TAJ POSCE, BALTIMORE
Taj Poscé grew up in Philadelphia, surrounded by people who worked in the trades. A knowledge of house painting and building materials is still present in the work he makes now. His painting surfaces are reminiscent of those you might find on a brick wall, sidewalk, or construction site. Poscé now lives in Baltimore with his wife, after recently completing MICA’s MFA program in painting. He’s carved out an intentional studio practice, one year out of school. We spoke about some of the glaring differences in making work in a structured educational environment versus working alone in a studio and trusting yourself through developed intuition. Poscé also had a transformative time as an artist at the Yale Norfolk Summer Program, where he embraced seemingly destructive acts like burning under the guidance of Anna Betbeze. Burning, covering, and uncovering are now staples in his process. His abstract paintings are worked and worn but also offer scraps of visual information and identifiable shapes. Poscé compares this to the act of researching his own personal history and looking through archives. For him, painting is like telling a story, and no one knows what’s really true. Taj Poscé has rooted himself in Baltimore post graduate school and is just to closed his first solo exhibition in New York at Dimin Gallery, Just on the Other Side. Dimin also recently announced the representation of Poscé and is showed his work this week at NADA in Miami.
Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Taj Poscé
A: WHERE IS YOUR CURRENT STUDIO, HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN THERE?
T: So my current studio is in Baltimore, in the Art at 520 building, and it’s over in the old town mall area, and I’ve been here since May of 2024
A: YOU ARE FROM PHILADELPHIA AND ARE NOW BASED IN BALTIMORE. AFTER STUDYING AND WORKING IN BOTH, DO YOU FEEL THAT URBAN ENVIRONMENTS PLAY A ROLE IN THE WORK YOU MAKE?
T: Yeah. I think definitely from a cultural aspect, but also an aesthetic aspect, growing up in Philly there’s a lot of grids that are the same in Baltimore, they are two of the oldest cities in the U.S. and so there’s a lot of historical information that I’m interested in. There’s a lot of cultural information and then the aesthetic information, I definitely consider all those in my practice.
A: YOU ARE ABOUT TO CLOSE YOUR DEBUT EXHIBITION AT DIMIN IN NEW YORK AND IT WAS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED THAT YOU’LL BE REPRESENTED THERE AS WELL. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THE BODY OF WORK THAT WAS IN THIS EXHIBITION?
T: I’ll start with the easy part, the combination of work was maybe three or four pieces that I finished in my last two semesters of grad school, and then the rest of the work was made over the summer. I think that the easiest entry point into talking about the work is that break period, the transition period between graduate school, which is really fast paced. There are lot of people in your studio all the time to then being here over the summer and everything slows down. It is just me and I’m having to figure it out, am I trying to continue a conversation I was having in graduate school, or am I just trying to be present and find something new? So I think there was this dialogue of trying to find a mediary space in that, not trying to veer off too far from my ideas that I was already working with. It was a huge task. But I also wanted the work to be true and pure for that moment and I found that aesthetically and materially, I was still really invested in what I was doing, but I think, I was just really interested in the pace change. I think what happened was every day in graduate school, not every day, but every week, at least in graduate school, I’m having to present myself exteriorly, and this is a flip, and so the work became more of an interior investigation. I saw the palette soften, I saw the work become more airy and spacey and because I think that’s just where I was, my mind was – just in a more relaxed state and also just having to deal with a new environment, where there’s no people. So a lot of the work kind of started there.
Then as the summer went on I started to listen to audiobooks and listen to different music I think was inspiring me, and just the day to day of coming to the studio over the summer and I just started to lean more into this interior/exterior conversation. And so I was really interested in investigating what that looked like for me and so I created these surfaces where there’s a negative space already built into the surface, so it’s like a void in the center. I felt with everything I was doing with that work made sense, there were these two things operating at the same time, and then just mushed together. So there was the interior space, which to me was kind of represented by the center, which was this layered, industrial plastic burned and meshed together. Then there was the exterior part of the painting, which is abstract and to me represented more of what was going on outside of my world. So a lot of the work was then based off of that conceptual idea.
