Deborah Klezmer

Deborah Klezmer of Deborah Klezmer Design studio in Sante Fe, New Mexico is an old friend of mine who talks about her journey from a writer/editor to a glass artisan, to ceramicist to glass and metal worker to jewelry designer. She has built her business up and re-built her business over time with commissioned works and has now been able to create charitable opportunities from sales of her work to make the world a better place for others. She also talks about the revolutionaries in her family history and how it has affected her artwork.

https://www.deborahklezmerdesigns.com/

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Transcript

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Deborah Klezmer – recorded on 8/28/20

Tia Imani Hanna:Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let's talk about it right now. I'm your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome! Welcome Deborah Klezmer of Deborah Klezmer Designs in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thank you for coming to “Tia Time with Artists.”

Deborah Klezmer: Thank you for having me here. Nice to see you. Hear you.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I haven't seen you in like way too many years. Deborah and I met each other in Brooklyn, New York back in, I want to say what 2002 maybe?

Deborah Klezmer: Time makes no sense, so whatever you say is fine.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because when I met you, you had just started to teach yourself ceramics on your bathroom floor.

Deborah Klezmer: Probably glass. Teach myself glass.

Tia Imani Hanna: No, it was ceramics. You were on that. You were putting stuff on the bathroom floor.

Deborah Klezmer: Oh! It was mosaic work. Yes. Oh yeah. That was the apartment on Carol, on Carol Street. Yeah. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s been that long. Yup. It is an amazing thing because you were making a transition from being a writer to doing artwork. And, so you said, “Oh, I'll just figure this out. I'll just rip up my bathroom floor and put mosaic tile all over it and in the kitchen too.” I think you did the kitchen. You did the bathroom. You started doing glasswork. You started doing all those things. You said, “Oh, I'll figure it out. I'm cool like that. I'll just figure it out. I can just do this.” So, I was like, this is a woman that I have to know forever.

Deborah Klezmer: Mosaic people also get like that. Once you start doing mosaic work, you want to mosaic the entire world, you can't help it, So yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. So, tell me a little bit about that transition. You were writing, you had done the editing work for, what was the name of the project that you had done? A lot of editing work for two or three years?

Deborah Klezmer: More than that. Actually, the big project was 10 years. It's called “Women in World History” and it's still available as a reference book online and in your library. And it featured 10,000 women from all over the world from the beginning of recorded time and we worked with 500 academics all over the world to do the project. So, that was pretty great. And, I had done editorial work prior to that as well, but that was the really big project that my co-editor and I did. And, yeah, my dad's an artist, so like weekend fun for my folks was dragging me around to museums in my stroller, pushing me around. I don't know that it was super fun for me at the time, but I do think that I really learned to appreciate visual language definitely as much as written. So that transition was what happened to me from editing. You don't end up as a jeweler unless you have OCD. You just don't, it doesn't happen. You can't set stones. It's not possible. So ,I think, from the editing for so many years, I just kept checking to make sure that the comma was in the right place, like a thousand times, and that was no longer healthy for me to keep doing. It was really nice to make a transition to a visual language and it seemed to come really naturally to do that. And my dad, he put a hammer in my hand when I was a very young kid, so I learned to use tools very early on, and it was really nice to start using my hands, more than my head, and stop thinking so much and just let things come visually. That was a great moment, actually, for me.

Tia Imani Hanna: I bet. Was it more, you say visually, but was it also just a physical thing? Because you're sitting at a desk, and you're writing or you're typing on a computer or you're… was it more just moving and getting physically active again? Was that part of it too? Or…

Deborah Klezmer: I think so. I think just using that hand/eye coordination is just such a different body function and I really enjoy that. And, I think it is also the fact that, at least for me, for your hands to work really well, your head needs to shut off a little bit and your body needs to figure it out on its own. That’s a kind of a letting go that's really nice. And then, your body takes over, so it's not that your head's not working. You're just not thinking the way you do all day long. So, yeah, definitely the physicality of that has been awesome. Except I don't recommend mosaics like on the ceiling. It's brutal for the body, so anything overhead… not a fan anymore. Nope, too old, so there you go.

