Excerpts from An Interview with Nathaniel Donnett

About my use of brown paper bags as part of my media for making art. Well, the first idea was to look into how people carry their personal memories or ideas or experiences with them wherever they go, whether they are bad ones or good ones or experiences that have been actually dealt with or experiences one must confront. There is also the idea about consumption, mass consumption, and the culture of buying a lot of thing within this one space and then re-dispersing it out for different types of uses. So that was my initial idea about the paper bags. But before the paper bags, there was an installation that I did, and in the installation it was like a metaphor for the mind. And using that metaphor for the mind, the idea was to have things inside the paper bags that symbolize ideas, memories, or even neurotransmitters and how the brain works. From that, I kept the idea of experiences and memories and everything like that. Along with me being at a coffeehouse hearing two people talking about good hair, bad hair, light skin and dark skin… So then immediately, after thinking about it, I put these two things together. So I am thinking about the personal baggage, and I am also thinking about the historic content of what paper bags mean to Black people. Which would be the paper bag test: if you were lighter than a paper bag, you had access to certain things; if you were darker, you didn't have access to certain things. And then, from there, that paper bag idea with the small ones, I started thinking about paper bag tests and testing… and the standardized testing in terms of measuring intelligence or people who were thought not to have intelligence and who were only these physical beings. So I did a little research on that. So those were the beginning points on where these paper bags came from. While investigating that… because it is all an investigation on trying to understanding "Does this exist?" "Why do these remnants exist now in my generation and for those younger than me?"

What is art to me? Mainly the paper bags are where it is rooted from. And where it goes; I am not sure where it is going to go. Because a lot of works that I do are extensions. They start here and something about their other work is interesting in something I do somewhere else… and it just continues. That's where the paper bags were started. Now I was also still interested in the plastic bags that I was using in the installation that inspired the paper bags, so I wondered what did these two pieces of bags function as and how did they function? We can talk about environment and we can talk about functioning as beauty—like, when you think about when people say they cover their face with a paper bag, you know, you think about what is beautiful and what is not. So I wanted to juxtapose both of those two, the plastic and the paper, and show in the context of what blackness is, or is not, that the difference in hair texture and phenotypes and color and shades and all these things do not necessarily define what black is. What black is is something deeper than surface stuff; it is experience, it is historical. So this is kind of where I get to the gist of my investigation of these bags and this colorism and all these different things I am using. That is more so with this show, and there is no division, there is no separation, between paper and plastic in the context I am using it in. Just like there is no separation between intuition and intellect. Although they have been separated mainly in Western and European society, you can't have the Ying without the Yang, right? So these two things coexist, so paper and plastic coexist. So it's almost like a joke. Paper or plastic? No, neither. It's paper and plastic. So that...