Catherine Czacki is an artist, musician, and educator based in New Mexico. Her work includes ceramic, wood, painting, paper mache, metal, fabric and found objects in movable parts that come together as installations. Their forms relay a past or the remnants of history re-thrown into contemporary vitality. Visual codes, symbols, and historic traces gather onto hand-sewn patchwork and its present re-invention. Absence and memory are often embodied in these objects that act as traces of unknown narratives and as symbols of erased truths. Objects are displayed on the ground in an open cosmos, but are also measured and treated with precious care - they are tangible, like Czacki’s own concise poetry.
In December 2024, Czacki launched an auction to benefit Sulala Animal Rescue in Gaza, rallying the artistic community to offer meaningful pieces for an initiative to help those in need, support towards all living beings enduring the ongoing genocide. Contributing artists included Camille Henrot, Mai-Thu Perret, Jo Nigoghossian, and Elizabeth Jaeger among others. An interview was conducted on Ninu Nina during the auction’s run.
Àngels Miralda: Dear Catherine, other than working as an artist, you are also a dedicated educator. How has the academic environment changed for you in the past two years?
Catherine Czacki: The last class I taught was a graduate level critical theory seminar at a regional comprehensive university as an adjunct. I worked a Saturday class schedule as I was actively looking for full-time work. In August, I prepared my syllabus with Edward Said for October 7. My students read the text in advance of the seminar. When I walked in that day, my students all asked if I was an “oracle,” I told them “one can’t be an oracle for something that’s been happening for almost a century.”
I’m still alive in a physical sense, though some things I thought to be constants have died the last few years. Even in the death of a career track, I keep seeing evidence every season of things that grow, actual plants and conceptual ideas. As much as we have to visit and remember the past, we also have to be present, and project and keep creating a future we would like to see, including what we expect of the academic environment. Right now, it’s very hard to predict the future of education, a country, a system, or a political party. We will keep witnessing, and need to further grow our networks of knowing that aren’t so reliant on institutional forms of support.
AM: Are there any other important academically underrepresented references you have found in your work?
CC: I started reading Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev in the last two years, an under-known Tatar revolutionary who was assassinated along with his wife and children during Stalin’s purges, in part because he was so successful as a teacher, and at uniting groups like the Buryat, Bakshir, and Tatar peoples towards emergent communism. There still isn’t enough of his work translated. What I did find gives warnings regarding what happens when you buy into a system that promises liberation, but is instead a surface power grab, swinging left and right, benefiting a small number of people. This is true of any academic, geopolitical or social system. For a long time it’s been profit over education or people, corporate or administrative salaries and billionaire growth instead of a planetary wellbeing, in other words, political power over the common good. Collective liberation can’t be achieved through celebrity, politicians, systems, promises, schools or societies that prioritize profit. It has to be a constant movement in the realm of the everyday, It begins, ends, refreshes anew with each generation. One of the last things Sultan-Galiev wrote was “Who Am I?” while in prison as he was about to be executed by the same party he helped bring to power. I think he speaks to the existential crisis of trying to do good in a troubled world, the attempt to spread knowledge while being caught up in geopolitical machinations. I can tell his story, but there are other stories I’ve witnessed in education in the last few years that I cannot mention. That’s the price we pay for knowledge and attempting to achieve collective liberation.
Catherine Czacki \ Figs (detail), 2019
AM: What has been your proudest achievement in the past year and a half as an artist advocating for justice and for a free Palestine?
CC: It’s been hard for me to think of things in terms of outcome, because it never feels like enough. A protest, a letter, a boycott. A conversation, a fundraiser. It’s daily. I try to treat activities in my studio and in the larger world as habits or actions. Because a result or achievement might never arrive. Some of the ways I’ve felt most engaged and useful in these times, included organizing and running the auction for Sulala Animal Rescue in the fall of 2024, and my teaching experience mentioned above. The conversations I had with that group of graduate students was profound. One said during the seminar “I had absolutely no idea this has been going on for so long.” It reminded me of the power of history when it is in collective hands, and isn’t just a celebration of power, accumulated wealth, telling a success story of some conquest or another. Every conversation in the last two years, with family, friends, the larger world is a scaffold that needs to be there, in order to demand change.
AM: Your work often relates to your own experiences and heritage, in particular to stories from your Tatar father. How has his experience of a silenced genocide formed your relationship to what we see today?
CC: My relationship to the Tatar part of my family was for a long time that of denial, assimilation, and hiding. The Tatar genocide is still considered a myth by many people, and has only recently been acknowledged. Now my dad is in his 80s and I have been reading histories, stories, and tales to tell him. Palestine was a floodgate for him. The newscycle dislodged stories from his deep memories, profound realizations about culture, history, power, and racism that are still visible today in a larger geopolitical sense and in our interfamilial dynamics. I think for artists like me who are at cultural intersections, it’s not easy to explain a relationship to heritage in the quantifiable ways that are measured in art contexts. Especially when it was deliberately erased or suppressed.
CC: Palestine has initiated a global resistance, and re-opened suppressed themes for many people everywhere. There’s so much more to say about this, the conversations he and I have had about family acknowledgement, denial. About his grandfather who was disappeared, likely for being both Tatar and powerful financially and politically. Everything they had was gone in a generation. Lately I’ve been thinking less about what we lost, and more about how we’ve gained a unique and illuminated perspective on the dramas of humanity.