Tia Imani Hanna: You started self-teaching yourself the mosaics and then you expanded into glass at certain point. What was the transition from? You went from writing to mosaics?

Deborah Klezmer: I actually went to glass first. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, while I was editing, in the early days of my career as an editor, I was teaching myself just stained glass. Then I started using some of those techniques, both in mosaic work and in larger scale works as well. So, it definitely went from editing to both mosaic work and glass work. I was doing both of those professionally in New York and then when I first moved here to Santa Fe. And then I first moved here, I had a studio gallery that I opened within 10 seconds of moving here. I had no idea what I was doing, because I really thought of myself as an editor, but all of a sudden, I had a store front… I don't know, you could call it that. Sure. I can think of other words too. It was actually quite frightening at the time and a big geographical move from New York to Santa Fe, as well. All of that kind of whole transition was all part and parcel of the same thing. There was this quote from Ray Bradbury that I had heard something to the effect of, “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.” And that's what I felt like I was doing every day when I walked into the storefront. I was like, okay, but people found me and started supporting the work I was doing, which was wonderful. I was doing really large-scale installation work at that point. Not much mosaic work anymore by the time I got to Santa Fe, more large-scale glass installation, steel glass, and bronze, and also always incorporating these antique objects. Starting with…there was a little antique shop in Brooklyn on Atlantic Avenue, and I started collecting stuff from them and also, yeah, “Good Old Things” in New York, I don't know if you know them. Oh, I think they're probably still there, out of anyone. They had opened up several more locations and it's all salvage, architectural salvage. So, antique hardware plates, other types of salvage and just a lot of antique objects. So, I was incorporating all of that into my work in glass. and then when the economy tanked, however many years ago that was. Yeah. In 2008, when the economy tanked, I was making these really large-scale installation pieces and, all of a sudden, getting funding for enormous projects was much more difficult once that happened. So, I started making glass jewelry, but I didn't want to glue on attachments. Glue is, just not a good word, so yeah, I took a metal smithing… a basic metal smithing class with a guy named David Gaussoin, who is a wonderful jeweler, amazing jeweler here in Santa Fe. I did that just to make attachments for my glass jewelry, but I found that I really loved the metal work so much that kind of felt like a coming home. I wanted to just be there. I continue to use antique objects in my fine jewelry, antique watch mechanisms, and things like that. So, all of that, you can see the line through… I think when you look at all the different things that I've made to getting to this point of becoming a jeweler. I hope you can anyway.

Tia Imani Hanna: I do want to talk about the jewelry in depth, but I want… I'm just interested in the transitions that you've gone through. Because I'm hoping to inspire people who are out there, who are searching for their art, in more than one way.

Deborah Klezmer: Definitely.

Tia Imani Hanna: Art is in the artist and not in the tool. I think you're a really great example of that because… so we're talking about the time when you were working and you had a company called “Through the Keyhole” at that time. And then you went from mosaics to glass to mosaic, back to glass, incorporating iron.

Deborah Klezmer: Not really iron so much, but definitely bronze and steel. And I found a… part of… I think changing medium has to do with the people you find along the way. So, when I moved here to Santa Fe, I had really just been working with glass and lead and antique objects. And then I met someone who is just a really incredible metal fabricator who worked a lot in bronze and a lot in steel, and she and I just started hanging out. Now, she wanted to know about glass, and I wanted to know, how do you fabricate in bronze. So, there was just this exchange that took place. I do think that has a lot to do with it. The people who come into your path along the way who can just even lead you to certain tools. Because what you said is so true, what you're using doesn't make you an artist, but at the same time, just knowing what's out there and what tools are available to you can give you a different sense of what might be possible. So, she helped me a lot. Then I started making bronze and steel surrounds for these large, installation pieces in glass. Yeah, I loved the metal work a lot, particularly bronze. It's just a beautiful material to work with. And if you're in Santa Fe, you gotta try your hands at bronze because you're in Santa Fe. So, it just goes with the territory quite literally. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Are there big places where there's just raw bronze or just a lot of metal?

