Interview with Fred DeWitt: Artist-in-Residence at Platform Artspace
Fred DeWitt (MFA 2021) is the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Platform Artspace, which is the Department of Art Practice’s public practice venue. He’s been creating artwork in the outdoor space throughout the pandemic. He is interviewed by Prof. Jill Miller about his early creative works, current projects, and plans for his residency.
Artist Fred DeWitt with cotton plant seedlings.
Jill: Fred, can you tell me a little bit about your background as a creative person? You had mentioned in a past conversation that you worked in tech before you became dedicated to your art practice. What was the journey like, and how did you find your way to making art?
Fred: My road to art making was long and bumpy. I worked as a system’s engineer and software trainer for a few years. Then one day I woke up and I couldn’t breathe. I became disabled around 25 years old and I was forced to rethink just about everything in my life. At some point I knew I wanted to leave the world with something beautiful to remember me by. When I was a kid, one summer I read the book The Learning Tree about Gordan Parks. I told everyone I was going to be Gordan Parks. My mother saved up and bought me a Super 8 camera. I could not afford film or processing, but I went all around town that summer pretending I was making a movie. Soon after my health stabilized, I decided it was time to live my childhood dream of being a filmmaker. I purchased a 35mm still camera and moved to New York for a while. It was way too cold for this Berkeley native. I came back and studied filmmaking at San Francisco State. After I graduated from SFSU I started teaching movie making and theater in Oakland public schools. I love sunsets and I would walk my dog along the water’s edge after work often. One day I was watching the boats sail under the Golden Gate Bridge. I said to my dog, Spirit let’s go see the world. So, I purchased an old small sailboat and three years later I was single handling out the Gate. The weather, the waves, the wind, and the whales tossed me around and almost turned me upside down. It was a transformative experience, terrifying and challenging yet beautiful and magical. Spirit and I survived the voyage and when I set foot on land in LA. I felt that with determination and perseverance one could accomplish anything. So, I decided to return to school and study fine arts
Fred painting with cotton plants
Jill: It has been impressive to see how your practice has moved across so many different mediums while you’ve been at Cal. Painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, performance, horticulture, and more! Can you talk about your experience with each medium? Do you feel an affinity to a specific material or mode of working?
Fred – I was set on becoming a painter. I met Professor Craig Nagsawa just before I officially entered into the program. Nagasawa was breaking-up rocks and making paint with them. I never put much attention into pigments or how paints were made. I just went to the store and purchased whatever they had in stock. The first day I entered into the program I met Ehren Tool, who runs the ceramics studio, he handed me a cup and told me it would last 500,000 years. That sold me on clay. When I was cruising down the coast, I kept thinking about the Middle Passage, and how all those folks must have felt packed, stuffed in the hulls of those dark, cold, wet, leaky, wooden ships. I was sailing on a modern boat and I was seasick, cold and miserable most of the time. The Passage must have been horrific. Entering into Cal I knew I wanted to do a body of work which centered on the Transatlantic slave trade. So, I started researching what else was aboard those ships, what were the other commodities beside the Africans. The 400 plus years of African oppression and resistance seemed too large for a drawing. A painting seemed too small for what I was feeling, and a performance seemed too ephemeral. I knew the story could only be captured with a multidisciplinary approach.
Jill: Your ceramics candy dishes are aestheticized- small, hand-held vessels carefully painted in soft pastels with gold trim. Inside we might find text and Skittles. What inspired this work?
Fred: Sugar production and harvesting has a complicated history. When I was a kid, we use to have sugar bowls. My grandmother even had a small decorative dish on her coffee table, where she kept candy for guests. I don’t eat much candy anymore, but I always associate candy with my youth and innocents. Sugar is in just about everything now, but sugar was a luxury item for Europeans until the Transatlantic slave trade. Colonialism, slavery, oppression, and sugar are all linked. Travon Martin was shopping for Skittles (candy) and sweet tea when he was killed. When the bowls I made were installed in the gallery some people would just go up and eat the candy without even thinking about the origin of sugar or the innocents of Travon. The audience was implicated.
Fred sculpture cotton seeds
Jill: Your subject matter has centered on the Black body that is subjugated, brutalized, and unsafe in our world. You’ve been making work about this for a few years, yet only recently has this topic received the national attention that it deserves. Could you talk about what it means to you to address such an urgent topic? Do you have a specific audience in mind?
Fred: I have always tried to make personal artwork, work which reflects my reality of being a Black man with a physical disability. The work directly relates to my life of growing up and navigating the social, political and economic system we live in – The work is about overcoming and managing to thrive amidst institutional racism. The work is about the resilience and resistance of the Black Body. Recently, I have had some push back with regards to my work. And I had to really think deeply about who the work was for. First, I told a friend the work was for me, for me to work out my issues, the making of the work was the artwork, not the thing itself. That was bull. Then I said the work was for the brothers on the corner, the sisters in church and the kids in the park. That was just another cliché that sounded cool, but the statement was much too simplistic. It’s wasn’t until a classmate said art can’t change the world, then I knew who my artwork was for. My art is not just for the oppressed, but it is for the oppressor. Art does have the power to change minds and hearts – First comes the art: the painting, the music, the song, the performance, then comes the change – The culture begins to shift and minds and hearts began to open. That is why I’m making this work to change the world.
Jill: You are the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Platform Artspace. What project will you work on?
Fred: I feel honored to be the first Platform Artist-in-Residence. I’m especially thankful with everything that is going on to have a quiet, beautiful and centrally located place on campus to work. Yet, I’m extremely conflicted about what my responsibility should be right now. There is so much discussion going on about racial dynamics on campus and in the Art Practice department specifically at the moment. I have to ask myself what is tokenism and what is inclusion? What does it mean to be “in-residence” at this time when so many people feel displaced? What does it mean to be given space on, some would say, stolen Indigenous land? I would like to create a site-specific work that addresses these questions – I want to make something which speaks to who I am, but also reflects the history of the Institution.