Dylan Cale Jones: My name is Dylan Cale Jones.
Isa Rodriguez: And I'm Isa Rodriguez.
Dylan Cale Jones: And you are listening to Practice Practice. Today we are interviewing M Wright. We're very excited. M Wright is one half of AK/OK. And M, would you like to introduce yourself?
M Wright: Sure. Hi. As you said, I'm one half of AK/OK, and the other half is my partner, Kate Jarboe. And together we make projects that allow us to delve into archives and in histories particularly around Queer feminist experience, thinking about how those historical threads kind of connect through to current social political realities and then kind of extend and help us and others extend into more just futures.
There's something, there's a sort of creative sustenance there of seeing yourself reflected in past histories that you've never been exposed to before. We find it really empowering, not only for us, but in sharing that with other people who also see themselves reflected.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. I think there's something really important about seeing other people access their agency and power in spaces where people accessing their agency and power is often erased. Like being like, "Oh, it's possible!"
M Wright: Right. And feeling connected to a sort of lineage in a way that also makes you feel like, "Oh, I have roots. Other people felt the way that I feel."
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, like across time and space.
M Wright: Right.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah.
M Wright: There's this kinship.
Dylan Cale Jones: So speaking of roots, we'd love to hear about your experience as a young person and creativity. What was that like for you?
M Wright: I'm thinking that a lot of the time that I spent creatively as a kid was probably in music because I was involved in choir and youth symphony and musical productions. But I was also exposed to a lot of different ways of making through a summer arts camp that was at the university in the town where I grew up.
So it was like tap dance, but also traditional Chinese watercolor. And I remember taking a costume design class where I painted costumes for imaginary plays that is something that I feel really lucky to have been exposed to.
And then, there were some people in our social circle who were friends (with) my parents who actually made their living as artists. And I didn't really realize that until later thinking back on it, but ceramics artists and painters.
But there was a moment for me that really stands out. I remember my fifth grade teacher, who was a phenomenal person, who really, changed my relationship to school or learning. Even now when I teach, I think about her and think about her approach to the classroom.
So, Ms. Rosemary Griffith, wherever you are, thank you! She would have us approach our academic work in ways that went way beyond the stipulated curriculum in my elementary school. And I remember us out in the parking lot in the middle of winter, like up on a snow berm all dancing to music that was like the favorite song of this one kid, Willie, in our class. He wanted to share with everybody. And on Fridays we would recite poetry we had memorized and she would start every morning by putting on music and we would get up out of our chairs and we would boogie down.
But there was one thing in particular. She invited a professional sign painter to come visit our class—who taught us how to do different styles of lettering. And that for me was a kind of light bulb moment of discovering lettering and calligraphy, which I can, you know, now in retrospect say, " That was the first seedling of being interested in typography," and led me to be a graphic designer really.
Isa Rodriguez: That's like a wonderful moment to draw on as like a genesis point.
M Wright: Yeah. She was such an interesting person too. And when I started teaching, I felt very uncomfortable sometimes in the role of being an authority figure in a classroom. It was so physically uncomfortable even. And thinking back to Ms. Griffith, and thinking about the ways that she approached teaching, that was eye opening for me.
I'm glad that I had that experience to see that there are different ways of engaging with the students and with teaching and learning.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. I'm interested in hearing about that. That's something that I struggle with too in the classroom. Especially because I think students expect me to behave as an authority figure, which is not something that I'm interested in doing.
And I, perceive a lot of discomfort in the classroom because I'm asking students to not treat me as an authority figure and kind of have their own agency and make their own decisions, and they're like, "Uh, what do I do?"
M Wright: Yes, that can also be paralyzing and that can be really daunting.
Dylan Cale Jones: So, yeah, like what, what's your, what's your experience of trying to balance that in the classroom?
M Wright: I totally agree with you of this like, "We are all on this journey together and we are going to discover things together."
But then also recognizing that I have spent years developing a skill set and a craft and finding ways to encourage the students to get passionate about that, to really engage with developing their own craft, figuring out what it is that they really want to devote themselves to. And finding a way to give them the space to explore, but also some kind of tether.
Isa Rodriguez: I imagine it sort of as going outside and like leading someone down a path somewhere where they're free to focus on whatever they want.
