Gabby Davis Artist Interview 

Interviewer: So, just give me a little introduction to yourself; just who you are, your year at Evergreen and what you study.

Gabby: My name’s Gabby Davis, I use they/them pronouns, I am 3 years at Evergreen but I am a super senior, 5th year in college, all together, because I’m trying to get my dual degree in both science and arts. I have the arts degree, so technically I could have graduated by now, by last year, but I’m doing this last year for upper division science credit for my second degree. So, hopefully, I’ll be graduating this Spring with two degrees. 

Interviewer: Dang, going for two degrees is impressive! For your art degree, what type of art do you usually make?

Gabby: My art’s all over the place. I’m actually jealous of people who just like, know their style and know their medium because I still don’t know mine. I love experimenting with all different types of stuff. But my associates degree is from Shoreline Community College, in Creative Project Management, which no one really knows about. I didn’t even know what it was until I graduated with it. But it just means that I have a lot of experience with a bunch of different things. Mostly graphic design, but we also learned all types of things, like how to JavaScript, and I learned UI and UX experience, user experience type of stuff for making websites and to translate them from your computer to your phone. I also did a bunch of 3D design stuff; making furniture and practicing how to do that. We practiced how to make goblins for video games. All kinds of things. So, I have dealt a lot with the physical type of art, and digital art. I haven’t done much with physical sculptures, though. But yeah, it’s just all over the place. When I came to Evergreen, I focused more on social psychology, regular psychology, abnormal psychology. I took Mukti Khanna’s “Mind, Body, Medicine” course, but it was all online due to Covid, so she kind of just mushed it all together with what would usually be her psychology capstone, so I learned a lot of psychology, as well as a lot of Ayurveda and other ancient practices to mush it all together. I think that’s what really inspired me to get into health, which is why I’m on the science track now. And I’m just like, ‘let’s just learn more of the tinier micro scale of everything, as well’. So, I’ve just been learning organic chemistry, and microbiology, as of right now. Just a lot of environmental remediation, which is actually pretty cool. I don’t really get to use my arts that much though, other than using different colored pens for my notes. But I don’t really get too much art out of it. 

Interviewer: It’s good that you’re involved in so many things though,and taking the time to immerse yourself in these. It’s very impressive!

Gabby: It’s because I don’t know what I wanna do. I feel like when you grow up, you have this whole setup, like “oh I wanna be this, I wanna be that”. And for me, I grew up in poverty in Baltimore, and then I was homeless a lot in my childhood, and sometimes had to sleep on my grandma’s couch. So, it’s like, any sort of idea I had of myself in the future, it would always just not really work out. I went to UMD for a bit, and I was all types of majors. I ended up in theater; theater was like, my big thing, and musical theater. But then I dropped out, so I didn’t even finish that. So I was just trying to figure out what the fuck I wanted to do with my life. And then I only really went back to school because of Covid, and all of that grant funding money they gave out to people. That was the only reason I could afford going back to school once I was housed again. So, I just feel like this was all pretty rushed, and now I do all these different things because I don’t know what I wanna do, so I’m like “I wanna try this out, I got the money too”. Like, I’ve done it all, and I still don’t know what I wanna do!

Interviewer: Just having involvement in so many different crafts and subjects. And there’s so much potential to take one of those things and create it to be such a bigger thing, you know? But it’s amazing to hear that you took these hard situations you’ve endured and took it as something to build your life upon. There’s this stained glass window piece that you sent me that is really intriguing to look at

Gabby: Oh yeah, the stained glass window. I made that completely by myself for an illustrator. It took a long time to get all the shapes. It was a project I had to do for my Adobe Illustrator class. I look at it though and I don’t like the colors. 

Interviewer: The colors are my favorite part! You take bold but plain colors and put them together to contrast them, and they’re just all over the place. I love it. And several shapes as well. Like pinning together the bigger circles to the smaller ones, and the bigger rectangles to the smaller ones. Tell me more about the whole process of this piece in general. 

Gabby: Frank Lloyd Wright was someone who we learned about in our illustrator class. Just some White guy, that’s all you really learn about in these classes. We were challenged to recreate art from multiple different guys, and I saw Frank Lloyd Wright’s stuff, and the whole idea with stained glass art, and what it represents to me. I’m not religious at all, but I grew up in a bunch of churches and everyone associates churches with stained glass. So I really just wanted to try to make all these shapes and I wanna try to do it digitally, you know?. So that’s how it ended up being that it was me trying to, for a class, trying to emulate some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s, uh, stained glass. And he’s very much into rectangles and circles. That’s why I specifically picked that one. And then I loved how crazy, because I think I was looking directly at another one of his pieces. I don’t even know if they have names. He just makes like these stained glass pieces and hangs them up in places and people commission them . So I don’t know if you’d be able to find it anywhere. But yeah, I really just tried to emulate the same thing.

Interviewer: It just came out so well and you know, there’s always the association with stained glass in churches is always just something that comes to mind whenever and they just look so beautiful, you know? 

