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Gabrielle Ione Hickmon's How You Play Spades Is How You Live Life project
542 Plays1 year ago
Gabrielle Ione Hickmon (b. 1994) is a Black woman from a middle place—Ypsilanti, MI. Her lab is a place where clay and words meet. She is interested in body memory, waiting rooms, layovers, circles, Black imaginaries, and ocular proof.
Her work includes essays, ethnographic research, and coil-built ceramics. She won Bronze in the Leisure, Games, & Sport category of the 2022 Information is Beautiful Awards and First Honorable Mention in the 2022 NYU American Journalism Online Awards for her ethnographic research project, How You Play Spades is How You Play Life: Spades in the African American Community. Her writing has appeared in Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. She has been in residence at Pocoapoco, Mas Palou, and will soon be in residence at Dairy Hollow, Mudhouse, and Haystack.
Gabrielle is currently at work on The Boyne City Project, a series of vessels chronicling her family history in Michigan which dates back to before the Great Migration, an essay collection, and a memoir. She works out of a studio in Ann Arbor, MI.
Episode Notes
Gabrielle | Web | Instagram | Twitter
How You Play Spades Is How You Live Life at The Pudding
Information is Beautiful Awards
Mixed-ish from Kenya Barris
Do No Harm Project from the Urban Institute
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor
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00:01:52
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy of Is podcast.
Interview with Gabrielle Ione Hickman
00:01:54
Speaker
I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode of the show, we continue a little bit of our journey talking about data and art. And I'm very fortunate to be joined by Gabrielle Ione Hickman. Gabrielle won one of the Information is Beautiful awards back in December of 2022 for her project on spades that was published at the pudding.
00:02:16
Speaker
And Gabrielle combines a very interesting background of research and writing and art, and she created this really fantastic piece with the folks over at the Pudding on Spades. And you can't see this if you are listening to this podcast, but right now I'm holding up a copy of the card deck that was published, printed, along with the digital piece at the Pudding about the history of this game, Spades.
00:02:40
Speaker
And it really reaches deep into the black and African-American culture and history, as you'll hear in our conversation.
Artist Residency Experience in Spain
00:02:47
Speaker
And it's also just an interesting story about thinking about how we can combine qualitative research, historical documentations, and our own experience into telling immersive stories. So I'm going to let Gabrielle tell you all about it in this week's episode of the podcast. So here is my discussion with Gabrielle Ione Pickman.
00:03:09
Speaker
Hi Gabrielle. Good morning. Good morning. My time. It's not Barcelona. Yeah. Good evening. My time. Yeah. Your time. Okay. So before we get into talking about your work, so tell me a little bit about what you're doing in Spain. Yeah. So I'm in Barcelona right now. I just got here today. I'll be here for a few days. Um, and then I'm actually heading off to a residency, um, at mosque.
00:03:32
Speaker
For a week, are we going to have to be working on a book project while I'm there? Oh, that's very cool. So this is just a week for you to just like sit in the countryside of Spain and just work. Economists, we don't get residencies. So like, what does an artist residency look like? Like, what does it feel like?
00:03:49
Speaker
You know, each is different. Some of them have a lot of activities built into them to try to stimulate your craft or your practice, and some of them are more preformed for you to fill in the space. This one seems to be kind of a good mix of the two. There are some opportunities, and I'll be there with a group of people, so there's obviously time and space for connection. But I'm really looking forward to having time without having to balance.
00:04:16
Speaker
all of the other things in life to reach with my project, to start drafting for my project. So yeah, it's just kind of a stretch of uninterrupted time for me to hopefully only do my creative practice. Yeah, that's terrific. That's exciting. Yeah, like I said, not a lot of residency programs for us economists.
Research on the Card Game Spades
00:04:40
Speaker
So I reached out to you. Well, actually, we met at the Information is Beautiful Awards a few months ago here in DC when you won
00:04:46
Speaker
for your spades project. I'm going to hold up the cards, but people on listening can't really see this, but I have the physical cards out. So I want to talk to you about this and talk about some of your, your other work. But maybe we could just start with you telling folks about the project and what inspired you to do it. And then we can talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of it. Yeah. So, I mean, I grew up watching people in my life play spades, my mom, my dad, my older cousins.
00:05:13
Speaker
Um, I wasn't allowed to play then cause I was, you know, sitting at the kids table, you know, I saw it and I saw how like every Christmas or every barbecue, you know, somebody was playing spades or dominoes or some type of card game. Um, and then, you know, when I turned 18 and I was going off to college, my parents taught me how to play and I played all through college. And now when I get together with my friends, we're often playing spades and have the same
00:05:39
Speaker
you know, spades partner and my friend group, we have a, you know, kind of keep a running mental tally. Just one how many games it's really actually very serious. Yeah. And during the pandemic, you know, kind of at the height of it, because of course, because of course, it's not over. My mom and I were playing cards a lot in the house together, we weren't playing space, because there were only three people in our household, and you kind of need four people to play, but we were playing space 10, we were playing five crowns. And I kept
00:06:08
Speaker
Also like seeing spades pop up in popular culture. So there's a mixed-ish episode that deals with spades or spades is like playing in the best man movie and TV series and insecurities array is they're having a beach party and spades comes up, right? And so I just kept seeing it and I kept thinking like,
00:06:28
Speaker
Oh, and also space is always being debated and discussed on black Twitter at any given point in time. So I just kept seeing it around. I was playing cards and I kept kind of just a question talking to my head of like, why is this important to us? Where did this come from? Like, why is this important to black people? Where did this come from? And I couldn't find any answers that like were satisfactory to me online. And so I just said, okay, well, I will
00:06:58
Speaker
figure it out or I'll do it myself. If that record, that data isn't there, then I'll be the one to create it. Right. But what's interesting about what you did was you combined the historical record or experience with your own survey, your own data collection. Yes.
00:07:16
Speaker
So can you talk a little bit about, I guess the question is, I do want to ask like how you did the survey, but what was your thinking there? Did you want to get sort of the present and the past? Like how are you thinking about sort of doing both of those pieces? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think.
00:07:33
Speaker
For me, a lot of the times when I'm thinking why I work in general, but especially this piece, it's always important for me to have like records for black folks and just in general, you know, society to come back to because we're so much of human history, it hasn't been written by people who look like, or like my history has been discarded or, you know, damaged or just not given the attention that it deserves. And so part of it was, okay,
00:08:00
Speaker
like, understanding, yeah, like past, present, and maybe future. Like, where did this come from? How has it endured for so long? What does it mean in the present moment? And how might it, like, hold space or make room for Black futures, you know, beyond kind of what we're living through or experiencing right now? So it was both about, like, establishing a record
Collaborative Project with The Pudding
00:08:24
Speaker
And then also I just really wanted to work with the pudding. Like I had one that I had been reading their newsletter and seeing that through our careers. And I was just like, kept telling myself, one day you're going to have an idea and you're going to work with them. And this just ended up being that because it just felt even from the very beginning when I was pitching and thinking like conceiving of the idea, it just felt like it couldn't be your kind of like stereotypical.
00:08:48
Speaker
like article with text and a couple pictures. And then like, it just, it just, it couldn't, like playing so it's just a vibrant thing. And it just felt like that kind of more standard, but internet format would do the game itself justice and like the telling of the story.
00:09:09
Speaker
Yeah. So tell me a little bit about that process working with the Pudding folks. I've had some of them on the show in the past, but what was it like? What was your, I mean, you are an artist by background, so I don't know if you have a ton of HTML coding background. I certainly don't, but what was the process of working with them and building out the story on the site itself? Yeah. So from pitch to story on the site was eight or nine months.
00:09:39
Speaker
And from pitch to selling the first card deck was a full year. So we worked on the story all the way through the process for a year, which is kind of crazy. And it started out, and I just kind of pitched them, hey, I want to write something about black people in cards. And I was thinking about multiple card games, like Phase 10, Uno, Five Crowns, Phase, lots of different card games.
00:10:07
Speaker
But I think there was, you know, a specific line in my pitch that kind of spoke maybe specifically to spades. And so Matt Daniels, who was the editor that I probably worked the closest with at the putting, was responding and was like, this is really interesting. I think we should just do the stage piece of it. And so, you know, shout out to him for kind of being able to see through what all was in my pitch to like that real nugget. And, you know, then we had like, I had a call with, I think Matt and Jana and myself, Jana's the,
00:10:36
Speaker
She did the designs for the fees and I know does, you know, other things for the putting, but she's one of their main designers. Um, and so we had a call just like talk through it more. And then from there they were like, yes, we're interested. You know, you do all the contract types up. And then it was literally just me and Matt meeting like every week, every two weeks. And that first stretch of like, all right, how do we actually do this? Because there isn't any data on it that we can provide.
00:11:03
Speaker
or like, there are books about bidwist, which is the parent thing of spades, but there wasn't really anything that was like, directly, here's the history of spades, just like, so it was a lot of like, all right, this doesn't exist, so we have to create this data. And then also get to find different sources and places where we can pull from to kind of fill in the gaps or speak to speculate of what kind of this history might have been based upon
00:11:32
Speaker
the records that we do have. And so, you know, we met every week, every two weeks for that, you know, that year long or nine month period. And just kind of took the project in phases. So at first it was like, all right, we know we need to do a survey, so let's figure out the survey questions. So like, I drafted them, Matt, you know, would respond and we'd meet and talk about them. And then it's like, okay, we need graphics to go with putting out the survey. We need to put the survey into pipe form. We need to then
00:12:02
Speaker
send it out on Twitter and like, then it's looking at that and saying, okay, we've got, maybe it was a three, four hundred responses. What are the demographics of that response? So from age, from gender, from regional location, things like that, right? To try to tell us complete a picture of space in the African-American community in the US. And so it turned out that we didn't have enough
00:12:30
Speaker
people in like an older demographic, we didn't have enough West Coast representation. So then we had to go and use like pullfish, I believe it was and do a much more like targeted kind of push to get people to fill in the data that we didn't get just from kind of organically sharing it on Twitter and Instagram. So we got all that back and Matt coded the data quantitatively and I coded it qualitatively because I'm trained in qualitative methods. And so then we kind of
00:13:00
Speaker
sat with what came from both of those, you know, analyses. Yeah, those pieces. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, we sat with we sat with what came from those. And then I kind of went off and did some, some reading and some research into Okay, well, what is out here about space that I can try to glean from? And then I had to write it. Yeah, it was I don't think I I don't think I maybe started drafting it and like
00:13:28
Speaker
May or June. It was five or six months of work before I even put any words onto the page. Then it's drafting it and trying to figure out how we pull in the research that we did into it, the data that we have, is this section interesting or how do we make this engaging just in the actual narration on the page.
00:13:55
Speaker
And then we had to go, okay, how are we visually presenting this and what does that look like? And then you go through the design and then I didn't do any of the coding or the design. I would say that I created, directed the process, but I don't know how to do GitHub. I want to learn, but I don't have the skills. So they did that and we would review it. And then I also pulled in friends and other sources to look at it as I was going.
00:14:25
Speaker
Am I on track here based upon your experience with space or what you know about it? Just to make sure that it wasn't necessarily true just to like my experience or my interpretation of the game. And then once we kind of had the narrative and we had edits and we had the designs and we had the code, it was time to publish. And at some point within that time period, we were kind of getting burned out on it. It was a long time to work on one thing. And so it was close to when we were kind of going to publish it and we were like,
00:14:54
Speaker
we should print this on actual cards. I think that got us like really excited about the piece because it was something that neither of us, me or myself had ever done before. So that was kind of like that real push to like, let's get this out because we want to then do this like next quarter. Right. So I want to ask about the card piece of it. So it sounds like you were writing when you were in that phase of writing the text.
00:15:20
Speaker
Were you thinking we're going to lay this out on on cards like was that like were you going into it like that, because I would imagine that that would affect how you would write. Yeah, so when I pitched it What I kind of
00:15:35
Speaker
I drew something that essentially looked like a space table. So the screen would have had four hands, you know, kind of at North, South, East and West. And my idea was that you would click into one of the hands and then kind of read that story section. That section of the piece. So even from the pitch, I was kind of thinking about, because this is the pudding, like they do visually. You know what I mean? So I knew I had to have some idea of how I wanted this visually to come together.
00:16:03
Speaker
That ended up being too complicated to code. And also just kind of didn't, I think we ended up having more than like four sections, or we have three sections. It just didn't work. And so Matt, Jan, we just were all kind of brainstorming and came up with the idea to do it.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's best on a mobile device, because that's inherently vertical. Right. To do it on the cards, because obviously, you might place it with cards, and so it just kind of makes sense. Yeah, it's interesting, because the desktop version, because I've tested all three of them, right? So I've got the physical card set, which my daughter and I were reading this weekend. I've played with it on the mobile phone, and I played on the desktop. And the desktop, it goes horizontally. Right. And that's sort of interesting. I haven't tried another tablet, which maybe should be like, I mean, that's just
00:16:53
Speaker
Is vertical is vertical. So, so for the desktop, like, what was the thinking about keeping this is just kind of an aside, but I'm just kind of curious. Like, what was the thinking of having it horizontal on the desktop, but vertical and mobile? I honestly would say you probably have to ask that I remember.
00:17:15
Speaker
Um, it might've been just like a limitation in terms of the coding and the way that you had to, had to code it to work. I'm not, you know, for certain, but. Right. The technical piece is always like. Right. Right. And then also, you know, we read from left to right. And so it's also, you know, kind of a bit disorienting for me to be reading something that scrolls vertically on desktop.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah, that's on your phone. That makes sense. And so I think we also kind of talked about it from that perspective as well. Yeah, that that is really interesting, right? Because we read left to right, but the motion on the phone is natural to scroll up and down. Yeah, that's really interesting. You also mentioned that in this whole process, you asked friends and presumably family to just just read through it.
00:18:04
Speaker
And I get the sense from you both of what I've read and what we've been talking about, that this is a personal, this project has personal meaning to you, clearly like rooted all the way back in your family, not letting you sit at the adult table, which I enjoy. But like, what were the conversations like with your friends and family when you were showing them this piece, especially the early version? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it was like,
00:18:27
Speaker
This is really great. When is it going to be out? And that was even just, you know, because I was kind of giving people updates on Twitter and stuff. So people knew that like I was working on this for that year. Yeah. And but then, you know, I mean, one thing that came up, I have a friend, Phil Lewis, who's an editor at Health Coast. He's really great. I had him read the piece and give me some editing to be back. And in an initial draft, I had just written black.
00:18:55
Speaker
And he was like, well, I think you, I think you really should hone in on Africa, but we need to pick one. It's either black or African-American. While African-Americans are black, not all black people are African-American. So like true to the specific ethnicity, given that spades is a game that originates from, you know, folks who were enslaved, right? And so that's, that's a different black experience, right? Then someone who's in session were not enslaved.
Analyzing Qualitative Data
00:19:23
Speaker
America, specifically, of course, you know, there was some people throughout African-American, right? But like, that was even a question of, okay, we need to be specific to the actual story that you're trying to tell. And, you know, I had even gone and interviewed some Caribbean and an African black folks, because all black people play, you know, play space. Yeah. But these interviews, what was coming out was like, oh, that I learned this from my African-American friends.
00:19:51
Speaker
And so then, both with Phil's feedback and then Rob, who was putting up, he was like, yeah, we can actually leave that out and just like, it's okay for this to just be about the African American experience instead of trying to like encompass. Right. The broader. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then also the history section. I'm a history nerd. I'm trained in the social science. I've always loved history was longer.
00:20:18
Speaker
And it wasn't interesting to people. So we cut a lot of that out to make it kind of flow better, be more interesting. I also at one point wanted to kind of include something about my personal history with spades. That didn't end up making the cut either, because it just, as the piece took shape, it just didn't make sense to go from this survey to history to random personal diaphragm. It just didn't fit the narrative.