Say if you're going on a hike, like there's a person who perhaps knows the hike and is saying, "We're going this way. This is the trail we're taking." But leaving room, going slow enough that people can sort of get absorbed in what they're seeing along the way and have their individual interests that they follow through on.
Dylan Cale Jones: So, M, how long have you been teaching for, and how do you consider, or not ,teaching part of your creative practice?
M Wright: It's been a full-time gig for me since 2010. So it's become really connected and intertwined now because it's just kind of how I structure my time. It's always present and it's always a part of what I'm thinking about.
It has a seasonality to it that as a creative practitioner, I find really useful to have that kind of rhythm of academic year. And of course the relationships of mentoring students and sharing those kinds of discoveries. And having unexpected things opened up for me because of the way they respond to things we're working on and the things that they find and that they bring in to share with the rest of the class. Yeah, it definitely all becomes part of the kind of ecosystem.
Isa Rodriguez: From my understanding your practice separate from teaching is a lot about sharing information and it's about like finding that information and making it accessible.
M Wright: Yeah in the projects, like particularly the projects where there is a lot of public engagement and participation, there definitely are ways that you kind of feel the same kind of energy as you do in a classroom.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit more about your practice with Kate and maybe also your individual practice and what you work on on your own?
M Wright: Sure. With Kate a couple things we're working on one is called 11 o'clock TV and it's a web based artwork where we search through the archives of video footage specifically looking for video imagery of women and non-binary people who are active in intersectional feminist activism or knowledge sharing. And like, it covers an entire gamut of actual protest, marches, and actions. Or it could be a reading of poetry, or it could be someone sharing a recipe.
We were imagining what would it look like if you tuned into this television station that existed in what we are calling the post-patriarchy.
Dylan Cale Jones: Okay, cool.
M Wright: How do we make that happen now? How could we just, you know, tune into that now?
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Will it into being.
M Wright: Yes, exactly.
Isa Rodriguez: It exists at least here.
M Wright: Yes.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. That sounds fantastic. It also sounds like you're really thinking about representation in this project.
M Wright: Yes, definitely thinking about the ways that mass media just replicates this imbalance that has been so normalized for all of us.
One of the things that led to this project is that we were at the Radcliffe Institute, the Schlesinger Library, which is one of the largest archives about women's history in the U. S. and we had a research support grant to go and work in the archive.
We ended up spending a lot of time with the archive of a group of activists who were coalescing around the anti-war, anti-nuclear movement in the early 1980s. And so there was this overlap of feminist activism, peace activism. The people who were at this gathering in, Seneca County, New York were representative of all different identities, from different religious backgrounds or non-religious backgrounds, different sexualities, and different experiences in activist practice. And it's really a fascinating model of how they came together in this physical space to protest an army depot that was shipping nuclear warheads over to Europe in the buildup in the Cold War. But in coming together in this physical space, they had to build ramps so that women with limited mobility could move around the land. They had to build an outdoor kitchen, and they had to build a composting facility, and there needed to be places for people to stay. And so working through a consensus model, they created this form of a utopian feminist world in, in the form of the peace encampment.
And so we're just like, "Why have we never heard of this?" And it turns out it is, to this day, like the largest and the longest running women's activism against militarism in U.S. history.
These are things we should be connected to and carry forward. And so we've reactivated texts from that peace encampment with groups of people in art galleries and community space. And by sharing those texts and revoicing those texts, think about how, okay, now we are carrying this on. And what does this mean today?
Dylan Cale Jones: Hearing you talk about this specific project and knowing about your other projects and your practice with Kate, it seems like collaboration is a really central aspect of your practice.
Can you talk some about your interest in collaboration and, and how you've sort of come to that and also maybe how you, you manage your collaborations with other people?
M Wright: There's an energy that comes from collaboration that does run through all the projects. I mean, at the heart of it, Kate and I are collaborating. And so it begins that way of this conversation and two different perspectives, two different people's approaches to what we're researching and I call Kate the idea machine.
She just comes up with all kinds of ways of, of seeing, and processing and, and creating and making in response to things as an artist that are ways that would never occur to me. And so there's this richness of the dialogue between the two of us. And then the fact that a lot of the projects engage with other people, it becomes an important sort of exchange.