Interviewer:  Was there a specific influence behind the colors? Or was it just something that kind of like, came to you randomly? 

Gabby: They’re close to the colors Frank Lloyd Wright would use in his own work. He used all types of stuff. I also tried to focus on colors that were specifically more dark and contrasty in terms of African design. What I wanna do now is really work on African textiles and African colors. And like incorporating that into what we think of as traditional classical art style. So that’s where the colors really came from. 

Interviewer: I can definitely get the sense of focusing on traditional colors that are seen in like African art and also just getting a sense of just highlighting African art in different ways as well. 

There’s also a piece called “Unapologetic”, I feel like that also reflects it pretty heavily.

Gabby: Yeah, that was also a part of that project. That was specifically a mood board for fashion. Because I wanted to try to dabble into fashion design in that class. ’cause I was like, ‘I don’t really know what to do.’ and we were just able to free range. And so I was like, “what if I just got into African textiles and this mood board was a part of that”, just trying to figure out what the colors were. Like different colors you don’t normally associate with Africa. And the aspect of queerness too, so I added the lipstick on the man and all this other stuff.

Interviewer: Dang, I didn’t think about that. Just like the subtle themes of queerness and like African art from the past, but you know, it’s never been abundant in most cases, you know? 

Gabby: Yeah. I agree.

Interviewer: Yeah. There’s a lot happening in the back as well. What was your process with picking out these images and why they felt most important to you in highlighting  what represents African art? 

Gabby: One of the big parts, of course, the textiles and the different patterns. I think people see Dashiki and they think that that’s like the only African pattern. So it was part of  me looking at different African patterns and figuring out what different symbols mean, ’cause we always talk about hieroglyphics and Sanskrit and all this, but I wanted to learn more about what a lot of these traditional African symbols meant; Things that people paint on their faces and brand into their skin. Like they don’t just do that for no reason. So I wanted to know what these things mean and how it is incorporated into the art? And then that became an expansion into color because you can’t have an African textile with no color. Like black and white doesn’t really exist there. So I was just sort of picking out the different colors. And that’s where the middle colors come from, the most expressive colors, the one’s I like the most. And then putting them together. Um, the woman, I picked her because her hair is so  Elizabethan, but they’re not, you know? Like it’s big has this Elizabethan wig shape, but then it’s also colorful and it’s made of wool. Like wool probably used to help make some of these African textiles, you know? 

So it just really spoke to me. 

Interviewer: There’s just like that, that like dual representation of the textiles

Gabby: Yeah. Just from her one picture. And I was like, I love that idea. Yeah. The background is just like, so, you know, it’s Africa. It’s just like stereotypical things we think of with Africa. And then I wanted to make the lion more queer. So I made the lion pink and his side of the lion is closer to the gay man. And I don’t know if he’s actually gay, but I made him gay in this photo. Gay and gender queer, whatever he wants to be, they wanna be, and change the color on their lips. So we had to practice Photoshop. So I used it to change the color to something more metallic, more American. I don’t think metallic is traditionally African, when we talk about makeup. I just felt like it worked. And then “Unapologetic”, which was like what I thought about when I saw it. I’m just like, yeah, this, these are black people just being black, you know, they’re different representations of black people than you would normally see. You wouldn’t see an African man and all of his garb with bright metallic lipstick on. You wouldn’t see this woman who’s a model and this crazy hair, you know? They’re just doing it, just living their lives unapologetically. 

Interviewer: Yeah. That definitely comes through a lot with the collage that you made. It’s just, you know, like using these people as just being unapologetic with like these examples of, you know,  just black bodies existing as how they want to be, you know? Just unapologetically and brandishing themselves with these colors that are just absolutely popping off and it’s taking away from that Western aspect that dominates almost every narrative that you hear. And especially with challenging that with the lion in the back, the stereotypical look that most people believe comes from Africa, and just putting that in the back and instead, putting  these  different representations of that, like in the front and on display. It came out super well.

Gabby: Thank you! Yeah, for this class, I was specifically trying to find photos that weren’t copyrighted. So I found a bunch of photos of people that weren’t copyrighted and then edited and stitched it all together,  and changed the colors of things and put things on top of things. So yeah, that was my research; trying to find things that wouldn’t get me in trouble in the class. 

Interviewer: It definitely worked out for the best.  

Gabby: Yeah, I was surprised. 

Interviewer: And you also have photography here!

Gabby: Yeah.  Those were during the 2020 protest at the time. So a lot of them, I just took pictures and  tried to take ’em respectfully, not just up in people’s faces. I had to do a whole narrative tableau. This one is of the “Tax Amazon” protest and Seattle. And these were like some of the best, the better photos. 

Interviewer: There’s also a portrait of Lucy Parsons. What’s a little bit of a backstory on that one? 

