By the time Zaire Linnex Miles-Moultrie found out he won a South Arts Southern Prize and State Fellowship award for his art, he had forgotten all about it.
“It came as a huge surprise,” Miles-Moultrie said. “Months and months went by, and I forgot about it…. It came as a big and welcome surprise.”
Miles-Moultrie, who grew up in Fayetteville, recently graduated from UNC Greensboro with a degree in studio art with a concentration in printmaking and drawing. He recently finished a residency at Artspace in Raleigh, where he expects to have a concluding show next year. As a South Arts fellow, he and eight other Southern artists each won $5,000, and their work is currently on display at Western Carolina University’s Fine Art Museum at Bardo Arts Center through Oct. 23. All of the artists now compete for one of the two Southern Prizes.
This week, we caught up with Miles-Moultrie to talk about his award, the inspiration behind his art, and how his identity as a young, Black man affects his process.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Your work is very visually striking. It’s mostly monochromatic, but there’s a very visceral element to it. Can you talk about how you started out making art?
I got into art through my uncle, Philip Moultrie, introducing me to art through comic books. I grew up reading Marvel, DC, the American classics. For a time, I was pursuing medicine, law, and business at the same time, but that love for art always stayed.
When I got to college, I only applied to two universities: UNCG and Chapel Hill. I told myself that if I got into UNCG, I was going to do whatever the hell I like, and if I got into UNC Chapel Hill, I was going straight to medicine.
With the luck of the draw, I got denied at UNC Chapel Hill and got into UNCG.
How has your art changed over time?
When I started, I was really trying to find my voice and what I wanted to say, or even what I wanted to explore. In a lot of my art, in earlier works, there were fledglings of it, but not full comprehensible sentences. It was until I had a conversation with a friend about the surreal nature of Blackness in the American South that, from that thread, from that one line, I started a more intense artistic journey.
Talk about that thread, the “surreal nature of Blackness in the American South.” What do you mean by it?
At the time, I was going through a lot of personal loss and death. I was also reflecting on a few things that, growing up, I saw, like how there were different rules for people of color versus white society.
There was this paper named “Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman that I read that really blew me back. It was about the world we live in, especially talking about enslavement. It was an internal exploration of seeing the rules of my life and the life of my peers who are also Black compared to the life of my peers who are white.
It’s about how we talk, how we see the world, how law is reflected and understood. Some people say that it’s obvious, but you don’t understand how different it can be until you start analyzing it for what it is, and what it is is very much surreal.
How does that show up in your work?
I’m exploring Afropessimism, which is a critical framework that understands that Blackness and whiteness can’t exist without one another and explains that violence is structural, permanent, and foundational within the modern world.
One of my biggest breakthroughs was a piece called “I Think I See You,” and then “A Letter to My Niece,” “A Letter to My Nephew,” and “Untitled (Red)”. Those three pieces act as a basis for what I want to say. They come from the realities, the fears, the hopes, to the stark nature of what my art can achieve.
How do you make your art?
I use both historical imagery and imagery that I’ve made and collage them to comment about the past but also to speak about the present.
I collect things, everything from the 1600s to the early 20th century. I have a slew of copper engravings, copper plates. I work with libraries, book collectors.
I scan images and work digitally but also analog.
For example, with “Intertwined,” which was acquired by the Bradbury Art Museum in Arkansas for their permanent collection, that took about a week to make.
The figure itself was from a newspaper clipping from South Carolina from around 1890. I went through archives within the South Carolina government to get a file for it, but the quality wasn’t to my liking, so I had to find a source myself and scan it. From there, the trees are from the book Africa and Its Inhabitants, which is from 1892. I got that from a library in California. The bird was from a book of animals of clip art. The body of the person in the tree came from a print of Nat Turner’s Rebellion when he’s in the forest and got caught. So I’m scanning, cutting, editing things where I can, and then it’s all ultimately screen printed.
You look at a lot of historical events to create your work. Oftentimes it’s difficult history. Does that take a toll on you?
It can be extremely hard, especially with the subject matter that I’m talking about. The pieces that I’m working on are about getting close and personal with names that have been lost. And even if you don’t know them, it’s hard counting the number of people who were killed to racial hate.
You know it’s a lot, but when you start and sit down and look at all the people, and how young they were, especially how young they were. I sit down, and I think, it’s just that I’m lucky.
Growing up, I saw the high school to prison pipeline. It’s a stark reminder that Black people and people of color live by very different rules than what the world thinks.
How do you feel like your work resonates in the current state of the country?
It’s important because the thing about American history is we like to focus on the Revolution, we got away from the British, then we had the Civil War, and the people were free, we had reform with Civil Rights, and now we’re the “greatest country on earth.” That is far from the truth, it’s far from reality.
My work is controversial not because I seek to be controversial but because I’m trying to speak the truth. My mom is afraid for me, especially with the work I do, but in all honesty I’m okay with it because we need the truth to be better. If we try to whitewash and hide the ugliness, the ugliness will just pop back up 10 times over. We need the truth, the horrible-tasting cough syrup to get over the sickness, to provide the world that all of us want.
I find myself exploring the depravity, but also the hope that can come from it. There’s a lot of hope, you gotta find it.
