Crystal Z. Campbell

In the first episode of season two of Why’d They Put That in a Museum, host Sarah Lees speaks with Beth Bacon about an exhibit of works by contemporary artist Crystal Z. Campbell. Through most of this podcast, Beth is recording while walking around the exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum. They discuss and array of Campbell's works, including collage-like artworks featuring manila paper, glass apothecary jars, and a video installation. Beth and Sarah explore themes such as healing, transformation, and the artist's Filipino heritage, touching on U.S. colonialism and personal history. In this episode Beth and Sarah discover firsthand how much more you can understand and appreciate art when you see it in person and talk about it in depth with someone else.

© 2025 Why'd They Put That In A Museum podcast hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Hi, and welcome to the podcast, Why'd They Put That in a Museum? I'm Beth Bacon, an author and art enthusiast, and I'm here with museum curator, Sarah Lees. Hi, Beth, and welcome back to the first episode of our season two. Yeah, thanks to all of our listeners for getting to know us in season one, and we're glad you're here for season two. Have you ever walked through a museum and wondered, why is this on display? What does it meaning where did it come from and why did someone think it was important enough to make it onto this wall or pedestal or display case right so in this podcast we attempt to answer those questions focusing on a specific artwork or group of works by a particular artist and see where the conversation leads us It usually leads us into a whole new understanding of the work and the artist and maybe even a fresh look at creativity, culture, and other big ideas. So let's get started. This first episode, Beth was actually on site recording part of the podcast from within an exhibition of the artist Crystal Z. Campbell's work. Yes, so you'll hear a difference in the sound and that's because I am trying to keep my voice quiet as I am walking around a museum. So today we're going to look at an installation of a contemporary artist named Crystal Z. Campbell. I am here at the St. Louis Art Museum, which is a beautiful collection. This is an exhibit that has been here for the last nine months or so and is about to leave. So our listeners might not be able to come to it in person. Actually, I want to start by asking Sarah, why did you think Crystal Z. Campbell was a good person to look at their art? Well, I actually knew her a little bit when I was in Tulsa. She had an artist fellowship there and worked on some really interesting things related to the city of Tulsa. And I think her project in St. Louis also has a lot of relevance and resonance with that city's history. The series of exhibitions, right, that the St. Louis Art Museum does to support contemporary artists every year, I guess, they grant a fellowship to a contemporary artist to present a show. Yeah, they invite a contemporary artist to come to St. Louis for the year. That artist teaches a class at Washington University in St. Louis and also gets some space on the walls here at the Art Museum. The Art Museum and the university are not officially, like this is not a university museum, but they're really close to each other physically. You could walk from the campus of the school to this museum. So I guess they have a really close partnership, which is awesome. Yeah. So you kind of knew of Crystal Campbell from, I don't know, does she always use the Z in there? Crystal Z. Campbell from Oklahoma. Reading her bio, that's where she grew up. She also has relatives that are from the St. Louis area or at least Missouri somewhere as well. I think her art is deeply personal.

