THE NEW ORDER: WOMEN OF WOODY CREEK
WOODY CREEKER: Patricia I’m so honored to have you in the magazine. You rarely give interviews so this will be a thrill for our readers to get a glimpse into your life. Thank you so much for talking with us today. Let me start by asking you where you grew up?
PATRICIA BLANCHET: I was born in Haiti and I grew up in Queens, New York.
WCR: What brought you to Queens?
PB: We left Haiti at a time of great political strife under the Duvalier regime. My family was fairly outspoken; my parents were really young and they didn’t want to live under a reign of terror. This was in 1968. There was a first wave of Haitian immigrants in the ’60s, the elite and the intellectuals, who left the country, and we were among those people. It was a voluntary exile — we weren’t forced out, thank god, so we were able to go back and visit as I was growing up. I went back to Haiti every year, at least twice, so I really knew my family and my country. I spoke French; I spoke Creole. So Haiti has always been very close for me.
WCR: You went to an American university?
PB: I did. I went to Swarthmore College [outside Philadelphia]. Before that, my family and I went back to Haiti when I was still in high school. I had the time of my life: I was 15 years old, I was all over town, a real social butterfly, lots of boys, lots of friends. And I really got inside Haiti in a way that I hadn’t been able to before. I really got to see the countryside and dis-cover my country.
WCR: So you left an urban setting, and was it an urban setting in Haiti or were you sort of out on the outskirts?
IT WAS A REVELATION: THE CONTINENT LOOKED COMPLETELY DIFFERENT FROM WHAT I HAD SEEN BEFORE.
PB: We were in the capital, in Port-au-Prince. I was having such a seriously good time that I realized that if I wanted to go to college in the States, I’d have to get serious academically again. And so at 17 I decided to come back and live with an aunt on Long Island to apply to college. And then I went to Swarthmore College.
WCR: And you started a professional life right after college?
PB: Pretty much. I loved Swarthmore, but I really missed dancing and making art as I had growing up. And Swarthmore was very academically oriented, though it has a very strong music program. I did a semester of very intensive theatre there with the founder of American feminist dram a, Megan Terry, and Jo Ann Schmidman, both women who had worked with Joe Chaikin and the Open Theatre in New York — very progressive, experimental stuff. I really fell in love with their work. So I went with them to Omaha, Nebraska just to continue studying their work, and ended up starring in the productions. And I really loved it. Having been a classical dancer, it was fantastic for me to enter the theatre world in this very avant-garde fashion. There was a lot of dance in these productions and they were all work-shopped intensively, very process-oriented, very improvisational . . . so they were just extraordinary productions.
WCR: What a great experience. You are well known, in our circle, as a photographer. What got you into photography from theatre?
PB: You know, I could never figure out how to make money making art, and I still can’t [laughter]. But I love to do it. After the theatre experience, I ended up falling into arts management through Swarthmore connections. There was a dance company in Philadelphia that asked me to become their managing director. I jumped at the opportunity because I thought that it would be a way to continue to be in the dance world and also earn a stronger living.
WCR: Paying bills.
PB: Paying bills. And so that launched the beginning of my arts management career. I would go on to be the director of development at the Museum for African Art in New York, and to work as a development and programming consultant for several New York institutions including the Caribbean Cultural Center and NYU’s Institute of African-American Affairs. I focused on black and African Diaspora cultures, which I am very interested in, cultures from Africa that have spread here and throughout the world.
WCR: What did you do?
PB: While I was the programming director at NYU’s Institute of African-American Affairs, I went to Burkina Faso to attend FESPACO — a fantastic biannual film festival that’s like the Cannes of Africa. It’s amazing: full of starlets and ego-driven directors, intrigue and parties, and wall to wall film, all day long for two weeks; it’s intensive. And it’s all filmmakers that are from Africa or the African Diaspora. It’s an amazing collection of people and work. I went there to look at films to bring them back to program them here in the States and I fell in love with the country. I extended my trip from ten days to six weeks and traveled around. I was joined by my dear friend, Carol Thompson, who is curator of African art at the High Museum of Art. She had done her thesis on Burkina Faso, so she had an inside track on the country and very deep connections to people. We went on this extraordinary journey, and I took what I thought were really interesting pictures. That name, Burkina Faso, means “land of the upright people.” They are soaring people, physically, and emotionally. It was extraordinary to be there. When I came back, I looked at the photographic work and saw that I had the beginnings of a really interesting project. I quit my job and went into the studio full time. That was in 2001. I had my first show in 2002.
WCR: You jumped into this career.
PB: I kind of jumped in, but I do that all the time: I jump in. I had always taken photographs; I had studied film and video and worked on a few documentary projects, so I had a strong foundation for visual work even though I had been primarily a performer.
WCR: That’s a great way to start. You starred so young in the theatre as soon as you were in your early twenties?
PB: Well, earlier even because I was dancing seriously since I was 7; I auditioned for the Joffrey Ballet. They bad an academy for young dancers, so I was going to the Joffrey part of my day and to school the other part. When the Joffrey said I was ready to dance full-time, I balked because I loved school as well. For me, it’s always been kind of a struggle to find the right balance between art and life. So I’ve tried to continue to Work and also to enable other people’s work. I’ve been doing this dual thing all along.
WCR: Tell me about showing your work.
PB: I’ve been very careful not to show too much as I’ve been developing the work because I’m not quite finished with the full series yet.
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN KIND OF A STRUGGLE TO FIND THE RIGHT BALANCE BETWEEN ART AND LIFE.
WCR: So it’s been a five-year project.
PB: It’s been a five-year project, pretty much.
WCR: And you go back periodically?
PB: I go back every other year and I stay for about six weeks. I feel like I’m always there because I’m working with the material all the time. The other piece of what I’ve done in Burkina is to implement small cultural development projects that have real meaning and impact. For instance, in the village of Boni, I helped fund the building of a sculpture atelier. Boni is a fantastic place, but very poor, at least materially poor. The artisans were working making sculpture under a mango tree, a beautiful place, but it meant that during the rainy season they couldn’t work, so they were cut off from a consistent income stream. So they asked me if I would help fund a building where they could work year-round. And I did.
WCR: Fantastic.
PB: They’ve now developed this building where there are different areas: an enclosed place that’s protected from the sun where they sculpt; a roofless space where they let the masks dry because their masks soar up to twenty feet high; a locked storage area to keep the work safe from looters, and a showroom where they display the work so when visitors come they can buy stuff easily. So this building has helped keep their income stream going all year long.
WCR: What materials do they use?
PB: They use local wood and leaves and natural fibers. And now that their artistic production has increased, they’re able to sell more, and they’ve gotten more international recognition. They have a troupe now that leaves the village once a year and travels around Europe to show their masking traditions and their dance. Small projects can have such an impact.
WCR: And what a great contribution to the culture.
PB: Exactly. Getting back to the show: while I’ve developed this photo project called “Burkina Reflected,” I’ve only shown a little, but I think with impact. I had a big show at the Atlanta College of Art. 3,000 square feet of gallery space. . . all of my work.
WCR: Wow.
PB: It was very exciting and allowed me to jump formats. I bad been interested in showing work that was a little bit larger, almost life size, because I thought that would increase the intimacy with the portraits.
WCR: Absolutely.
PB: I wanted to show a different face of Africa. I’m very tired of this long tradition of foreigners going to Africa and imaging the continent in a way that they see it, a way that isn’t always genuine.
WCR: Like the Masai over and over.
PB: That’s right. I won’t mention names here of people whose work I really don’t relate to. . . but it’s the kind of work that is exotic, erotic, ritualistic, spectacular, you know, or ethnographic-a classical Africa that’s timeless and beautiful. .. all of these adjectives we have falsely attached to the continent: the National Geographic approach. Well, these are representations that have largely been put onto Africa by foreigners. I was very inspired by the work of African photographers: Malique Sidibe, Sedou Keita, Samuel Fasso, just to name a few African photographers who started showing in New York about ten years ago. It was a revelation: the continent looked completely different from what I had seen before. We are so accustomed to seeing images of ravaged Africa: war, famine, poverty, disease, conflict. But there’s a whole other side to the continent as well. First of all, it’s an enormous place.
WCR: Yes.
PB: I mean there are many, many countries with many, many different cultures. Burkina Faso alone has seventy different ethnic groups. And when you see images of Africa, you see this sort of general spectrum, like it’s one place. Remember Bush’s famous quote “Africa is a country.” I think this remains a false perception in people’s minds that it’s one place. So I decided, based on the work of the African photographers, that there was in fact another way of imaging the continent. I wanted to participate in this dialogue.
WCR: Wonderful. That’s really amazing.
PB: And that’s the basis of my work. I saw after that first trip that in fact my photographs were doing something completely different, partly because of my way of working. I collaborated very deeply with the subjects. I let them pose themselves, I Jet them dress themselves. They wanted to look good for their portraits, and I encouraged this. Also, a rolleiflex encourages very formal, but intimate portraits.