Gabby: I wanted to learn more about Black anarchists. Black abolitionists. And I found out about Lucy Parsons and I was like, why haven’t I ever heard about this bad bitch before? Like, she did so much. We learned all about Emma Goldman. And they existed around the same time and didn’t really like each other. Lucy Parsons didn’t like Emma Goldman. Goldman was really into free love sort of thing. But Lucy was like, “that distracts from the mission”, you know? I always feel weird about free love in general because it was just like an excuse for white men at the time to totally exploit women in a different way, you know? Like, we hear about free love. We don’t hear about women either. We hear about like men doing whatever the fuck they want, which is what they always do. White men specifically. And how it’s like, women started to feel more pressured to do this because of free love, you know, “don’t be, don’t be a stuck up love, free love,” you know? And so I always felt weird about that. And so I was on Lucy Parson’s side. It’s like decades later, but I’m like, yeah, I’m on Lucy Parson’s side. It’s just another excuse for white men to do what white men do. But we don’t learn about her as much because she was a former slave, was released,  and didn’t really tell people she was black. From what I read, she didn’t really tell people anything about her race. She married a white man and then just tried to coast, and that was, you know, what you did back then as a black person who could pass. But, she did a bunch of other amazing things. She did the same shit that Emma Goldman did. She did so much for the people she fed;  she called herself a social anarchist. I was really in awe of her. So I wanted to draw her. One of her famous black and white photos of her is as a young woman. And, you know, she rarely smiled. It was one of the first portraits I ever made. So it was a lot of fun to make. I did it completely from scratch. Sometimes I’ll trace over people’s faces, but I was gonna challenge myself to make this one, and I really liked the way it came out. I liked the way I got practice with different brushes, and with this was with Procreate. I used Procreate for my classes so that I could practice doing digital drawing. And this was one of my first ones actually. I haven’t really done any since. A lot of my art, I give away. I like making things for people as gifts. And then I end up giving it away. I won’t take a picture beforehand. Like, “It’s for you, I give it to you. If you wanna take a picture of it, go ahead, but like, it’s for you”. So this was one of the first things I made and was for myself and I didn’t really give it away. Um, I did submit it to “Spin Drift” Shoreline Community College’s literary journal. I also had a poem in at the same time in which I got to say “nigga”. So that was fun. I got to say “nigga” in my poem, printed in this very white literary journal. I loved it. I don’t even remember what happened, but sometimes you just get in, like those Black rages; I was in a mood that had said something or looked at me wrong or something, and I wanted to draw Lucy Parsons and write a very angry poem that I got published. And I just wanted to make it very clear that she’s an anarchist, which is why I picked mostly like black and red and that’s also why she’s got like the “A” circle as her earring. 

I wanted to like people that like look at her and wonder who she was. It  doesn’t look that much different from the black and white photo;  if you look it up, the positioning of the hat, the outfit, they’re the same. It’s just me and my anger, not like, “why don’t people know more about Lucy Parsons? Why don’t people look up Lucy Parsons?”  And now I bring her up all the time. She’s my wifi password!  

Interviewer: Wow, everything behind this picture is amazing! Yeah. I am also gonna be doing this interview word for word in the paper, so hopefully people will understand the rage in this interview. I have never heard of Lucy Parsons before, so I’m really happy that I’m able to know about her now 

Gabby: She’s put a lot of amazing stuff. She beefed with Emma Goldman, which I find really funny.

Interviewer: With what you’re telling me, just like the outlook on free love she wanted to express and Lucy being the opposite of that and saying like, no, actually we don’t need free love for several reasons. And then other people are just like, actually, you’re just weird for that. But like, she absolutely was not. There’s an underlying sentiment to free love that went overlooked at the time. It was really great talking to you though! Hearing the very strenuous process of how you made your art and different types of mediums has been great.

Gabby: Yeah, I’m just like, “let me try this”, you know?I don’t know what my style is. I don’t know if I’ll ever make anything like this Lucy Parsons picture again. Maybe I’m just like “maybe I don’t like that drawing style”, you know, the next time I draw her and she looks completely different. But, I’m on my journey and I hope if anyone white or black, whoever listens, you know, mostly black, I hope that they read my thing and they’re just like in the same head space and they’re just like, oh, “I’m think I’m an artist ’cause I make art, but I don’t really”, you know, I hope that it reaches to someone and being like, you’re not alone. Some people haven’t figured it out yet. And I feel like a lot of artists are very much like, “I have it figured out. I’ve been doing this, I’m gonna be a cartoonist and this is my style”, you know, and I’m just like, “I don’t, I don’t have that yet”, and it’s okay to be on that journey.  Maybe we live in this state our whole lives and it makes us better for it, you know? People get stuck in these like one bubbles and they do that their whole life. And I feel like you miss out on some things. Like, if you are only doing cartooning, you never know how much you might like sculpture. You never know how much you might like doing this or that, you know? So it’s like, I like where I am right now. And it’s a little worrisome, you know, calling myself an artist and I feel like, am I?I think I’m starting to grow into it, though. I used to hate it. ’cause you know, everyone’s around you and they know what they’re doing and they seem to know where they’re going. And I’m starting to learn to enjoy the ride. I get the little saying now where it’s like, “it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey”. I’m starting to understand it.