UNKNOWN 3:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

talks about and gets influenced by her family and her heritage. So we can talk about that a little. What are you seeing? What am I seeing? So for one thing, the exhibit is broken up into two rooms, which are not right next to each other, which I think is kind of unfortunate. And I'm in the room that is quieter because the other room has a video and the video is like booming. In this room, there are are a bunch of artworks that are inside frames and they're on walls. Although she does have one glass sculpture as well in this room. In the other room, there's two glass sculptures and a bunch of other things on the walls. One looks like kind of like a leather, treated leather with images on it. And of course the video that I was talking about. So that's way more multimedia in that room. What's interesting is I saw pictures of on the website and in the catalog. But looking at it in person, like you have always said, it's way better to go in person. Yes. They're really much more interesting to look at visually when you're here in person. Oh, good. They're made of different kinds of paper with textures on them and also rope, like pieces of yarn, like you'd knit a sweater out of, and also like rope that's more like what you would make use on a farm. Okay. Twine, I don't know, and yellow papers that look like manila envelopes. Yeah, well, that word right there I think is key, right? Manila. Yeah, because her heritage is that she is part Filipino, and I never knew that manila envelopes were from Manila. Yeah, no, I mean, it's just one of those things that's kind of in our culture and language that you don't think about, but... I don't know. I thought that manila was like a word like vanilla. It was like a flavor of paper. The paper itself is called abaca, A-B-A-C-A. It turns out that abaca fiber is made from a type of a banana plant that's typically sourced from the Philippines, where it is called manila hemp. And to me, manila envelopes, they're like inter-office memos. You remember back before we had email and you would put your memo in a manila envelope and like close it with a little string and like send it off to the accounting department yeah we called those cheeses because they had holes yeah yeah you could see what was in it right that's a blast from the past right but so anyway this fiber apparently is known for its strength like the fibers are extra long so you can shape it when it's wet as you're like making paper apparently it's also used to make tea bags because you can you can dry it and then wet it and it still holds together which i think is not true of a lot of paper i think that helps to explain the way that campbell kind of included other stuff within the paper fibers right and on top of it looks like there's one that has like it looks like little shells it's really beautiful like blue green shells against the yellow manila paper it's a really lovely color contrast and um I really, really like these pieces and I have to say that I wouldn't have had that response if I was just looking at the picture on the website. Right, yeah, no, which I'm doing now and they look interesting, but I bet the materiality of it is really engaging. You kind of want to get in there and try to figure out like what all the little pieces are and how they hold together. Yeah, and just like the patterns. She has the bigger twine in nice patterns and then the yarn It's like solid colors, blues and reds. It looks like the kind of yarn you would literally buy at Walmart to make a scarf. It's like acrylic yarn, you know. Yeah, so I wonder if in a way it's making art out of something that we sort of took for granted. I didn't even think about what manila means. But if you draw out the nature of the medium and its history, it becomes much richer than just like a folder in your office drawer or something. You can see that they were literally... Manila folders. You can see the clasp and the flap and the hole in it. And they're just cut up Manila envelopes. And also there's fabric. I can see like little pieces of fabric in there. And they're all sort of embedded in, maybe she made her own paper as well. And they're kind of in this homemade paper. She made the paper at a place called Diadene. They work with printmakers and I guess paper making as well. I love the fact that you can tell a human being made this and I remember like working with kindergartners and in some of my projects I not only read books to kindergartners but I sometimes do art classes with them and make paper you pull up paper right mush it together and flatten it with your hands and it's really fun

SPEAKER_01 8:54

yeah

SPEAKER_00 8:56

yeah at some point too I don't know if she used that process in this but maybe that is how she did some of this and then put in the threads and the shells and the fabric Yeah, I think so. Well, I think that's part of the quality of this fiber is you can do that much to it. Like you can include stuff within it and on top of it. A quick little description again from the museum's website. It says, paperworks in the exhibition were created during Campbell's time as a fellow at the Dieudonné papermaking studio in Brooklyn, and they're made of manila envelopes and manila rope, alluding to the centrality of the Philippine abaca industry to the U.S. colonial project. In other words, this was like a resource, you know, that of course, the U.S. wanted to control and monopolize from another region of the world. And that, you know, of course, is part of the philosophy of colonialism is that you want to own the raw materials. Yeah. And we're seeing that happening today in our political dialogue that's happening now. And can you take over a country just because you want the resources? Is that an okay thing to do? You know? Right. There's a lot of debate about that. And And I'm glad that there's art about it, too. She's definitely making it beautiful and interesting. Also, like the way that the rope is, you can almost anthropomorphize it a little bit. One of them kind of has this rope going across the middle and then these two other ropes on the sides. It almost looks like SpongeBob with a mustache. I'm really, really interpreting that. Nobody else might see that but me. But some of the look like? I don't know, when you have ropes going off the edges of a middle shape, it is like arms and legs. Right. That's, I mean, that's an interesting question. You know, they're not, they are, to me, when I'm looking at on the website and not in person, they're clearly abstract visual objects. You might wonder if there's also meaning to the shapes and the way that they're configured on that paper, because her work has so many layers and such richness that even like the colors, right, maybe those also have some significance. But Most of them are mainly yellow. There are people that are more like grayish blue. And there's one that's grayish blue that has like a loop of a rope going off the upper left side and then a string going down the lower right side. And to me, it looks like the loop is a head and then two ends of the string are like dancing legs. It kind of looks like a dancing shape. Now, again, that's me totally interpreting. But why not, right? I guess I get it. But why not? Yeah, because they are open to interpretation. That's part of the value of something that's that abstract is it doesn't tell you what you're meant to see in it. Right. I mean, that's why it's abstract. But I think like emotion is important in abstract art and the balance of it is pleasing and the colors are pleasing. When I came here, I was kind of nervous. I was like, I'm not sure I'm going to like it. But I'm here in person seeing it. I have a totally new respect for it and admiration for it. The other part of this exhibit are these glass vases. What size do you think these are? These glass bottles?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Well,

SPEAKER_00 12:15

when I looked at the image, they look kind of small and maybe the size of your hand, right? But now that I see the dimensions, it says it's 35 inches high, which is almost three feet. Yeah. These are huge. Wow. And they are excellently crafted. They are so elegant and so pristine. It looks really, really interesting next to the rough rope and handmade paper. And so to see this beautiful, very, very precise crystal glass next to these rough pictures is quite interesting to think that the same artist did both. Yeah, that's a good point. Some of these glass vessels have titles. I don't know what, if you are looking at something specific right now. Let me walk over. Okay. The one that is in the room where I am is yellow-ish, amber color, I guess. Oh, uh-huh. It's called The Comet after W.E.B. Dubois. Okay. Blown amber glass. It's basically two round globes and then a little triangular piece of glass at the top. So The Comet is a science fiction short story written by W.E.B. Dubois in 1920. It discusses the relationship between Jim Davis, a black man and julia a wealthy white woman after a comet strike unleashes toxic gases that kill everyone in new york except them great i have to read that i'm just trying to think about the resonance of putting that title on this object right do you imagine if you were inside there it would be sort of like a toxic gas kind of environment or something maybe yeah maybe maybe there's two globes which is interesting because earth is only one globe so why would there be two but but maybe one with arrow top is the comet Right? It suggests sort of direction and velocity, doesn't it, to me? Yeah, yeah. And also she calls them apothecary jars, like medicine would go in it. Yeah, yeah. It's all part of her visual imagination and vocabulary, right? They're kind of allusions to things more than representations of them, I think. Yeah. Yeah, the idea that these could also hold like healing substances. Yes. These objects are presented as alchemical symbols for healing from colonial legacies. Yeah. Healing is really interesting. You know, does art heal? What kinds of things heal? And if you make art about a healing vessel,

SPEAKER_01 14:52

it's

SPEAKER_00 14:54

a hopeful thing. Incorporating the depth of the history behind not just the objects, but their location and yeah, her own personal history as well. This is a living artist and she, all these, things at some workshops she went to in Brooklyn, a paper workshop. And she goes to Tacoma, Washington and does a glassblowing workshop and makes a bunch of art. Like you go girl, like do all media. I think that's awesome. Like why does she need to like stick with one thing? Yeah, I mean, her work is really varied and multifaceted. One of the things that she did in Tulsa was to I think she found some old film from a movie place in kind of resuscitated it. And even though it was all deteriorated, there's something so compelling about literally finding a piece of history, right? And trying to make into art. I wonder if that is some of the video that is in the other room in the museum. I'm going to go walk over there. Okay. So I'm heading over there now. It's quite a distance in the museum. I'm sure they had to deal with their permanent collection and find spaces for this temporary exhibit. So unfortunately, they're not right next door to each other. I think as a museum goer, I never would have put the two together. Right,

SPEAKER_01 16:14

right.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Here I am walking into the room. I don't know if you can hear. It's music right now. My microphone might be blocking it out because I have a really specific kind of... Yeah, I'm not sure. I can get little snippets. Can you hear that at all? Actually, maybe it's good that you can't hear it. so then we can keep talking. Yeah, that's true. So in this room, there are three more of those apothecary glassworks. One looks a lot like the amber one, but it's clear and it's got three balls on it. Okay. One of them is a black colored glass. Yeah. It also has the triangular topper at the top. Okay. But instead of round globes, it's more like oblong and

SPEAKER_01 17:02

ribbed.

SPEAKER_00 17:03

And then there's another one that's more teardrop shapes, opaque green and more of a see-through, almost purpley dark shade. They're all like really beautiful. Oh, now can you hear it? The video is talking. Can you hear that?

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

So it's talking about Mount Pinatubo, the volcano in the Philippines. Right, right. That happened 20 years ago or something? I don't even remember. So it's a video that's news footage but also colors added to it when you you know mark up a photo on your phone okay but then also some are like instead of a black and white film it's like red and black a whole bunch of different things are going on in this video um right yeah i'd have to dig into that yeah i have to say when i go to museums and i see a video i'll stop and look at it and definitely the question why did they put that in a Well, I think it's also that they demand your time, right? It's not just something you can look at and walk away from. You actually have to sit at least for some length of time to try to understand it, right? Because it's a time-based medium. And so it kind of demands more of you as a viewer, I think. Yeah. Yeah. I have to admit, sometimes if I was on a vacation and I'm like doing all this stuff and I go to a museum and there's a video, I'm like, oh, I'm going to do this. I'm like oh good I can sit here for 10 minutes and rest yeah and I watch the video and I don't get it yeah sometimes you know you just need a moment or if you don't have one on the flip side like if you're like I don't have time for this right now then you're also not going to get that video it can be challenging yeah so this video right now is showing a ton of really quick shots of all these stamps from the Philippines postage stamps

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

Old ones, new ones, five cents, two cents. It's going by so fast. Different people on there. Okay, that part just stopped. I did read in the brochure that family members of the artist were working at the post office in the Philippines. So that element might be really a personal. Yeah, yeah. You're right. I think the title of the video is named for a plant. Oh. Right now I'm looking at the video and there is a plant. It's a video of a plant. It almost looks like a dandelion. Yeah. Yeah. Is that the plant? I think so. So it's called the Mimosa pudica or a touch me not. It's a sensitive plant. It has like a big open kind of filly or lacy like leaf. But then if you touch it, it folds up. Oh, yeah. And on the video, it's a close up of somebody's finger and they're touching the leaf part and it And it goes from like sort of an open leaf to a closed one. Yeah. Yeah. The flower is sort of like a dandelion, a seeded dandelion. It looks like a little power plant. Oh, so the word I was looking for was makahia. That might be the Philippine word for the plant. I'm looking at the little card on the wall. Yeah. And it is makahia. And it is meant to have medicinal properties. Oh. Like there's a whole long list of things like for pain relief maybe and... just a whole bunch of other uses. So that's kind of interesting in the same room as the apothecary jars. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now we're seeing some connections, the manila paper, the Philippine video, the medicinal plant from the Philippines, the apothecary jars. There are themes in this, although they look to someone who doesn't dig in, that these things have no connection at all. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, an artist is taking inspiration from all different elements that cross their path, that come into their lives, that are part of their family history. And it makes total sense for them. But a museum visitor who just goes walking through, it's like, why are these things by the same artist? They look so different. Now we're back in our usual recording places. Sarah, I don't think I would have discovered the themes that tie together Crystal Z. Campbell's art without having you to bounce ideas off of. Art isn't really just for looking at. I think you need to talk about it too to really understand and appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a real value in hearing other people's perspectives and getting more information. So what do you think are the main themes that Campbell investigates? I'd say for Crystal Z. Campbell, a lot of her work, even if her pieces don't look and are made of different materials, paper, glass, video. I can see now that they share ideas, like ideas about healing and transformation. Yeah, definitely. There's apothecary jars. There's the healing plant, like the mimosa poetica in the video. There are a lot of themes that you write kind of center on these ideas. And I think healing is a hopeful theme. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, another thing I think that ties together her different work is that they all relate to her family's cultural background and the influence of colonialism, and in her case, Filipino heritage. Definitely, you can see that in her materials like the manila paper and the abahaca fiber and rope. Those are resources from the Philippines that were exploited under U.S. colonialism, and I think by using using them to create something, she's kind of restoring a value to them that was a bit taken away in an earlier period. Yeah, that's so interesting. Like art as let's honor it or restore value to. And that is a role of art. Another thing that came to me was that when I looked at her stuff, I couldn't help but have an emotional response. And it was a personal response. But I think the themes that she's working on are really like, universal, you know, her family heritage, colonialism, even healing, and like the huge universal theme of hope that you can see in her art. I think that's really interesting, the interplay of personal themes versus the universal themes. Is that something that curators look for when choosing art to display in a museum? Yeah, I mean, it does depend a little bit on the work itself, right? I mean, I think these are ideas that are in Kimball's work. They're things that she wants to draw out and so a curator in this instance you know wants to make sure that viewers can make those connections it's not always the case with all kinds of exhibitions right sometimes it's more about the materials or the process and there's less of these kind of broad overarching themes although of course you always want to suggest that there's more than just like a pretty picture on the wall there's there's usually some kind of broader idea that the curator does hope to draw out by bringing works together yeah and i just think it's interesting the combination of like these universal themes and then I looking at a piece of art have an individual personal response I guess you know curators would want the viewers to have a personal response like what do I personally feel yeah ending in front of it definitely we want to kind of make a connection with the viewer in some way at whatever level is available just thinking about this exhibition and my experience there. I never would have understood the bigger themes and maybe I wouldn't even have appreciated the art as much if I didn't have a dialogue with you about what I was looking at. I'm really starting to believe that you have to talk about art. Of course you look at it, but in museums we don't really talk about the art much as we're walking by. They're kind of quiet places. Art kind of reveals its secrets slowly but And we have to stop and look at it and talk about it. Definitely. If we really want to understand it and appreciate it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the challenges of presenting art in a public space is that very often it does demand time from the viewer, from, you know, the character putting it together. In addition to just going somewhere and seeing something in person, you do need to give it that greater thought either through conversation or through reading. I think you're absolutely right. It It really helps to take the time to try to understand more fully what the artist's goal is. And speaking of time, it looks like we're about out of time. Yeah. So if you enjoyed this episode, please do leave us a comment, share a link to the podcast with your friends, interact in whatever way you wish. Yes. And join us next time on Why'd They Put That in a Museum? See you next time. See ya.