A: BIG PICTURE, WHAT ARE THE THEMES IMPORTANT TO YOUR WORK?
T: I always use the term stakes – what are the stakes? What’s at stake in my work? Or what are the stakes in my work?
I think materiality is one of those stakes, that’s something important in my work. Because I think that leads to the next thing, which is lineage. For me, materials play a huge part in my family culture and where, I guess, my makeup and where I come from. Then research and history is another big stake. So there’s always these little components of an archive of what I’m researching at the time or a personal archive of things that I’m writing that are literally finding their way into the paintings that I collage in. I am also very interested in, I guess, the best way to explain, is trying to expand the idea of Black art. I was really invested in this reading in school, Black artist symposiums, it was in the ’60s maybe, a bunch of Black artists from Romare Bearden, Sam Gilliam, when they were all young and deep into it. They had this conversation about expanding the Black aesthetic consciousness and what that meant. So that’s always been really important for my work too, I’m just really trying to think outside the box and create something unique, and expand what the Black experience means. It’s so nuanced and so that nuance is really important for me. Investigating the value of the cerebral versus emotional intelligence, that’s something that’s really valuable for me too, for people to see me as a full spectrum. And I think when I say see me, I mean see me through my work.
A: YOU USE A REALLY WIDE RANGE OF MATERIALS AND PROCESSES – PUSHING AGAINST THE LIMITS OF ABSTRACT PAINTING. HOW DO YOUR MATERIAL CHOICES SUPPORT THE IDEAS BEHIND YOUR WORK?
T: Way back when I was in undergraduate school, I used to just… I actually never had the words for my work and I couldn’t figure out what it was that I was doing, but I had this professor who would always say, well, he kind of gave me these terms of like, oh, you’re trying to find the hierarchy of materials and at the time I was like, sure, I don’t know. I don’t know if I still always know what I’m doing, but I do know since then it’s been important for me to parse down the materials and just get really familiar with very specific ones. I think the ones that have sustained or have stayed in my practice have been construction materials, or industrial materials that you would use to build a house or just build stuff. I grew up in the trades, my grandparents had a construction business and when I was 14, my first job was painting houses in South Philly. The materials that show up in my work are what you would see on site. The plastic is kind of what you would use to cover the floors and I use a lot of blue tape in my work and to get these graphic images sometimes and then I use caulk in my work, sometimes it’s paintable caulk, and sometimes it’s non paintable caulk.
So there’s this combination of construction materials and then there’s the research portion. And identifying things that are a part of my personal archive – conversations, poetry that I’m writing, or just random notes or thoughts in my head that just kind of flow through the work as I’m making it. Then there are the actual studio materials and I also do a lot of burning.
So the burning was just this very experimental thing that I learned about in 2018. I was working with another artist and they were teaching a group of youngers about just experimental mark making and experimental materials. So we did a lot of things like fabric dying, which I had never done before. This particular artist also had burning as a part of their practice, but they did it in a crazy way. This was all at the Yale Norfolk Summer program. It really was incredible – with Anna Betbeze. While I was there, they also had a super incredible library nearby, and so I was learning about all these other artists who were doing different material things, like Howard Hodgkins painting over frames and all this different stuff. It was really cool. It was challenging at first, because I had never been out of Philly on my own at that point and I was in Connecticut in the middle of nowhere. And for six weeks we couldn’t have visitors and I was staying with another family. But it ended up being great. I still am connected to all of those people, my cohort, a lot of them showed up for my solo show, which was awesome. And when I studied abroad, I had also come across an Italian postwar painter, Alberto Burri, and I also loved what he was doing with fire and plastic. His work is incredible. I think maybe for a period he was using burlap and stuff too, just all these post-war modern materials. I had always kind of had this interest in materials like that, I just loved work that was like that.
After that I spent that summer experimenting with burning, it kind of fell out of my practice for a while, and then in 2020 during the pandemic, I had an outside space and so I started working with it again, right before I got into graduate school. And once I got to Baltimore, the first piece that I made for graduate school had a really great reception. So I got really excited about continuing to use fire and I knew that I was there for two years and this is the first painting I made. And I was like, alright, I can do this, this can actually work. It has some momentum. It also just felt right, it felt like a good use of material, I think especially for all the things I was investigating at the time, like personal identity. For me, I was connecting what was happening to the idea of a Black person’s experience in America, trying to piece together my history, it’s just taking little bits and pieces and trying to fabulate this, construct this idea of what it could possibly be and you never know if it’s true or not. So when the fire takes so much away, it’s kind of like you lose control in a sense, and then what’s left is, to me, is what was meant to be there. That’s kind of how I also looked at the experience of trying to find my family archive, what was there and left for me was there for me to investigate, and try to piece some stuff together. I had connected to that initially and it’s expanded since then, but the fire just became really important for my practice. And I think just like the mysticism, people were just really interested in knowing how I was doing it. How is this color changing like that? I just started getting better with it, getting more tools and figuring it out.
A: YOU’VE RECENTLY FINISHED THE HOFFBERGER MFA PROGRAM AT MICA – HOW HAVE YOU STRUCTURED YOUR LIFE AND YOUR STUDIO PRACTICE SINCE THEN – WHAT IS YOUR DAY TO DAY LIKE?
T: Well, when I first got my studio, I had nothing lined up after school, I applied for a lot of stuff, and I was really just freaking out because I didn’t necessarily have a plan for my studio. But this studio was such a decent price and it was so nice and I had just enough money for a deposit, and then I was like, well fuck it, I’m gonna just do it. I’m glad I did. My wife really encouraged me, she was like, “Just do it ’cause you got to continue the momentum.” I felt like I was in a really decent place to do that. I feel like some people felt like they really needed a break, but for me, I knew the Sean Kelly group show was happening and I knew I had to keep it going. I did a little open studio thing, maybe a month into having the space and randomly, I mean, I invited a bunch of people, people I had never met just came and bought a bunch of drawings. And I was like, oh, that worked -so now let’s just keep it going. I’ve just really been lucky, to be honest.
Before I came to grad school, I had to figure out a plan. I ended up working my ass off and my aunt let me stay with her for a while, rent-free. I ended up buying a place, I did a ton of research on how I could do it the most efficient way and I bought a two-unit property. So when I did that it made sense because I had my studio in the basement and it’s where I had outdoor space, I had a little backyard, I was just outside the city, outside of Philly in the area called Clifton Heights. And I got my first solo show the following year at Rush Arts. And I sold one painting, but it still was helpful. And I was teaching at the time, middle school, I think, and then high school. So I had a renter upstairs and I lived on the first floor, which is like a one-bedroom flat. My wife and I also got engaged around that time. Then we moved here a few years later, it worked out so well the first time. And I was like, well if we’re moving to Baltimore and we get an apartment then we’re gonna be broke again. So I said let’s just do this all over again, and she was working for a tech company at the time and so I just showed her the same process that I did and we knew we were getting married at that point, we took a risk, she jumped in two feet with me when I got into school and we moved down here together and we did the same thing, we bought another two unit property. Being a landlord is challenging. But also I’m not a slumlord, I actually like to give people good living conditions. Growing up in the trades I have the ability to do a lot of work. So I did a bunch of renovating myself and my grandfather had a lot of connections. He had a lot of friends and so they helped me with stuff, like when I’m away and things like that. So, that’s been its own journey, just being a business owner. That’s kind of how I’ve been able to float through, but I’m not super rich, I just have low living expenses. And then on a day to day, I teach at Baltimore School of Arts right now, and I’m going to be teaching a class at MICA this spring too. I’m in the studio mostly. I only teach like three days a week, but when I’m not teaching I’m in the studio the rest of the time.