CC: My father enjoys the Tatar folktales I’ve been finding to help him reconnect with his ancestry, in particular one about the “bird of democracy” Semrug, but also the house spirit creature, called a Bichura – a malevolent/benevolent guardian that takes the appearance of a cat or dog depending on context. Sultan-Galiev also knew this social and political tenuousness, and wrote about it at the end of his life. He saw as a child the tension between his family's nobility on one side, and being poor teachers on the other, as an educator, a radical, a theorist and himself Tatar. When I asked my father recently what my grandfather used to say about being Tatar, he said “same thing I used to say to you, never speak of it and don’t go back.”
Everyday I am still finding my own center, my own way of working that has pieces of this, parts of that. Some of my favorite stories my dad has recently told me are lucid ones that seem to focus on a beautiful or poignant thing. Like his story about foraging dandelion greens and apples on the edge of a relocation camp with a maybe stolen bicycle his sister acquired. Or learning that my grandfather retained some of his Tatar animal techniques, and became known for healing horses even after being a refugee and arriving in the US. Etel Adnan describes this kind of thing in her book In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country. Humans during profound times of trauma, war, genocide sometimes find what is memorable are these moments, the shock that there is still some form of beauty in the world during times of utter cruelty.
Catherine Czacki / Coin, Three Times Removed 2024-2025, Oil on canvas board.
Catherine Czacki / Vague Being, 2025, Oil on canvas board.
AM: You’re on calls. Other than a studio visit, what can people contact you for?
CC: Writing for grants, topical directed Art History lectures relevant to a research area. I did advising for students when I was still teaching, I am open to helping with that. I'm dedicated to a form of facilitative feedback for other artists, cultural workers, writers, and humans in general. How do we help each other keep going? Show me what you are working on, and I’ll try to help push it in a direction suited to your unique signature. I taught writing for a few years while doing my PhD, and have helped people compose, edit and write about their work for shows, websites, grant applications, etc.
Like a tale I recently read about a wolf that can do “70 crafts and assume 70 images,” I’ve experimented in many mediums, becoming adept at a few. I’m always glad to talk about material and the basics of approaching our collective and individual aesthetics for making work physically and conceptually.
AM: What are you most looking forward to in terms of new works, exhibitions, or other types of projects in the future?
CC: My work of late has consisted of self reflections on the crumbling of empires, human hubris, who we are as a part of a larger material world, and the remnants of what’s left when collective and individual lives fall apart, and in some cases, start again. I have been making eroded coins out of ceramic and painting them, bearing the slightest traces of text. The way I work visually at a cusp between representation and abstraction illustrates the slipperiness of belonging to a culture to which one has had little exposure to due to the denial of access as a semi-universal experience. I’m also interested in how other species and the rich material world have been suppressed and denied as well by being made into taxonomies that aren’t always a true identification. The enlightenment narrative of certainty is quickly slipping away, and all of the manufactured cultures and current human dramas will one day become history, eroded coins that may or may not be decipherable. The other day I was reading about targeted burnings of material written by women in ancient libraries – these women were writing poetry, experimenting with alchemy, craft, medicine, etc. I used to start my classes with a quote by Linda Tuhiwai Smith related to this absence:
“We believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact history is mostly about power. It is the story of the powerful and how they became powerful, and then how they use their power to keep them in positions in which they can continue to dominate others.”
Art is one of the tools we have in order to fight against the systematic annihilation of archives by the dominant global hegemonies.
Catherine Czacki / get the house in order, 2020, installation detail, Best Practice, San Diego. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Catherine Czacki / get the house in order, 2020, installation detail, Best Practice, San Diego. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Catherine Czacki / get the house in order, 2020, installation detail, Best Practice, San Diego. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Catherine Czacki / get the house in order, 2020, installation detail, Best Practice, San Diego. Photo: Paul Salveson.
Catherine Czack / universe will take it, 2024, installation detail, Co-Opt Research + Projects, Lubbock.
CC: I am incorporating more and more of my father’s words into my work. He recently said that his father was “born on a crumbling estate, at the edge of fallen empires.” Another time he said “nature will take it all back,” with a smile. This is not a threat, but a promise for new growth that humans can’t begin to quantify. I think this is also contained in my grandfather holding on to his horse healing knowledge. That knowledge is an essence that I am trying to honor through my practice.
As a student I spent many years experimenting with manifold materials including video, conceptual practice, and large-scale installations. While in a hybrid practice and Art History PhD I began to call that time period of academia my “endurance performance art.” At the end of this long process I returned to other ways of working with material, simplifying and reducing. Lately, I am making ever smaller paintings and ceramics. If I work with found objects still, they are small ones, “corner of the room” small. Things that can merge, combine, break apart into other configurations, constellations. This smaller scale allows for an ongoing fluidity, a portability. My father is one side of my heritage Tatar/Polish, and my mother is from the US - a line of farmers. I value the constant need to repair, seed, and keep going as an ethos I’ve learned from both sides. Working with my hands is important to me, it connects my work to the material world and allows for visual critique and I believe this is what best captures Etel Adnan’s description of the human need for beauty, or at least enjoyment.
AM: How do you think Collecteurs can help create a global community committed to a more just art world?
CC: Collecteurs can help with visibility and support for artists and cultural workers. The direction in which it is growing - becoming a multi-tendrilled entity containing a topical magazine, slow social media, and infrastructure for artists who can now meet and have studio visits remotely holds a lot of potential. It’s exciting to see the project grow into something that can uphold culture in new ways just as the old institutions seem to be crumbling under the weight of political change. We can keep building new things together, that’s the only way forward.
End.