00:20:46
Speaker
Right. I kind of wanted to do where we were thinking about doing that didn't end up. Didn't work. Yeah. Okay. But now we've got it on the podcast. So now folks know a little bit about your personal spades history. You had mentioned also earlier that out of the survey that you all ran, Matt was doing the quantitative side and you were doing the qualitative side. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about your analysis of the qualitative data. Did you,
00:21:13
Speaker
I mean, I guess like, were there specific methods you use? Did you use tools like in vivo or something else? And then like, what was the richness that you found from the, from the qualitative piece? Yeah, I quoted it by hand. Okay.
00:21:26
Speaker
I'm a pen and paper or pen or, you know, paper and crayons girl. And so I remember just kind of using different colors to represent different codes. So particularly like one of the things that comes to mind is that question of like, how does anything feel? Yeah, thinking, you know, seeing, okay, how often are certain responses coming up?
00:21:48
Speaker
whether it's excited or black or loved or family or whatever else, right, like coloring each of those every time it came through in the data. And then, you know, kind of doing that same process to all of the different like questions to kind of see what is the what is the narrative story that's emerging from the data that people are giving, which I think
00:22:13
Speaker
Um, it's really helpful. And then I also did interviews, right? So I'm coding it and then I'm saying, Oh, I really like this person's answer to this, or this perspective is really interesting. Let me reach out to XYZ to then have an interview to talk even further about their survey responses. And that's where you get, you know, Terence's quote in the piece or, um, Robin's perspective. That's where that, um, kind of,
00:22:39
Speaker
That's where that comes in. And even within that, we were trying to think about gender, age, where in the country we live, all of that, so that even in the people who we were quoting in the story, there was representation and diversity.
00:22:54
Speaker
Right. That's really interesting. I mean, the whole thing is pretty interesting because in some ways, even though it's kind of, it's obviously on the pudding and celebrated and won an information is beautiful award. In some ways, it's not really a kind of like data visualization, like project. I mean, it has data, but it's a storytelling project. So like when you pitched it, were you thinking like, Oh, this is a data project? Or are you thinking like, this is a storytelling project?
00:23:22
Speaker
I think I was thinking this is something that doesn't exist that needs to exist. I have the ability to create it. I was really excited about using my training in the social sciences to do these. I was really excited about being able to say, I'm going to create a survey and then I'm going to code the survey and then I'm going to use that. It's almost like
00:23:47
Speaker
And I have a lot of friends and just people in my network who are in academia, and a lot of them like this could have been like a dissertation project. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And the kind of way that it in the way that I both went about it, and then also kind of in how it like ended up. Yeah. And, you know, people have said that it's changed the way that they think about these are friends who are like professors in the academy, it's changed the way that they think about sharing that information from their research, right? Because I could have
00:24:15
Speaker
this and like put it in a journal and then no one could see it. Like that's not the point.
Future Projects and Ambitions
00:24:22
Speaker
And so I think I was excited about being able to merge like my passion and interest for writing and telling black stories with my, you know, academic training. I have, you know, masters in social sciences. I've taken all these different methods courses. And so it was really exciting to get to
00:24:42
Speaker
And, you know, I bring my research skills into everything that I do, right? But to really concertedly get to kind of merge the two on a project. Like I said before, I knew that it needed to be visual and I just had loved the putting for forever. And so I knew I wanted to work with them. It was kind of all, all worked. I mean, you know, we do have visualizations in there. We have- No, right, right. But yeah, I do agree that in some ways it does feel
00:25:09
Speaker
moving like a narrative history project that then has data with it. But it's not like a dashboard kind of like, you know, a lot of the things that were at the information awards, you know, it's a dashboard kind of thing. But yeah, this is more of those immersive stories. But what's also like the physical cards, what's great about the physical cards is like, we all know like the internet just kind of like things are gonna disappear from the internet. But like the cards will always exist, right? So like the physical,
00:25:37
Speaker
Now, have you played spades with the cards? I have not, but my family members have. So in the past, they named my mom, two of my uncles and a family friend. They played did with my card deck, actually, which is sort of playing spades. And that was like a really, really cool moment. Yeah, that's pretty cool. People in my family playing with the cards. Yeah. And then we just did like another print run that sold out. So it's exciting for me, like the card deck, it should be like an everyday accessible archive.