One of the things that we found in bringing those texts to the current moment from the 1980s was that it gave us an opening to talk with people about what is the activism that they're engaged with currently, locally, where they are, what are the things that are of concern to them?
You find your people out there, you know, and sometimes they're not where you are, but then that distance becomes generative in its own way, because like, "Oh, well, let us come to where you are, engage with your creative community. Who is here? You know, let's open a conversation, and see what people are up to here, and how that relates to these themes that we're making work about."
Isa Rodriguez: We have known you both for a long time, but we haven't seen each other in years.
But here we are again. Right. Having these conversations again.
Yeah.
M Wright: You never know like what kind of opportunities you'll find to collaborate with people that you have nurtured relationships with.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, it seems so essential to the things that you're interested in to in terms of movement work and just like the existence of historically oppressed people too is that like it requires people to work together, to see themselves in each other, to work through conflict in difficult ways. So that makes a lot of sense to me in terms of the histories that you're interested in and trying out different ways of collaborating in your own practice in relationship to those things.
M Wright: Yeah. And it's so helpful to have these models for approaching that, like you said, to see yourself in others, to work through difference, to connect across difference.
To go back to that project with the Women's Peace Encampment— they were going to officially open the peace camp right around the 4th of July. And so there was this question of, "Do we raise the U.S. Flag at the peace encampment or not?" And they worked through what was a pretty charged question, whether it could stand for what everyone collectively was building together, because that symbol meant different things to different people who were all very invested in this collective effort.
And so the consensus after a lot of engagement was that each woman would make their own flag if they chose to.
Dylan Cale Jones: I love that.
M Wright: But not running away from these polarizing or potentially divisive topics, but instead having the kind of space and trust to find some kind of answer that we all can agree to live by instead of avoiding or just you know, shutting it down.
Isa Rodriguez: Especially given that today that's the model that we see most often, right? Is people having a difference of opinions and there being no trust built to work together within that.
Dylan Cale Jones: So M, what else is going on in your life besides your art practice or your collaborative practice? What else are you balancing with the work that you're doing?
M Wright: Well, we have three dogs now. We have more dogs in the family than people.
Dylan Cale Jones: Does that make it a dog family?
M Wright: I think that makes us dog people.
For me, I enjoy having this sort of overflow or abundance of the work and the work is the teaching job, the work is the creative work that we do together. The work is also some projects that I'm doing as a graphic designer.
I'm like obsessed with this historical research I'm doing right now on women typesetters who really had to work around a lot of systemic barriers to entering the craft of typesetting because it was pretty locked down by socially determined codes around who could be an apprentice and who could be a typesetter. And none of those included people who were gendered as women.
But I, I think that, something that is a double edged sword is that I really love the overlap of work and life and life and work and trying to mingle those things together, but then things get out of balance and how do you find time for everything?
It's that becomes difficult.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Dylan and I take a lot of meetings in the park.
M Wright: Oh, nice.
Isa Rodriguez: Right. So it's like we are fully having a business meeting, but we're on a walk in the park.
It gets us outside time, some sunshine. But we're still fully in our work brains, but our bodies are somewhere else. And that's something we try and do to balance our tenacity around our projects a little bit.
Dylan Cale Jones: Well, and sometimes it allows us the flexibility to get distracted. A lot of times we work, but the other day I remember we were like, okay, like, let's get off the computer and go outside and go on a walk. And we can talk about what we're doing on the walk. And then we just ended up like. Picking flowers
Isa Rodriguez: And talking about birds.
M Wright: Yeah, birds are big for us right now.
I found that I really have a certain physical limit to how much I can be on screen anymore. This is a change for me. Yeah, I'll wake up sometimes on the weekend and be like, I cannot get on the screen.
Isa Rodriguez: I'm curious to hear what's your screen limit. Do you have like a number of hours that's your screen limit or is it just a feeling?
M Wright: No, it's just like an attitude. It's just like I can't open up the computer
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah I was thinking about your project and about, spending a lot of time in archives, right? Are those archives digital or are you still like in the actual stacks?
M Wright: They're both. And there's serendipity in both of those realms. But there is something about the physical stuff that's, you know, we're just kind of starved for, and so...