Deborah Klezmer: There it's just a really common material to be used here. We have a wonderful foundry here, right here in Santa Fe, for bronze casting. So, they're right here, and then you just have a lot of artists working in bronze. And, we have gorgeous sculpture all over Santa Fe that's done in bronze and steel. We have a lot of open space, so it's really nice to see artists using that space for sculptural work which is, I think, one of the things that is distinctive actually about Santa Fe. When you get here, you can't help but notice that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. Yeah, I bet. Yup. All those broad open surfaces and flat lands and then pieces of sculpture pop up all over the place

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And, then you have the mountains, the mountain ranges behind all that. So, it is truly beautiful. And also too in bronze, one of the things that I loved about bronze and steel as well. It's a little different with steel, but it was actually the patina work I love so much because A, you get to play with chemicals, B you get to play with fire, and then, you can create these very different effects of color and visual texture, depending on the combination of chemicals that you're using and temperature and all those factors. So, it's a process that’s actually not a hundred percent easy to control, which I loved about it, and the variation was just so beautiful, yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, when you're working on these larger pieces, was it, “I have this concept in my mind, but this is what it turned into?” Or was it like, “Oh, you drew it all out and laid it out exactly how you thought it should fit together?” Because you were working in structural pieces, so I know you have to be pretty exact about some things. Was it like it fit together like puzzle pieces or was it more of, maybe I'll just do this whimsical thing over here?

Deborah Klezmer: I think, honestly, it was very much both. If you're doing lead came work in glass, the stuff has to fit like really well. So, everything does have to be… again, OCD is your friend in that situation. For me, like everything's just gotta be very tidy because a problem in the bottom left corner of your project, as you build, is going to end up being a very big problem in the top right of your project and then you, yeah. It's not good. So, actually, that work did teach me to start. I don't draw now really, when I work, but for all of that work I did make very precise drawings. But then, there were times that, because there are other ways in glass too, you don't have to use lead came. You can use copper foil. And that does give you a little more leeway, especially if you like the look of heavy soldering. All of a sudden you would just have this really improvisational thing that you could have go on and I was able to lay things out on the bench, and just see what comes. It's actually, in part, how I work now because you want the materials to talk, or I wanted the materials to talk to me, and lead the way. But then you might have to, once you found the way, you then might have to make a really good template to put this together. It definitely a combination of both.

Tia Imani Hanna: You were working on the really big projects, now you've gone smaller. Through the Keyhole transitioned in 2008, when the market kicked the rug from underneath your feet. And so, you said let's go smaller and started working on the jewelry pieces. How did you go smaller? Because you're working in these huge pieces and, by the way, are any of those pieces still available?

Deborah Klezmer: Still available? No.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sold out? 

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, we actually are. We have two pieces in our collection that I have kept, but that was it. And, primarily, they were… as I kept moving through the work, I moved more and more toward just commissioned work. So, they were designed for specific spaces and specific situations. But with the glass jewelry, I had moved. Yeah. I do change techniques a lot. I had moved from okay, so stained glass, and then the way I was using it is called cold glass work. Okay. Because it's not done in a Jone’s Saw, cold, but then, seeing some really interesting results that people were getting in the kiln and Santa Fe has an enormously strong glass community. Really big, really active. We have a bullseye resource center here, which is a major deal, and so I wanted to try and again, okay, so again, a person comes into my life who had been an art teacher. Who was a ceramicist who had a gigantic kiln and because he had five kilns, he wanted the space instead of the kiln? So, he's do you want to house this kiln? Then I had the tool, right, to begin experimenting. He just totally transitioned my work at that point. Once I got the kiln, I was able to start doing warm glass and I've been making some large bowls that I call ‘permeables’ because they had lots of holes in them. And I liked the idea of a bowl that had a lot of holes.

Tia Imani Hanna: No real purpose, but to be artistic right.