00:26:05
Speaker
because you can sit there and read the story, but you can also play with it. And so, you know, there's something interesting to me in that, like being able to kind of be so hands-on and tactile and like engaged with this archive, with this story, with this archival object, with this art object that also has like a real world purpose. And I'm also
00:26:26
Speaker
When we did the print, when I got some decks just by myself, one for my personal archive, but I'm also endeavoring to get them into black and other cultural institutions, especially in the states around the world so that they can also be
00:26:40
Speaker
like properly preserved beyond people having them in their homes as well. And it's just so interesting to think about a cultural story and then being used in actual gameplay and how they kind of would wear over time and how those various things just kind of interact in the analog world in people's actual lives. It's just kind of interesting to think about
00:27:07
Speaker
you know, how they'll bend and they'll tear and they'll, you know, when you, you know, and they won't be as like slippery and glossy after a couple of plays, right? Like, yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. I mean, I know some people who have bought multiple decks so that they have one that they can play with and then one that is preserved. Right. Um, I, I even have some friends who, when we did the, like, I have friends who bought decks the first time and then we did the reprint and I was like, yeah, well, one, you should get one cause they're going to sell out. And then two, like,
00:27:36
Speaker
then you have one that you can play with and you have one that you can just keep. And so I think a lot of people have thought about it that way as well, recognizing like, oh, this is an archival art object. Let me have one that I take care of and then let me have one that I touch and interact with and play with. Right, right. So now looking forward, do you see yourself doing other projects? I don't want to say similar vein, but I guess I mean a similar vein in so far as
00:28:05
Speaker
doing another survey and doing that sort of social science research type thing and, you know, immersive, you know, sort of blending it with another story. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have every intention of getting a PhD.
00:28:21
Speaker
So there's obviously a lot of research assets that will go in that. I'm also always in the words of the survey I'm moving for and interested in, everybody's black. So a lot of my work always is centering around black culture. So there definitely are some other projects that I'm thinking about, whether that would be them in school or I would just try to, like the next thing that I do, one, I think will take longer time just because of how I'm thinking of it in my head. And two, I want to get like,
00:28:51
Speaker
a big grant to do it, you know, kind of up front or have it be like what I'm doing for school, which I think is doable given how this one's performed, et cetera, et cetera. So I definitely do have some other projects in mind that are kind of still rooted in like my personal black experience or things that I'm kind of, you know, noticing in my life and in my world, but yeah, I definitely do have some other ones in mind that I'm hoping to kind of get going on in the next year or so.
00:29:19
Speaker
I kind of already feel bad for your PhD classmates who are going to like write a dissertation and they'll be just like, you know, 40 page essay and you're going to come up with some like storytelling thing that's going to blow people's socks off. So hopefully, I mean, and also like hopefully the Academy doesn't try to like beat that out of me.
00:29:42
Speaker
So in econ at least, one of the guiding principles or lights is like you do your dissertation and then you try to get the chapters published as general. So maybe you don't do that in grad school, but you turn that thing into something else. And I know lots of history folks, right? They end up publishing their dissertation as a book later once they learn how to write for the non-academic. I've been writing for non-academic, so I've done both. So it'll be interesting to see how that
00:30:12
Speaker
how that goes. I'm also hopeful that like having this private online CD will like be interesting. Oh, yeah, we should accept ourselves. Yeah, fingers crossed. Well, we'll see what happens. I'm rooting for you that that's awesome. Do you want to talk for a moment about your your the project you're working on during your residency?