Dylan Cale Jones: It smells, it has a smell, right? That's great. That's my favorite part is like smelling old paper. It's so good.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, and I think there's a lot of information that exists physically that does not exist online. Although we have this idea like the internet has all the information I need. I find in my own research that most of it's still in books.
M Wright: Yeah. And so much information hasn't been digitized when it comes to archives of different papers and objects. And if the original things had some kind of materiality to them, then that doesn't transfer necessarily to the scan or the photograph of it.
For instance, we were in the physical archives and the archivists are bringing out these boxes you're like, "Oh my gosh, there are actual t shirts and banners in here!" You know, you're, you're unfolding the things and you're feeling the actual scale of them.
And all of that changes your response to it and opens up other ways of thinking about how you're going to then interact with those historical objects.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, and I find that unless someone has like a special research interest, a lot of the things that are digitized are not about marginalized communities.
M Wright: Right. Which is such important work. I think that ideally we would want it digitized so that people don't have to travel to, to these collections because that's not necessarily possible.
Dylan Cale Jones: So I want to go back to something that you were talking about before. One was this kind of like I think you said attitude about knowing when you are done with screen time and then you also talked about things getting out of balance and I'm wondering what what are those signals or indicators for you?
M Wright: Yeah, when I said attitude, I think it was like a grumpiness.
Dylan Cale Jones: Okay.
M Wright: Because I depend so much on the computer as my creative tool.
But you know, that question that you had about how did you experience creativity as a young person? I just feel like those kinds of physical engagements with all the things we used as kids and everything was an art material with the potential to become part of a sculpture or a drawing or a fort or, you know, dress up costume.
Yeah, now it's just the track pad. I think that our senses, they're, they're hungry for more.
I love that I'm a designer in this technological period. Learning from people who are a generation before how much time it took for them to do paste up or wait for a text to be typeset and then couriered across town. It's really rewarding and satisfying to just be able to do these things yourself. It's empowering!
But then you start hitting the bottom of the pool. It's just, you know, a couple of fingertips moving around a track pad you start to, to atrophy a little bit.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, I mean, talking about all of these things, like with the digitization of archives and the experience of being on the computer, all of it brings me back to this idea that even in the screen culture that we live in, our reality is material, right? And our experience of reality is material.
And I think too, your experience of talking about the archive and feeling those objects. And smelling them and interacting with their thickness and their texture and all of those kinds of things, right? I was like, oh yeah, because it starts getting us to imagine how we interact with our material world right now.
M Wright: Right. And how amazing, technologically, is it to have this archive that is 3D in real 3D with texture and smell.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, it's interactive.
Yeah.
You said that right now there's a lot going into your projects and you're teaching and that sort of mode, but have you had other times where the balance looked different?
M Wright: I think that it's been a similar juggling act for many years now. It's just like, it's the same pie chart, but maybe the slices change in size relatively to one another, but that kind of flexes over the course of the year and the pressures of teaching really fluctuate with the time of the semester.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. Does it look different for you in the summer?
M Wright: Oh, sure. Yeah. The summer, it's just like this dilation of time that you can fool yourself into thinking that a lot more as possible to do. Um, of course there's always that trap, but there's more breathing room. And I think that's so important because you have to leave time for the next ideas to enter from somewhere for the discoveries to happen.
Yeah, you never know when that's going to happen, but by taking some of the other pressures off and allowing more time just to kind of rummage, dig around, you know?
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah.
M Wright: Um, you, you just increase the odds of that, I guess.
I think that just the same way as living in a climate where you have different seasons throughout the year it keeps you feeling like you're, you're moving forward in time and marking time, you know, it's, it's helpful.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah.
So M, is there anything in your practice or in your life that is changing right now?
M Wright: We have moved a couple times in the last few years and that's a change of geography, a change of culture. We were living in Montreal for over four years and then moved back to the States. And I think that you have a sort of reverse culture shock after living outside of the country.
But I'm settling into a new professional position now, which is in a program where I have the opportunity to more closely mentor students and also oversee the student design studio, which works with local nonprofit organizations. And so there is an opportunity there for me to get to know who are these potential collaborators around Tulsa? What good work are they doing? How could we work with them to amplify their mission? And it's been a nice discovery, actually, and a good way of getting to know a new city and what's going on here, by meeting these people who are running different organizations in different socially engaged nonprofits.
