the Toronto-based US artist exploring the American flag and its many meanings

June Clark left the US in 1968, the identical yr anti-war scholar protesters occupied Columbia College, and riots broke out in main cities together with Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, DC, following the assassination of the civil rights chief Martin Luther King Jr. Clark’s husband on the time was fleeing navy conscription, and so, in a matter of 48 hours, she stated goodbye to her household and mates in New York’s Harlem neighbourhood to search out refuge in Canada.

Quickly after arriving, Clark began documenting her new residence by means of images, a follow she discovered on her personal as a result of ladies weren’t allowed to make use of the darkroom on the College of Toronto, the place she labored in administration. By the Seventies, Clark and a number of other different ladies had based the Girls’s Images Co-operative, utilizing the basement darkrooms of Toronto’s Baldwin Road Gallery to supply their work, and assembly recurrently to assist one another and organise their very own exhibitions. This spirit of self-sufficiency has been integral to Clark’s decades-long profession, particularly contemplating how gradual the broader artwork world has been to take up her work.

That has all modified in recent times, since Clark’s work was included within the Artwork Gallery of Ontario’s 2016 present Toronto: Tributes and Tributaries, 1971-89. Additional publicity got here when her artwork seller Daniel Faria introduced her assemblage works and installations at worldwide artwork festivals. In 2021, Harlem Quilt—created throughout a 1996-97 residency on the Studio Museum in New York—was proven at Artwork Basel Miami Seaside. Final yr, Perseverance Suite—a brand new collection utilizing farm and home instruments like irons, rolling pins and shovels—was exhibited at Frieze New York. This summer time, Clark has exhibitions at three main Toronto establishments: the Artwork Gallery of Ontario, the Energy Plant Modern Artwork Gallery and the Museum of Modern Artwork (Moca) Toronto. She has additionally been nominated for this yr’s Sobey Artwork Award, Canada’s highest honour for modern artists. Her work is now within the collections of the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Nationwide Museum of African American Historical past and Tradition, and the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, each in Washington, DC, and different main museums.

The Artwork Newspaper: It has been a busy few years for you. How does it really feel, getting this long-deserved recognition, not simply in Canada, however within the US?

June Clark: I’m nonetheless doing precisely what I’ve been doing for the previous 50 years—making an attempt to determine stuff and undergo my feelings and make the work that solutions these feelings. So, sure, it’s stunning that hastily persons are saying, “Oh, I like that” or “That is actually transferring.” However in actual fact, for me within the studio, nothing has actually modified.

You as soon as stated, when talking about making Harlem Quilt and returning to your outdated neighbourhood after nearly 30 years, that nothing had modified and the whole lot had modified. Do you assume that applies to your work too?

Issues have modified. Many, many, many extra eyes are on it and lots of extra persons are commenting about it. I feel when it comes to what I do and the way I see, I’m nonetheless strolling round choosing up rusted items of steel off the bottom and seeing how they’ll slot in to future works. I go searching and nonetheless see items [of ceramics or household tools] that my grandmother had, and I feel, “Oh, I may most likely use that.”

While you first began within the Seventies, you had been doing largely images.

Sure, very straight documentary images, educating myself to not crop within the darkroom, however to look at my body and get precisely what I need.

And also you taught your self as a result of ladies weren’t allowed within the darkroom on the College of Toronto, which is astounding.

I don’t know what they thought we’d rise up to in there. And to be clear, I used to be taught and taught myself with a gaggle of ladies who discovered collectively—some had been extra superior than others. I taught myself to see, after which, with the assistance of different ladies, I taught myself learn how to put my knuckle in a tray of water and know if it’s 68°F [the optimal temperature for chemical development].

And it looks like that sort of hands-on schooling fed into the remainder of your profession. You see it within the Whispering Metropolis works, the place you might be immediately manipulating how an etched plate will print by wiping ink away from sure areas.