Deborah Klezmer: No, no, no! That you could put apples in it. You can put letters in it, you just couldn't put soup in it, but I loved what the light did through those negative spaces. Glass is all about the light, so it was just one more dimension to work with and I love negative space. I use it all the time, no matter what medium, no matter what I'm doing, there's always going to be some negative space there. What did you ask me? Something about something, I don't know. Jewelry? Yeah. Oh, okay. So, what I started doing was I was able to make these like kind of giant slabs, using, in part, dichroic glass, which is very popular for glass jewelry. People love it. It's actually used by NASA. They put dichroic glass… I don't know if it's actually glass or, I dunno, but NASA uses it around the spaceship so that when it re-enters the atmosphere, it doesn't burn up, it is that highly reflective. You get exquisite color from it and shifts of color and it's very metallic. It has metal in it, so I was using a lot of dichroic glass and with other glass-making, these huge slabs, and then needed to find a way to cut them up into small pieces because I didn't really love a lot of the glass jewelry that's out there. It's like a little form that's laid out in glass and then fired, so you have these, soft bullnosed edges and I like a really crisp edge, especially in a piece of jewelry. Like I want the edge to look very intentional. again, no matter what material I'm working with, very interested in the edge. Because edges have a lot of surfaces. They've got really three surfaces to work with. I had a tile saw from years and years ago and got a new blade for it that was specific for glass, all water driven, and I was able to start cutting up the slabs. But then you have this really, like, grody edge. The edge doesn't look so good. It's nice and crisp. but it's really cloudy and sandy looking. So, then the pieces, once they're cut, I would form them on a grinder as well, so I could get nice curves from that. Then I would throw them back in the kiln to just do what's called a ‘fire polish’ and a fire polish will keep my edge nice and crisp, but then it's going to give me a glass edge, it's going to look like glass and so that was just perfect. And given that I was going to all that effort to make these little forms, wearable forms, that's why I really didn't want to just glue up prefabricated non-precious metal bale onto it. I really wanted to have an attachment. I like attachments. I want it to look like part of the piece. so that was what began the next part of the journey, you know. But no matter what, at least this has been my experience in my life, no matter what materials I'm using, no matter what the tools I'm using, fitting is fitting. Period. You need to know how to fit to be able to do almost anything. I always refer to writing, actually. Writing is building a nice cabinet. People think of it like this mystical process. It’s not. It's that you want to build a beautiful cabinet. That's how writing should be. It should be constructed that way. So, I've always had that brain about how I approach whatever form it is. Yeah. You might have to learn to use a new tool. You might have to learn to see a little bit differently, but all the skills you've had in these previous endeavors, they translate, they're going to help you out. They're going to come through for you, so it's going to be a much quicker learning process as you change what you're doing, provided you don't cut your arm off or all the other wonderful things that can happen.

Tia Imani Hanna: All of the different things that you've learned are definitely showing through in your jewelry pieces. Now, the one on your website, which is “DeborahKlezmerDesigns.com,” right? You talk about your grandfather's radio and the piece that you made about the radio. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I know I can send people to the site afterwards. 

Deborah Klezmer: Definitely. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Look at the video and see the piece itself. But what was it that you just said, Oh, I have this family radio and I just want to do something, a tribute, to him? 