Isa Rodriguez: It sounds like there's a lot of potential there.
M Wright: It's wonderful to see the students building their skillset and getting to actually really express their personal creative voices and at the same time be partnering with and collaborating with these organizations that they really believe in.
I'm always trying to open up the classroom to have the students making work that will be seen outside of the walls of the classroom. How can we engage with what's going on beyond campus? And this is just the ideal platform for that because their work goes out in the world. They take a lot of pride in making something that they know will have an audience and also something that they can really believe in is contributing to making a positive change.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah, it sounds like ideal clients in a way. Having done some freelance design work. It's really nice to believe in the thing that you're designing.
M Wright: Sometimes it feels like you have to work toward that, you know, you gotta just like put in the time and slog away and do the work that you like don't really connect with personally.
And so to be able to have this space where the students are working on projects that are really personally meaningful to them is pretty wonderful to see.
Isa Rodriguez: Yeah. And to have them experience that as young people, right? Where that's going to be one of their first experiences of designing for and with other people.
Dylan Cale Jones: What is your own personal definition of success? Or how do you know, for yourself, when you've done something that you consider successful? What does that look like to you or feel like, or whatever?
Smell like
M Wright: Back to the sense of smell... Smells like roses. I think that for me there's definitely a pressure to have achievements or successes that are externally defined that you know, I can justify my existence . That there are these categories on the CV and they're pretty defined.
I'm lucky that the professional expectations aligned to some degree with what I really just want to do kind of naturally as a curious person.
That's really fortunate but it's not something you would want to fully buy into as your own personal definition for success, because then it's this impossible hamster wheel of always measuring up to that.
And so I think for me in terms of just like a personal sense of satisfaction it's kind of when we hook into material for a project where I feel like, Ooh, this is exciting. And I just want to spend the rest of the day into the night, into the wee hours, just continuing to like gobble up as much of this as I can.
Like, I just love that feeling of stumbling onto something, learning about something. It kind of nourishes you in a way. Like a lot of the work that Kate and I do together and research that I'm doing for my own projects that feels like success even before it becomes something. Before it becomes something we can share with other people.
And, gosh, when we have a participatory activation of a project where we come together with people that we meet in that moment and we share something and they share something personal and there's a connection made there's a real sense of gratitude and gratification around that as well. So yeah, it seems to be found in, in those kinds of moments.
Dylan Cale Jones: Yeah, that that's relatable for sure.
Isa Rodriguez: So as we work into our wrap up questions, the first thing we'd like to know is if you have any advice for your past self.
M Wright: You know, it's funny, but I think that I really, as a kid, I like was doing okay. Everything seemed pretty, pretty good in my little world. I don't know. Um, I'm just, uh, just thinking back, you know, getting kind of nostalgic about that age where you're just allowed to dabble across all kinds of different subject matter before you get kind of specialized or locked into a field or more of a niche.
I think that maybe that little person could like come and tell me some things.
Isa Rodriguez: Well, how about we frame it this way? Do you have any encouragement for your past self?
M Wright: I guess that I would give an encouragement that it's okay to strike out and trust that you'll be stepping on firm ground at the next step you take and you never know what something will lead to next, really.
Dylan Cale Jones: Sure. I like that.
M Wright: In retrospect, looking backwards it makes sense, but looking forwards, it's kind of terrifying. You don't know where things will lead, but yeah, just a reassurance that like, yeah, it leads to good places.
Dylan Cale Jones: Great. Well, M, it's been wonderful talking to you. Thank you so much for hanging out with us and sharing your story with us.
M Wright: Well, it's been great to talk to both of you. Thank you It's been a lot of fun.
Dylan Cale Jones: Practice Practice is created by Isa Rodriguez and Dylan Cale Jones. The music you heard in this episode is by Kate Jarboe.
Isa Rodriguez: This season of Practice Practice is funded by a Thrive Grant from the Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition and the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Dylan Cale Jones: Thrive Grants fund community-driven, artist-led projects across the state of Oklahoma. Learn more and apply at ovac-ok.org.
M Wright: I'm M. Wright of AK/OK, and you're listening to Practice Practice.