00:30:32
Speaker
It's not the project that you've been thinking about on my website. I haven't talked about that one publicly. I'm happy to talk about the one that you saw on my website though. Yeah, let's talk about that one. So you're working, so that's a, that also seems like a pretty personal project to you. So maybe you just talk about that, let folks know. Yeah, I mean, a lot of, yeah, like I said, a lot of my work is personal and rooted in my experience or what I'm seeing in kind of parallels in my experience, a lot of black experience, but the project that I'm starting on now, it's mostly rooted in ceramics. So if you didn't know,
00:31:01
Speaker
writer, journalist, but I also researcher and I also work with play ceramic artists. It's called the Boyne City Project. The kind of short and sweet version of it or just a bit is that my great, great, great grandparents helped found the city in northern Michigan called Boyne City in the 1800s. A lot of kind of their history and like mark on the town is still there. Like there's a church that my
00:31:31
Speaker
you know, great, great, great grandmother, like, you know, when you go into it, there's like a photo of her in there. She's, you know, a family member, if there's a historical marker outside of the church, there are streets aimed after them, there's all kinds of stuff that's so in this. And so this project is very much still still taking shape. But what's come to me so far is specifically through play, you know, it's about kind of reaching back and trying to, to understand and like,
00:31:59
Speaker
I always kind of root my practice at African ceramic traditions, but also to think about, I've forgotten the crucial piece of the song that makes this make sense. They own the brickyard and bricks are made of clay. And so for a long time, I've been interested in ceramics and felt really called to ceramics. And in the last few years, I've stepped into that kind of calling.
00:32:19
Speaker
And so I now work with Clay and see it as a continuation of the work that my ancestors did. And they're brickyard with Clay. And so it's both about the fact that I can't trace my, I can only trace my history so far back. I can't tell you where in Africa I'm descended from. So part of it is looking towards those methods that I don't, that I can intuitively and bodily kind of understand and work with and act on, but can't necessarily directly speak to.
00:32:48
Speaker
And then also thinking through the history itself in Michigan, documenting that, and just bringing it into a larger consciousness. It's not a narrative. I feel like you hear about people in the 1800s that often. So that for me means that it deserves to be told. And then thinking about the present of, well, what does this mean? Not only for my family, but how does this change our understandings of
00:33:15
Speaker
the black experience, black life, blackness in that time period, what does it mean that like this didn't necessarily, and not that I like aspire to, you know, being a billionaire or anything, but like, right, you see people like the rocker fellas or the Vanderbilt, right, who were operating in similar time periods, in kind of parallel industries, when they have all this sustained wealth, why isn't that so it is for my family. I'm also kind of interested in questions like, what does it really mean to be from a place? Because I would
00:33:45
Speaker
you know, if anybody's like from Michigan, I think I'm from, you know, I'm from Michigan, I can trace that back again. And so it's just, there's a lot of different questions around it. Right now, it's mostly kind of taking shape through my ceramic work. But I do think that eventually there will be some sort of written piece to it that just hasn't kind of come to me as clearly yet. Yeah, it's a
00:34:10
Speaker
as a family history project. And I'm hoping that, you know, as I continue to do it, it will also inspire people to, again, like reflect on, you know, what it means for black people in American history and black Midwestern history, specifically outside of like Chicago and Detroit, these kind of ethics and period that you think of black people as being. What does it mean for them to have been there before the Great Migration, which is typically when folks moved up from South to North.
00:34:38
Speaker
but also just to inspire people to look into their own family histories themselves because I think you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've come from and where you've come from. Yeah. Well, that's a great note to end on. Gabrielle, thanks so much for coming on the show. Good luck on the residency. I'm rooting for you on the PhD program, although get ready because it's
00:35:05
Speaker
Yeah, but the piece is fantastic and I'll share the links on the episode page. So folks can check out both the pudding story and your work on your website. And I'm looking forward to the next thing that you come out with. So thanks so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. It's been really fun.
00:35:25
Speaker
And thanks for tuning into this week's episode of the show. I hope you enjoyed that. I really do hope you will check out the story on the Pudding website about Spades. You should also consider just buying yourself a card deck. It's great, like the actual hold the project in your hands is really just fantastic. So I hope you enjoyed this week's episode of the show. Thanks for tuning in each and every other week.
00:35:45
Speaker
And I hope you will stay tuned for more great podcasts, great episodes and other great content on the Policy Vis website over the next few months. So until next time, this has been the Policy Vis Podcast. Thanks so much for listening.
00:36:00
Speaker
A number of people help bring you the policy of this podcast. Music is provided by the NRIs. Audio editing is provided by Ken Skaggs. Design and promotion is created with assistance from Sharon Satsuki-Ramirez. And each episode is transcribed by Jenny Transcription Services. If you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it and review it on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:36:22
Speaker
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