Deborah Klezmer: It was in part to, of course, make a tribute to him. My grandfather was a Holocaust resistance leader. He ended up in the mountains, leading a partisan unit against the Nazis and the Fascists, and he was the head of the unit. No one knew he was a Jew and, basically, he spoke seven languages, so he could pretend to be whomever he needed to be at any given moment. So, he road in the car with the ethnic Germans and he wrote a memoir when he got back and then the family worked to publish it, actually, after he passed. So, it's just this crazy story, oh I don't even know what, absolute heroism and determination, And so one of the things early on, in the early days of the war when he was in Poland and the Germans were coming into Poland, the order was for all the Jews to turn in their radios. Okay. So, of course, to cut everyone off from information, and he didn't turn in his radio. He kept his shortwave radio and he credited that one initial act of defiance with really saving his life because he was able to get information that allowed him to stay ahead of troop movements as he was trying to avoid detection. That always stuck with me growing up for some reason. I knew his story, knew him, and loved him, and then we have this antique radio that was always in our living room when I was growing up. And, somehow, even though that radio was definitely not a shortwave radio, but in my kid's brain, it's like that Faulkner moment where the kid says, my mother is a fish. These things just get put together. That radio became that for me in my kid's brain, and I have that radio now in my studio. So, as our political climate was changing, I have been personally incredibly alarmed by the all-out assault on the press, given my family history and what I just told you, that is a terrifying notion. I feel like I have seen, through my family, pretty much firsthand what happens when you deny people access to information, so I wanted to address that in my work. Also, too, I really wanted to see if I could make a form that really looked like the radio that I had grown up with. Actually, that piece is entirely designed in CAD on the computer. I love being in CAD. It's three-dimensional space. You can do things in there that you simply can't do at the bench. It's very exciting, very liberating. Awesome. “Lawnmower Man." So, it was designed…

Tia Imani Hanna: More literary references.

Deborah Klezmer: It was designed in CAD and then 3D printed in wax. And then from there, it's traditional casting process lost wax casting. and then it's set with quite a few gemstones as well. The text on the radio says, “We will never give up our radios.” And that was the message behind the piece. A friend of mine, who's a filmmaker, Kiersten Russell, came here. We shot a video about the piece. It's about my grandfather. It's also about the making of this piece. I just feel like no matter what I'm working on, no matter what material, I do feel like there are a couple things in this life that I want to say. So that always comes through no matter what material I'm working in. And I do use text a lot, As someone who's had so many years of a career as a writer and editor, I can't help myself, but it's short, and it may only be three or four words, but then you get the visual language that goes with it. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Isn't that part of the thing of being a writer too, is that you say the most things with the least amount of words? I have that it's like physics, it's like a math proof, elegant and simple, but it's not. There's so much depth to that sentence. No, it's all of that training and all of that work is… It's…

Deborah Klezmer: Distilled. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. No question about it.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. It was the radio one, really, that caught my attention. So, you're doing that piece and you’re doing other pieces, and you’re creating other pieces for charity.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Yeah. When COVID hit and all my shows for this year were canceled and believe me, I am not alone in this. We're all going through this. It was really an amazing moment to have to catch up to, but I just felt since I didn't know what was going to happen next and everything in my world had been just really just, I don't know, laid bare for lack of a better word. I have really… I had spent so much, obviously, yes, as we all do as artists. It's been years to get the business just to a place where I felt like the past couple years have been really wonderful years for me creatively and, yeah, it's just been great. So, all of that kind of got stripped in a single moment with all the cancellations. So, I felt, “Okay, everything's been leveled to the ground right now anyway. I don't know how I'm going to survive it?” But of course, determined to survive, always worked 24/7 anyway, so I'll figure out a way. But since that's happened, let me take this moment to do the thing that I've put off for so many years, that's always been in the forefront of my mind, which is, I want to use my work in service to some greater good. And there were, I had… Yeah, I didn't have a million excuses, I really only had one, which was always, hmmm, let me wait until the business is making more money. Let me wait until things are in a better place to do it. I will get there. And that's what I will use that for. Okay. And, I also was raised with the phrase, “If not now, when?” So, it was an ‘if not now, when’ for me moment. Oh, I feel like I've really altered the business model, so I'm definitely doing pieces that have charitable components, donating a significant portion. I’m not talking 5%. I’m donating to nonpartisan charitable organizations, so it's a way of saying, if you're coming out and you're supporting a small business, that small business is going to support other community endeavors and I feel so happy. If there's one thing that I feel like has been a really positive thing that's happened in the past several months, it's that transition has been made and I'm thrilled to do that, and I trust everything will still be standing a year from now, or whenever when I show up in person at shows again. So far, the response has been really wonderful. There are a lot of people out there who want to help and it's nice to be able. One of the frustrations I have is that I probably could have been a surgeon, period, but life didn't lead me in that direction. And my only regret about that is not because I want to be a surgeon. It's that really does help people with direct help, but I also know that by the jewelry that we wear, people have a very personal relationship to those things and a necklace can be a talisman for someone that gives them strength and gives them hope and all of those other things. So that is something, I've learned that is something to be able to help out in a certain way, to be able to do that and then have direct help go to charitable organizations has been the perfect combination.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, what are some of the organizations that you're funding?