Precisely. The factor is, it’s a more durable journey to show your self. However when you do it, you don’t neglect it. And once more, you’re not studying from another person and their methodology; you study your personal methodology, and it stays with you, nobody can ever take that away from you. So in actual fact, not being allowed within the darkroom was a favour to us, in some methods. And it allowed me to amass lifelong mates.

The present on the Energy Plant has a whole lot of private works that draw on recollections about your loved ones and your group. A few of these return to the Nineteen Nineties. What’s it like revisiting these older works?

After I’m within the studio, I’m a specific individual. When the work is that outdated, I actually do have to achieve again and determine who that individual was who made that work. It’s extremely thrilling to revisit work that I did years and years in the past, and conjure the feelings and the individuals I used to be making an attempt to honour.

Going again to Harlem Quilt; on the time, my mom and my sister had been nonetheless alive. So that you get wound again into the household circle, and so they’re treating you such as you’re seven once more; my mom always requested me if my coat was heat sufficient throughout that yr. My mom additionally taught me learn how to sew as a child—she was a milliner—and when she went to the exhibition on the Studio Museum, she walked into the room with the Harlem Quilt and stated, “That’s not a quilt.” While you return residence, it’s important to keep in mind who you had been—or they make you keep in mind.

Harlem Quilt will not be a standard quilt, nevertheless it shares a whole lot of the needs of a quilt— recording a reminiscence or a convention by means of textiles. It additionally has a votive high quality to it. It’s nearly like strolling right into a chapel.

Sure, precisely, and it’s enveloping you. I’m very happy with the best way it turned out within the sense that I actually needed to conjure the sensation of rising up there and being surrounded by the entire individuals who cared about me and needed me to be protected.

The Artwork Gallery of Ontario exhibition, Unrequited Love, centres on a collection of flag works that you’ve got been creating all through your profession.

It was after I was making the Ethical Disengagement piece, the place I’m sitting there, pulling threads, that I seemed round and noticed what number of flags I truly had achieved. I needed to come to phrases with how I felt about that image, and the way that image had permeated my very being as a baby. After which, with Colin Kaepernick [the American football player and civil rights activist who knelt during the national anthem in protest against racial injustice], I realised that individuals actually weren’t understanding his gesture, the best way I understood it—that’s why I’ve devoted it to him. As a result of all of us grew up with our palms each morning throughout our hearts, pledging allegiance to not our nation, to not our president, however to the flag. And what the flag meant to us. And the way it betrayed many people, within the sense that we didn’t discover ourselves within the flag.

As an American-born artist, who left the nation throughout a tough interval in historical past, and who has spent most of your grownup life outdoors the US, how has your notion of American id modified through the years?

I wouldn’t say it has modified. America has modified. I nonetheless really feel very, very linked to the soil there, which in fact is why I do these flags and why I make this work. I really like the nation I grew up in. I don’t love the nation that has been taken over by mean-spirited individuals. That’s an issue.

Do you assume the American flag is one thing you’ll maintain returning to?

I by no means know. I assumed that I used to be completed with the Perseverance Suite, however there are a couple of new items I’m doing now. I by no means know in regards to the Homage items, that would proceed. You simply by no means know what occurs whenever you go into the studio—I can go in and anticipate to work on one piece, however one other piece rises to the floor and takes my consideration.

• Better Toronto Artwork 2024: Triennial Exhibition, Museum of Modern Artwork Toronto, till 28 July

• June Clark: Witness, Energy Plant Modern Artwork Gallery, Toronto, till 11 August

• June Clark: Unrequited Love, Artwork Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, till 5 January 2025

Biography

Born: 1941, Harlem, New York

Lives and works: Toronto, Canada

Schooling: 1988, BFA, York College, Toronto; 1990, MFA, York College, Toronto

Key Reveals: 1990, Mnemosyne, Mercer Union, Toronto; 1994, Koffler Gallery, North York, Ontario; 1997, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; 2000, Girls’s Artwork Useful resource Centre, Toronto; 2018, Artwork Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; 2022-23, John & Mable Ringling Museum of Artwork, Sarasota, Florida

Represented by: Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto