Q&A: Sharon Hayes, Professor of Fine Arts

For artist and Professor of Fine Arts Sharon Hayes, time is a public resource. Her work, which engages strategies of performance, video, and sonic and public sculpture, explores the impulse to represent one’s self and one’s presence in moments of history. Beginning with her 2003 video installation of repeating audio tapes made by the Symbionese Liberation Army and continuing through her five-part video series Ricerche, Hayes has investigated the ways people speak in groups, and the way groups speak through individual people. Last month, the final installment of Ricerche debuted at the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing, where it will be on view through August 11.

Hayes’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Andrea Rosen Gallery and Madrid’s Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, among many other places, and shown in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Guggenheim Museum.
 

When did you first come to Penn, and how to you conceptualize the relationship between your practice and your teaching?

I came to Penn in 2015 after 10 years teaching at The Cooper Union in New York City. I started teaching there right after graduate school, as I was building and deepening my art practice. I guess in some ways, these two practices–teaching and making art­–developed in relation to each other and are bound up with each other. I don’t teach my own work in the classroom but who I am as an artist, the questions I ask in my work, and the conceptual frameworks that animate my art practice, deeply inform the who, what, when, where and how of my teaching. I am constantly making and re-making courses, bringing in fresh content, working with new pedagogic forms. The huge privilege of teaching is that I get to work with and learn from successive generations of younger artists. I care about them and I care about the transformations they want in and from their work and also from the world around them.

It’s not easy to study art and it’s certainly not easy to teach art. Some of this is because making art is at the same time intensely personal and extremely public. But it is also because in order to make art that is powerful, an artist has to challenge, dissemble and break down prevailing concepts, forms, tastes and, even, attitudes. When you do this, it’s easy to feel lost, without an anchor, like you no longer know what a line does, how color functions, or how time moves. This can be scary but it is also extremely exciting.

My favorite moment of teaching is when I am in the studio with an artist looking at something they just made or in a class critique with a newly finished work and none of us, at first, can fully comprehend what we are looking at. Slowly, in collective effort, we offer observations, words, phrases, sentences that allow us all to absorb their proposal and, in so doing, we are led to a deeper and wider vocabulary, to new fields of discourse, to sharpened tools, skills and methodologies and to expansive ways of being in the world.
 

Who are your touchstones, creatively—the artists or elders who inform your practice?

At UCLA, where I went to grad school, I worked with the artist Mary Kelly. I hadn’t studied art as an undergraduate. I came to art via theatrically-based performance which I did in the mid to late ‘90s in the downtown dance, theater and performance scene in NYC. It was through Mary’s teaching and in my relationship with her and her practice that I learned so much of what has become important to me about the relationship between fields of discourse and fields of art making, about exhibition practice, being an “ethical witness” to an artwork and about art that takes an active relationship to politics or political movements, specifically feminism and queerness. She has been deeply influential to my practice as both an artist and a teacher.
 

Your work often engages with the creation, or assemblage, of queer histories; to what extent, if any, do you consider yourself to be an activist? Are there inherent tensions, in your mind, between the practices of activism and art-making?

I have such deep gratitude for activists, organizers, and community advocates who do the hard and often unpaid work of creating more humane, safe, healthy and just futures. While in the course of my life, I respond to and join this work (a large project that I think of as dismantling white, patriarchal heteronormativity) in and through participation in protests or organized actions, I have not been on the front lines of ideating and organizing. In my work, I am in dialogue with these actions and activities–past, present and future–and try to ask questions that are hard to ask in the space of the work itself, questions about time, the grammars of resistance, about sadness or disappointment as a political force. I often look backwards along queer genealogies because I’m also interested in the generative possibilities of the “could have been” or what, in linguistic parlance, is called the “unreal past.” I am interested in using my work to pull forward political pathways that were possible but did not happen both to learn something about the past but also to offer us all more probabilities for the future.
 

Could you tell me the genesis of the new work that’s included in the Whitney Biennial? What inspired you in the Pasolini film to make your own?

The work I am showing at the Whitney is the final part of series called Ricerche, which steps off of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1963 film, Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings), in which he goes across Italy interviewing people about sex or, what he calls, the sexual problem. My recent work is Ricerche: four and is an 80-minute, two-channel video installation composed from footage from interviews with three groups of LGBTQIA elders: one in Philadelphia, one in Dowelltown, Tennessee, and one in Los Angeles.

Ricerche translates from Italian as “research,” and is a word that Pasolini used in his film as an intertitle between sections (Ricerche I, Ricerche II, etc.). What I love about his film is that he’s asking these questions to people in groups and so those he interviews must navigate the very personal territory of sex inside of their collective affiliations and relations (with neighbors or family or their army troupe or their football team, etc.).

Back in 2013, a curator who knew I really loved the film invited me into a large group exhibition with the request to take it up in a work. It was an oddly specific request but I said yes because it aligned with my own growing interest in doing so.

I followed Pasolini’s interest in interviewing people in groups, and across four works I’ve interviewed 35 students at a women’s college in Western Massachusetts; kids (5-8 year olds and 17-18 year olds) of LGBTQIA families; 23 members of two women’s tackle football teams in Dallas-Ft. Worth; and now 35 LGBTQIA elders.
 

You also often collaborate as part of your practices; with whom are you currently collaborating for your teaching at Penn, and what do you find fruitful about the process?

Yes! Collaboration is hugely important to me. The first work I made as an artist was theatrically-based performance staged in the downtown dance, theater, and performance scene in New York City. Not only is that medium inherently collaborative, in that you can’t put up a work without a collective effort, but also this foundational encounter with the “scene” of downtown performance educated me toward the power of collective activities. So the collaborations of making art or organizing political actions but also those activities that we think of as passive, like being an audience, that really are not passive in the least.

At Penn, I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to collaborate in the classroom and outside of it. In addition to my work with colleagues at Weitzman, I’m affiliated faculty in the Center for Experimental Ethnography, I’ve been co-chair of the Advisory Board of the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, where I work with arts leaders across the University, and for the last year and a half, I’ve been on a faculty working group to discuss curricular intersections between dance, theater, and performance and to build a proposal for a Dance, Theater and Performance program at Penn. This fall I will co-teach a course called Is This Really Happening: Performance and Contemporary Political Horizons with Brooke O’Harra, an experimental theater maker who teaches in the Creative Writing Program at SAS. This is a SNF Paideia Program Course which makes it possible for us to teach performance in the field, so to speak, by taking students to performances happening across Philadelphia and engaging them through in-depth work with performance makers and thinkers.