It became clear during the COVID-19 lockdowns that surviving and thriving in today’s brutal late capitalist world requires community and connectedness to counter the alienation of screen living and rising divisiveness—conditions exploited by politicians increasingly fascist in their machinations. As Édouard Glissant frames it, the opposing, critical force of a “poetics of relation” refuses the division into “us and them,” reminding each of us that we always exist in relation. By “taking up the problems of the Other,” Glissant concludes, “it is possible to find oneself,” but oneself as relationally connected to others.

Joan Semmel’s work activates what painting can do to produce different ways of seeing, and thus different ways of thinking, that shift the position of certain bodies in the social sphere. I get the conversation started by asking Semmel some questions about her earliest work, her experience as an artist, and her turn to painting, before weaving in more complex questions about the relationship of her work to specific experiences she’s had in the world.