Deborah Klezmer: The biggest project that we've just done, it's a necklace that says we are all related and it was done in concert with my friend Sky Red Hawk who was my first friend in Santa Fe. He is a Lakota Sioux musician. It was to raise funding for the Native American Relief Fund, which provides direct funding to help native communities during COVID. The native communities have been hit particularly hard, in part because many people don't have running water and those other kinds of basic necessities, so it has made grappling with this situation even more difficult. Sky is an incredible flute player, so we went up to the Galisteo mountains. the Galisteo Basin here and he played the flute, and I made a piece based on what he played, and we've donated a significant amount of funding to them. 50% of proceeds from the sale of the necklace have gone to the Native American Relief Fund, basically any dime that the studio made off of our 50% was donated back or not donated, but used for advertising the piece so we could sell more so we could donate more. So, that's just been really wonderful. I do believe we are all related. It's a good message. No two ways about it. It's a good reminder.

Tia Imani Hanna: Is there another organization as well, or just the one?

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And then we're also donating money to the Esperanza Women's Shelter, which is here in Santa Fe for people who are experiencing domestic violence. And there's a piece specific for that donation on the giving page of the website and also there's a donation component to the radio piece actually, which helps fund legal resources for student journalists. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's all… the content is related to the charitable organization that's chosen. Yeah, it's all part of a piece, for lack of a better way to phrase it.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, definitely, your website says that you're a designer, artist, writer, and activist. Activist is definitely in your resume.

Deborah Klezmer: Sure. Sure. I just… I kinda, I believe that we all should do what we can and there are so many things I can't do. So, the few things that I can, I'm trying.

Tia Imani Hanna: We appreciate it. It's a good example for us all. Oh, she can do that, then I can do that. That's a good idea. Again,and that's why I wanted to have these conversations with people because people are doing things. And, if we, if I can get other people to hear what other folks are doing then, “Oh, yeah, I never thought of that. Shoot, I can do that.” Each one, teach one. 

Deborah Klezmer: It's so true, so true. And as much as a lot of artists, I'm not dissimilar from many other artists. My first choice is to be alone working away for 15 hours without getting up. But if being in the public a little bit more just helps me to hear what other people are doing and also share what I'm doing, I do think you're absolutely right. It's hugely important. And one thing I have to give a shout out for it to Santa Fe for that reason as well. When I moved here from New York, I didn't know what to expect in the artist community here. People are incredibly generous with their knowledge. Like, I have found that to be universally true. We all want to share what we're doing, and many people are doing these weird things, like, that are not very, it's not a traditional use of their materials, so that's exciting ‘cause, yeah, you want to push the boundaries of whatever you're working in, so yeah. Help is a good thing… to give it and to get it. Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. I remember in New York it was… I had seven jobs all the time, and was like the old “Living Color” TV show… “You lazy Jamaican you only have seven jobs,” it was kind of like that? And, I did very little art in New York, but at the same time, I got a lot out of being there because I did get to meet a lot of artists and played with some different people that I would not normally have had the chance to. So, know there's a lot of goods in and lot of bads. 

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Yeah. I love the fact that it's been as many years as it has been, and you and I are still… we're still doing it. And that's it's not a small thing, and I understand that maybe I had to get to my fifties to really understand what that is, but yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Fantastic. All right. I was trying to think, you've got all of these things going  and then, we talked about this briefly the other day. You're writing your werewolf story.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. Not in a while, man, but I would like to go back to that novel, I definitely would, but I don't know. We'll see.

