(bird tweeting, whirling sound ) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) To be honest, I know when something is done because it will strike me.

I'll look at it and I'll think, "that's beautiful."

Woodcuts have a line quality that you can't capture in any other medium.

They're striking, they're graphic, and they're hard to ignore.

Which is part of why I love them.

I've been using them because I carve very quickly and I paint very slowly.

And so when I'm asked to do projects, it's sometimes a matter of efficiency.

How can I make a really big beautiful image without taking the rest of my life to do it?

And so the woodcuts have been a way of doing that.

My name is Katharen Wiese.

And I'm an artist and a community arts organizer.

The woodcut figures require a little bit of tendonitis, some low cost wood, and a lot of labor.

So the woodcut figures are a lot of work.

I make them life size and so some people will scan, like, a small block and then print it very large.

I don't do that.

I start with a very large piece of wood, four foot by eight and I cut it down.

And then I kind of seam them together because they can't roll through a press bed if they're too big.

I don't think I was ever making particularly small work.

But I've gradually really embraced and preferred making my work large scale.

A large component of that is I so often see, like, black people being minimized or being marginalized.

And so, like, why not make the figure as large as life?

Why not make the body present with you, with the viewer so that it's as if you're being confronted by another person?

And I really like that experience and the, like, sort of relationship that you have with a figure when it is the same size as you.

And you enter into that work in a more immersive way than you would if you saw, like, a small kind of truncated body.

I think the question I'm trying to answer through my work is, who am I?

And what impact does that have on other people?

How does that identity function in society?

(footsteps) Yeah, oh, do I like that?

(upbeat music) Being a black Nebraskan is a very specific experience because most black Nebraskans are surrounded by white people because 90% of our state is white.

And, like, more than 90% of our city is white.

And so it means that you're oftentimes in isolation or you're oftentimes like a token.

And so processing what it means to form an identity in absence of your peers at times can be really challenging.

(upbeat music) Sometimes, I don't know what part of my identity I'm processing because I'm an intersectional being.

And we're all intersectional beings.

And I think that's one of the main things I'm trying to communicate is that blackness is not monolithic.

Blackness looks like me.

Blackness could look like a white-passing person.

Blackness could look like a lot of different things.

But often within an a shared identity, there's people of very many different sorts sharing space.

(upbeat music) I don't think art in and of itself changes things.

But I think that the artist sitting down and asking something of the viewer requires them to first ask something of themselves.

And so it means there's all these creative people out here that have questions and that are looking for answers.

And I think that self-reflection is the beginning of social movement.

Images are powerful and representation is powerful.

And that's what I've been really excited about is that there are so many opportunities to do that.

I think one really important tool for countering, like, monolithic narratives of blackness is to ask people, "what is your experience?"

And there's so many similarities.

There's also so many differences.

And all of that is, like, this big beautiful umbrella, which is the black identity.

And I think leaning into the individual narrative and not the propagandistic image of a black person, which can often become stereotype.

But leaning into the person means that we're not, like, re-objectifying or re-dehumanizing the black body.

And so that's something that I am really leaning into within my own practice.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) I made two pieces of Dwight Brown in 2020 and 2021.

And the first one is sort of an interrogation of gender.

It's, like, kind of dripping with, like, glitziness.

And this is like a man who identifies as a straight, but his gender expression is, like, liberated and it's free.

And I was really excited just to see him owning his own space and not limiting that to one version of itself.

And I felt, like, how gorgeous is that?

Like, let's celebrate it.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) I was so happy because I had worked on this giant, like, seven foot wide painting for a year.

And I was finally showing it.

I got to show it in my neighborhood.

And there was a mom that came up to me who was Hispanic and her daughter was African-American and Hispanic.

So she was a multiracial girl and she was like, I am so excited to, to my daughter because she's seeing, like, art by a Nebraskan artist of someone that looks like her.

And it's like those little moments, where people feel seen and they know that their experience is not a solitary one, but it's one shared.

I think that that was really powerful.

And just to see the hundreds of people that, like, crowded into this tiny room to support the, like, five artists that were showing that day, it was beautiful.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) I just got accepted to Yale School of Art on Wednesday.

And I'm really glad I waited and asked for what I wanted because I just got accepted.

(upbeat music) I need to dive into what my experience of blackness is and not continue to stereotype myself by saying, I need to tell someone else's story.

But that my story is important enough.

And that Dwight's story, and Joelle's story, and my mom's story.

These are stories important enough to tell in rural Nebraska, in Lincoln, in the suburbs.

Like wherever it is, like, there's black people, and they're important, and they matter.

And I think that was a really challenging place for me to get to.

'Cause I had so much tension around feeling like I wasn't enough or feeling like I was too much.

And so this work, I think, in me celebrating other black people and other multiracial people, I think, it's also allowed for me to celebrate myself.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music)