WCR: Not like snapshots.
PB: Not at all. People sat up. They wanted to have their pictures taken; they had thought about it, about how they wanted to be seen.
WCR: The upright people.
PB: Exactly. The upright people. Every time I went back, I would bring pictures with me to give back to the subjects. They saw the images of themselves, they saw what they liked, what they didn’t like, and we’d do another photo session. So this deepened the collaboration, and the quality of the images. The intimacy is so immediate you realIy feel and see the character of the subjects. In all the portraits, the gaze of the subjects is out-this is very important to me because I got tired of Africans being looked at. I wanted to give them a chance to look back. This mutually fascinated gaze is why I wanted to have life-size images. I had a vision of a room full of pictures hung at eye level of Africans looking at you looking at them, to ask the question of ourselves of why have we looked so deeply and still missed the point.
WCR: Interesting.
PB: The next show is on Martha’s Vineyard in August at the Carol Craven Gallery.
WCR: What’s the name of the magazine your work will be in?
PB: It’s called Trace, a real hipster mag-azine that has wide circulations in New York and London; it’s a cultural mag-azine that does all sorts of interesting things. They saw some of my work at Lincoln Center last year and based on that they invited me to have a spread in their magazine. I I thought great, absolutely. I’ve been very focused these last years on making the work, not on get-ting it out there. I don’t have a gallery, I don’t have a dealer. So any time that it’s gone out into the world, it’s because someone has seen it, grabbed it, and put it out there.
WCR: So what we’ve seen so far in the various shows are just peeks into the project you’ve been working on.
PB: Right. I’ve been lucky to show in great places while I’ve developed the work: the Goethe Institute in Ghana; the High Museum of Art in Atlanta; the Atlanta College of Art; Lincoln Center in New York; the Bill Wright Gallery, and now the Carol Craven Gallery. It’s really a privilege for me to able to show the work as I’ve developed it. The next step will be a book and hopefully a traveling show of the full “Burkina Reflected” series.
WCR: Wonderful. That’s beautiful. Just a couple more questions. . .What brought you to Woody Creek?
PB: Ed [Bradley], my husband, brought me to Woody Creek, I guess, twelve years ago. It was the beginning of our court-ship and he wanted to bring me to this place that he loved, that he’d been coming to for thirty years. Being from Haiti, and Haiti literally means “mountains after mountains,” I was very familiar with mountain landscapes, but in Haiti the mountains are more gentle. The highest peak in Haiti is 8,800 feet. There are none of these soaring, rocky, awe-inspiring peaks. And so the Rocky Mountain landscape was very different for me and it took me a little while to really get inside this place. But I’ve come to absolutely love this landscape and l can’t imagine a life without it. I think it’s such an extraordinary place and Woody Creek, in particular, is so special. We live in, I think, a little paradise.
WCR: That’s great.
PB: So now I have the best of both.
WCR: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Hunter, the community, Woody Creek Tavern?
PB: Hunter is a whole other interview. . . but the Tavern, I love the Tavern. A couple of years ago I had a horrible mountain-biking accident. It was just really stupid. I’m sort of a speed demon and I was going too fast, not paying attention. Ed was going at normal pace behind me and I was speeding ahead, just laughing and giggling and I wiped out. I completely destroyed my knee — everything but the knee cap, what orthopedic surgeons call a “grand slam.” I’ve recovered, thank goodness to Dick Steadman down at Steadman Hawkins Clinic and physical therapists like B.J. Williams . . . another reason we love Aspen, because we have access to such genius surgeons and therapists.
WCR: Yes, exactly.
PB: When the ladies at the Tavern, the waitresses, heard that I had done this, they sent me a care package, a big box full of food.
WCR: That’s wonderful.
PB: And it kept me going for about a week. I’ll never forget that. So, in that way, you know, Woody Creek is a real community. People watch out for each other here, take care of one another. Also, there are a lot of famous folks here whose privacy is really protected by the community. People leave you alone; there’s no gawking or chattering. It’s easy and low-key.
WCR: Except for the Woody Creeker magazine [laughter].
PB: Except for the Woody Creeker magazine. Voluntarily!
WCR: Voluntarily . . . Well, we really appreciate the interview and we are excited to start a series with you and Patti Stranahan and Ann Owsley, the women of Woody Creek. Thank you.
PB: Thank you.