Tia Imani Hanna: What was it about, because that there is something, it was about lights and darks. I think we were talking about that because when you work in the glass and you're talking about reflections and how the light hits it. And then you have the negative spaces in the bowls with the holes and, there are lights and darks. And then you talk about the freedom fighting with your grandfather and not giving up your radios now with the Trump machine. There's a lot of light and dark in your work. So now… you're… it's like, why werewolves? And I think because they have that in them, they're just like this terrible… light and dark in there. And I still remember when you read part of that work that you started back in the day on the werewolves, scared the crap out of me. 

Deborah Klezmer: That's so good. I love hearing that. That was the point. 

Tia Imani Hanna: There was only a couple of pages, but I was like, Oh my God.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. I think… it's funny that you brought that up just because of a current video piece that we're working on. It's about these jewelry forms that I call gear flowers, which are like this uniting of nature and culture. So, for me, I think for whatever reason, I'm always trying to take these things that we usually frame as a dichotomy and synthesize them and try to find the points of intersection. So, with the werewolf story, it really is about the more violent side of human nature because I don't think that the violence side is necessarily being the wolf part. I think of it as being the human part, with our compassionate self as well, and how those two things can, and very much do, co-exist. So, it's that meeting and I think that's always an exciting place. When you take two things that don't really belong together and you put them together, interesting things will happen, and it does force you to see the world in a different way. And I think in some ways, for me at least, I can only speak personally about this, but for me, it does help me overcome really negative feelings that I have toward anybody who doesn't think like I do. It helps me bridge. It's a bridge.

Tia Imani Hanna: The bridging, I get that because when Trump came into power, my partner, she literally just sat in the chair for literally two weeks and just shaking her head the whole time, saying, “I can't believe it.” And I just kept on trucking and she asked me. She said, “How can you not be affected by it?” I said I am affected by it, but this is just normal life for me. What's changed? Really, it's really, nothing's changed. Just like I was still doing the same thing I was doing yesterday. The thing that's strange about it is I actually am thankful for him because he's put all the stuff that was hidden… it's out in the open now. People aren't hiding anymore. So, all that stuff that I was seeing all the time as a black person in this country, it's not hidden anymore. And people are admitting things openly because they think it's okay because he's just vomiting crap all over the world and saying this is the way it should be. And people are like, yeah, that's right. So, you're like, Oh. So that idea of bridging between those people who support him, and they say, he's not all bad because he…

Deborah Klezmer: Can you think of a reason?

Tia Imani Hanna: I can’t. I can’t. Some people are saying he's not all bad because he's tough on crime or something. But the fact that they say he's not all bad because… somehow, they're justifying all of his behavior based on one thing that they found that they agree with.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah. And they're… I think there's a term, single issue voters. and I feel like they've built a coalition of all of these different kinds of single-issue voters, but those single issues just don't happen to be issues that I agree with at all.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's also one of those things where I still have to remember people are human.

Deborah Klezmer: Exactly.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that just because they support a candidate that I don't appreciate doesn't mean that they're bad humans. But, at the same time, I have to wonder… you're supporting, you're overlooking all of these horrible, inhumane things that he's supporting, and you think that's okay.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, how can I bridge that gap?

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, exactly. Yup. As a Jewish person, and someone whose… our family story is about the Holocaust because of my grandfather. Having grown up with the knowledge of what happened as being a predominant part of my lessons, right? There's this thing that you go through of not wanting to ever become like the people who did these horrible things, and I do think that there's a way in which hatred makes you like that, it makes you more susceptible to the ‘cray’, right? Hatred makes you more susceptible to ‘cray, cray’. We can leave it at that. I don't want to be that, and, at the same time, the polarization is real. The differences are real. They need to be acknowledged. They need to be discussed. I think sometimes it's as simple as, like, this very easy lesson that I was taught early on, “You don't have to say everything you think.” I do think the world might be a better place if… yeah. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: And that has been, I think, the fight that all of us have had internally and some of us externally, as well. It keeps coming back to, “What do we do? What are we doing?” I get… I'm hearing that from a lot of people. And I keep saying it, I just say, “Make art. Make art. Make art.” It does affect me. My stress is high. I'm worried about a lot of things I was never worried about before. Of course, COVID is a huge fear. But it's just make art, just keep making art and yeah. Because of COVID. Because we have this technology where we can talk to each other. It's like it… it's allowing us to have the salon that I've always wanted to have. I'm talking to people I could never talk to before. What are you doing? What are you working on right now? How can we work together? Is there something I can help you with? Can you help me? That is happening and on a different level. And I'm really pleased to see that. So, there is some good coming out of all of this. and I think because artists are creative enough to reach and ask for that. Yeah. So that is… that's a lovely thing to see happen.

