens, NY.