April Bey

April Bey: Yeah, I'm up at 4:30am every morning.

 

Because I have to get the things I want to get done, done, before I get to my classes. So it can be hard to make art when you spend four hours with other adults helping them make their art and making them feel special. When you get home, you just want to relax and knock off and watch something. So that's usually when I get a lot of my practice in.

 

I was thinking about this the other day. It's 100% because I grew up in The Bahamas. But it's ironic because Bahamians don't have any concept of being tardy once we're functioning in the real world. The way the school systems are set up, we would be physically beaten if we were late. We had to show up to school on time. We have the British colonial system there, so we had uniforms, we had houses, and we were inspected every morning. And so that's where it started: my family pushing me out the door early, so I got to school on time so that I could rectify any uniform issues. But then, culturally, we don't show up on time for anything—none of my friends! It's like we lose it after we're out of the institution of school and the influence of British institutions, but I haven't because I don't have enough time. I don't have time to sleep in and not do anything with that whole part of the day. And I get enough sleep, so why not use that time?

The climate was a shock. I really, really hated the winters. When I first moved to the US, I thought it was such a flex to have a school bus because in The Bahamas you just walk to school. And I was like, "Oh, I get to ride on the school buses I saw on TV." But then waiting for that bus when it was like 30 degrees out and not really understanding how to properly dress for the cold… I was just trying to figure it out. Because, in The Bahamas, we wore uniforms. I would never see my friends out of uniform unless it was summer or on the weekends. And so now, all of a sudden, I had to learn how to dress, wear regular clothes every day, and not just for special occasions.

 

And in college, it got to be a little bit more comfortable because I had more access to different types of people, different types of Black people, and exchange students. I purposefully chose the international dorms so I didn't have to go home during the breaks, but also to meet everybody from different countries and stuff. So I think that's when I started getting comfortable; but that's also when I started being a little bit more educated, starting to feel uncomfortable because now I was understanding all of the language that had been around me when I moved to the Midwest from The Bahamas.

 

Yes, witchcraft, it's evil. In The Bahamas, at least for me growing up, we could only afford the one local Channel ZNS, Z-N-S, and that channel would often show older shows. So I grew up with these shows that I guess played on Nick at Nite; they would play on ZNS. So for me, books were the only way for me to understand young adults in other cultures. Harry Potter was one of them, and The Baby-Sitters Club, obviously. But it was Harry Potter that we would smuggle in through the US because the movies weren't allowed in The Bahamas either because it's witchcraft and The Bahamas is a Christian nation.

 

And I was obsessed with Harry Potter, or really any story at that time that gave me an escape, an adventure escape. For me, it was, “Now you have discovered that you are exceptional when your whole life you've been told you aren't, and now you get to escape the little rock that you've grown up on.” For me, it was like, “I want to live in the States, I want to go away and live in a castle and be in houses and wear uniforms instead of just being hot and miserable and having to walk two miles to go to school.” I read a lot of British young adult fiction, also R. L. Stine. It was mostly books. And to this day, I still have a very rigorous reading practice.

 

Absolutely. The reason reading is my favorite medium of consumption or listening to podcasts and storytelling is because my brain can shape things the way I want to see them. You can describe the race or whatever of the character all you want, but I'm still going to see Hermione with a big afro, and that's how I've always seen Hermione reading the character. That invitation for me to add my own creativity is the reason that I like that format. And so that's what I try to bring into my work as well: seeing how my planet is from the inside of my head and seeing if you can position yourself within that.

Junkanoo, 100%. It's a parade performance competition that happens in The Bahamas for Christmas and New Year. When I went recently, one of the things I realized was how small I was when I was a kid, being immersed in that, and walking through it. My memories of it up until I went this last year were giant costumes with feathers and fur and glitter and sequins, and the dancing is a part of the competition, as is the music and the presentation of the costumes. That's probably the biggest influence.

 

I think I fought that for a very long time in grad school. I was like, no, I just have a background in design, which I do. That's what I teach. But if I'm being honest, my attraction to design obviously comes from Junkanoo. Junkanoo is like an organically designed production. Seeing it recently, really put that into perspective for me. The craftsmanship that goes behind creating the costumes is very similar to what I do in my practice. And then I'm examining the school system again and how our standardized tests are. We call it Home Ec, but it's something that we were, I say, forced to do in The Bahamas. According to the US school system, a lot of students don't see cooking or sewing throughout their whole education, whereas in the Bahamas we're tested on it before we can progress.

 

And so, for my sewing projects, I didn't do very well because I was always trying to sneak in something creative. We had to make a lab coat, and that was it, to pass the test. And my lab coat was functional. There was one arm longer than the other, but I would've passed if I hadn't also spent six hours box-stitching a teddy bear on the pocket because I wanted to add a little extra oomph. So that's kind of also the aesthetic of Atlantica. It's very flamboyant, it's very gay, it's very extra. Glitter is our currency. You simply sit down and shake your hair out and that's how you pay for things on Atlantica.

 

The origin story comes from my dad. It was his way of explaining racism to a child who was way too young to understand it, and obviously for a young father who wasn't prepared to have that talk. He told me that we looked different because we were both aliens from another planet. Specifically, I wanted to understand why my features looked more like his and what those features meant because they didn't look like everybody else's features. Why is our nose laid out this way? Why does my hair go up instead of hang down? And so he literally was describing those features as alien, but that we're better. We're great aliens and we're here to observe and report on Earth and we can't tell anyone, it's a secret. Our magic is a secret. And I think that I walked away with that as being positive.