Deborah Klezmer: I think those moments, where everything, just really falls apart, you can be felled by that, or you can innovate. Those are our choices. You can do a combination of both, different minutes in the day. I see a lot of people really just innovating and trying to find new ways to connect. We're humans. We want to connect. We'll figure it out until we can return to in-person stuff more safely. We'll figure it out. And I really appreciate what you're doing. I think it's awesome and it's always good to hear what other artists are doing, and adapting to weird times, so yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: It’s very strange. I's propelled us so quickly into this, this digital age for those of us who are over 40, over 30. Yeah, 20 I should say.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Because all of this digital stuff, it's like, what is this? But we're having to jump headlong. And I think this was going to be like a 10-year span to get to where we are right now. I think that it just pushed us from that ten years it would have taken us to get to where we are right now, where everybody jumped at the same time, which means everybody's a little bit more hyper-educated about digital stuff. Which I would've never even thought about this podcasting as even a possibility because before you had to have much more equipment, it cost a fortune. It's not like that anymore.

Deborah Klezmer: Yup. Yup. And as an artist, for me, at least, the digital stuff... and I still… I feel like a newbie every day still. But it is just another language. So that part is exciting, to learn, and that's why I also do work in CAD. Again, it's just another language. The technology, it's a tool, so it's one more tool. So, I love that.

Tia Imani Hanna: Let me ask you a question about what would you tell your younger self now that you didn't know. Let’s say, what would you tell your 30-year-old self?

Deborah Klezmer: 30.

Tia Imani Hanna: Can you remember what you were doing when you were 30?

Deborah Klezmer: Again, time makes no sense. So, I don't really know. I have a lot of trouble, things to chronology, just, in terms of, carbon dating myself, but thirties…

Tia Imani Hanna: Let's see. Late 80s, middle 90s, somewhere in there.

Deborah Klezmer: That helped me. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Let’s say the 30s.

Deborah Klezmer: This is what I would say. I don’t if it's relevant to anything we've discussed, but I think it actually is. I would use a quote from a poem by Lucille Clifton and… actually, no... It's a quote from Lucille Clifton, but I don't believe it's in one of her poems. She said it in an interview and she just said, “If you see crazy coming, cross the street.” And that’s what I would tell myself because it applies to a lot of different things, really. I think your path can be smoother if you just cross the street. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Just avoid the whole situation.

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, you don't have to flip them off, just cross the street. 

Tia Imani Hanna: I like that. So, woo hoo… cray-cray is comin’! 

Deborah Klezmer: Yeah, definitely. yeah. Yup. I think we have a lot of choice over what we permit into our lives and the less cray we have, the more creative I can be. There's no question about it. I'd rather be crazy at the bench all by myself. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, that's right. Have that crazy idea and have it turn into some beautiful piece of work. Is there anything that you want the audience to know before we sign off today? They should go to your website andour art, your photos, your videos are there at deborahklezmerdesigns.com.

Deborah Klezmer: And also, one of the ways that I'm getting through this time is with commission work, which I shied away from before with the jewelry. I did some, but I wasn't actively seeking a lot of it. And now, those are big projects. They're fun. I enjoy working closely with people. They're very personal. So, if you have something in mind, definitely feel free to contact me through the website if you don't see what you're looking for on the website.

Tia Imani Hanna: For sure. Thank you. Thank you, Deborah, for spending the time with me today on Tia Time with Artists.

Deborah Klezmer: I just love getting to see you!

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. 

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