 

So that's the origin story of Atlantica and the stories that are now being developed and coming out in my work are reactions to being on earth. My friends and I talk about Atlantica in everyday contexts. Like when we get frustrated at that one restaurant for that one dish we had last year, and then they're out of it! We'll be like, "Oh, on Atlantica, this wouldn't even happen. They would've already had this prepared for us." Or if we're going somewhere in LA, my friend in the backseat will be like, "On Atlantica, you can just call ahead and the spot would be ready." And so now it's forming this online community where people are showing up also for my public photo shoots and being like, “I've lived in Atlantica and I'm ready to go. Let me do this.” And that's kind of where it's going now.

No, because you have to meet my dad, who a lot of people in the art world are starting to meet.  He's goofy. He's goofy like I am. And to us, aliens are the best thing ever. We're really into Star Trek. Most of the stories he told me I learned in college were from 1980s sci-fi movie plots because other students had them on while we were working. I was like, "Wait a minute!" And they're like, "Yeah, this movie's been around." Our favorite movie is Enemy Mine. Have either of you seen that? Enemy Mine, it's a very underrated ’80s sci-fi movie about humans discovering and colonizing space and then running into another alien race that's kind of doing that too. But because they can't communicate, they start a war. The movie centers around one of the soldiers crashing on this planet with another alien soldier and they're forced to live there for many years and they fall in love.

 

It has a lot of commentary on gender because you don't really know the gender of the alien, it fluctuates throughout the movie. It's a brilliant movie. But growing up, to me, aliens were always something to aspire to because, in a lot of our fiction about aliens, they're always better than us in some way. They come down to us and they're coming to either destroy us because we're not worthy or they're coming to take over because they need something we have that isn't as great as what they have, but is a key ingredient to what they need. And so that has been something I've thought about.

 

But also the word alien is used as a combative term against people who cross borders and try to decolonize the word alien and reclaim it. There's nothing wrong with being an alien or attempting assimilation. These people aren't aliens, they're human beings. And I'm trying to humanize that word as well. And also, it's coming from Blerd culture. In Blerd culture, nerd culture, aliens really aren't seen as being negative but are seen as something that we obsess over, that we cosplay, and that we're interested in.

 

Yeah, success is the best revenge! So I need to be transparent here and say that the reason why I've been so aggressive with my career is because when I got the teaching gig, a lot of people in my life were like, "You're not going to stop making art." I lost friends over this because they were like, "You're not going to make art anymore. People teach, they don't do.” And I was like, "What do you mean?" I can't do art on my own without a steady income and I have a disability, I need insurance, I'm being practical. And I'm so grateful I went that route because there's been some really shady art world things that if I didn't have a job to say, "No, I'm good, thank you," I would've lost art. The career side wouldn't have done as well, and I'm grateful for that. But at the same time, I really like to succeed to prove people wrong and that's the best revenge.

 

Absolutely. And after taking a year off from teaching, I learned a really big lesson, that I need to teach to keep the balance. There are things in the art world, putting myself into it a hundred percent where I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like I'm getting stupider.” They're simple concepts that my students get, like respecting my boundaries because I have a syllabus, emailing me during work time only, and responding to my emails in a professional way because they want to impress the professor. There's academic and intellectual stamina.

A lot of falling over on my face and getting through opportunities and then sitting up and being like, “Oh no, they took advantage of me.” I get my heart broken a lot. I'm in Los Angeles and the one thing that everybody asks me is, "Oh, how do you live there?" with this look on their face like they smelled something off. And then I'll have to be honest with them and say that it's difficult to form genuine relationships here in Hollywood, it's so transactional. People are so good at performing the closeness of a friendship. You become friends with them and then after a certain period of time, they haven't achieved what they thought they were going to achieve by being in your proximity. I've stumbled through a lot of those things.

 

But then also, again, I have a job that over the years has shown me what I'm worth. I used to do artist talks for like $150, but now that I'm a lecturer, and I know what that entails, like sitting down to put a presentation together that's going to work on any computer because you don't know what computer they're going to have. And then to actually give that presentation for an hour and then do 30 to 45 minutes of Q&A afterward, and the time to commute! People were asking me to do talks where the commute was an hour and a half both ways, and they were paying $150. I started paying taxes. I have two assistants, who are employees now, and I'm now paying all of those taxes. So I can tell you exactly how much my time is worth an hour now based on how much it costs me to not be in the studio drafting and sewing and laying stuff out. And so once I calculated that I realized that a lot of these opportunities were philanthropic, so I started categorizing them as such. And so when people ask me to do these talks, I'm like, "I'm sorry, I can't afford to donate my time or I can't afford to do this." And usually, they'll follow up and be like, "Oh, we're paying you $150." Yes, but unfortunately when you count in the small business tax and all the taxes and all this other stuff that actually ends up costing me about $1,200 to do this talk.

 

Then I also send them an average of how much I've been paid before because it's not like I'm just floating through life. I actually have numbers of what people have paid me. It's like, if they're willing to pay me this much, how do you expect me to come down to you? And I have rules. If it's a Black-owned, nonprofit that's serving my community, then I'll do it. But that's philanthropic and I have a quota because we can't be everywhere all the time. And that's how I've learned. I've made a lot of mistakes.

 

I say this is part of a solo show coming up at Tern Gallery in Nassau in 2024. 

Well, it's really, really, really, really, really fun. It's enjoyable. I like tightening my thread, I like buying needles, I like going shopping for fur, I like people touching the fur when they go to my shows, and I like seeing little Black girls smile and I like to see all people from all backgrounds come and giggle while they take selfies. I like traveling to meet new people because of my work. I like making work because it keeps me alive and it also prevents me from being a serial killer, I think.

 

It does.