Technically, Janelle Iglesias didn’t grow up in a home where they went to museums or had family and friends who were professional artists, but it seems like her life was almost conspiring toward her future as a sculptor and creator.
Growing up in Queens with Norwegian and Dominican parents and three sisters, she was surrounded by lots of other kids and families as different as her own.“One of my best friends who lived down the block was Taiwanese and Italian and Jewish. Another best friend was half Irish, half Haitian. So, everybody’s family had different stories of where their parents came from, or where their grandparents came from, and had different traditions. Like, you took off your shoes at some neighbor’s houses and you kept them on at others. Some families, you couldn’t play on Saturdays, and some that was their main play day,” she says. “Everybody’s house had different food and you were invited in to eat, so I think I really grew up with this idea that difference was the default and difference was the norm, and that everybody’s parents weren’t necessarily from the same place. Their dad might speak a different language than their mom, and that families looked many different kinds of ways, as well.”
It made sense that she would go on to earn a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from Emory University in Atlanta, but it was her time there — both through her work study position mixing glazes for the ceramics classes, and a student trip to South Africa — that revealed her interest in art and the role that artists can play in imagining a better future. While she dove into graduate work as a sculptor, one of her sisters, Lisa, was also pursuing studies as a visual artist. Together, they would become Las Hermanas Iglesias, collaborating on projects since 2005 while maintaining their individual art practices and working as college art professors. Their current work, “Las Hermanas Iglesias: wontloversrevoltnow,” features new and previously created pieces, including mixed media installations with copper tubing, casts of their hands and their family members’ hands, and textiles to start “a conversation about care and community.” This exhibition is on display at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s Encinitas location through Dec. 27.
Iglesias, 45, is also an associate professor of studio art at UC San Diego and lives in City Heights with her partner, Brandon Som, and their son, August Som-Iglesias. She took some time to talk about the connection between cultural anthropology and her artwork, working with her sister, and finding ways to offer support and care to others while trying to survive our current circumstances.
Q: What was your introduction to visual art?
A: I took a little bit of a back door into visual art. I studied cultural anthropology in college and my work study position was mixing glazes and helping out loading kilns for the ceramics classes in the visual arts building. I was also taking some ceramics classes and some art classes, so I was interested in art, but I became much more serious about thinking about it as a profession.
At the time, Emory didn’t really have a minor in studio art, so it was just an elective that I was taking. I got really curious about this idea of being a cultural producer; as much as studying culture, creating culture also became an option that I could understand and sort of envision. We didn’t really grow up in a house where we went to a ton of museums or knew other artists, or anything like that. My sister, who is also an artist, did study fine arts in college, but she also feels like she sort of came to it a little bit later, understanding that it’s something you could actually pursue as a profession, in a way.
In college, one of the things I was able to take advantage of is this program that they had at the time. Emory University has a great school of theology and Desmond Tutu (the South African Anglian bishop who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his anti-apartheid and human rights work) was a visiting scholar at the school while I was there. He had started this program called “Journeys of Reconciliation” where he helped facilitate these groups that would visit different places in the world that were experiencing different kinds of conflict and struggle. There was a trip to Northern Ireland and Ireland, a trip to Wyoming to a Native American reservation, and a trip that I joined that went to South Africa. That was super formative. I thought it was going to be much more formative as an anthropology student with the study of culture, but I realized that so much of the work of the anti-apartheid struggle was also done through artists and writers and musicians. They played such a central role in reimagining what the future could be and documenting atrocities and telling stories and thinking about how things could be different. Digesting and processing and holding space for different possibilities for futures. After I came back from that summer, I also felt like I had a new idea of what it meant to be American. It was like a mirror had sort of been held up because I thought I was learning about South Africa, but I also felt like I learned so much in terms of our own systems of oppression and systems of systematic injustice in this country, as well. They became much more obvious to me after seeing them so blatant in another place. They were actually quite similar to Jim Crow laws and things that happened in the United States, different current systems of injustice. That was also a trip where I felt that maybe being an artist wasn’t so selfish. Maybe it was actually being part of something bigger, in terms of being a part of society that was integral to working toward a better future. I felt like my idea of what was possible and what role artists played, that they didn’t just sit around in their studio and make self-portraits. It was something else. The role that artists play in society was opened up to me on that trip, and I came back thinking maybe I want to be an artist.
What I love about City Heights…
When we first were looking for a house, we started walking around and visiting different neighborhoods, and City Heights felt the most like Queens. I think that’s because it has a large immigrant refugee population, so there are folks from all over the world that live here, but it’s also very family oriented—there’s older folks and younger folks, and it’s very walkable. We can walk to the supermarket or to get fresh tortillas, we can walk to our neighborhood parks and library, and there’s a really amazing diversity of food that’s available here, too.
Q: Why were you interested cultural anthropology?
A: I think studying culture is endlessly interesting because humans are just so interesting. It’s studying why we do what we do and all the ways that we celebrate, all these rituals and different things that happen in different places, and also all the similarities and how they come together and live, even though they’re from really different places. I think it was a sort of a catch-all-I could study music, I could study art history, I could study sociology, and it would all sort of feed into cultural studies.
I was also really interested in objects. As a sculptor, it’s a study of looking at material culture and histories of material culture, and not just the aesthetics of those objects; the actual role that those objects play within ritual, within culture. It’s really interesting to think about looking at material culture and objects through an anthropological lens, as much as an art historical lens. You’re both looking at its form, but also what kind of histories the object holds. What kind of power or luck or sense of value did these things have, and how were they passed on, how were they used, and why were people buried with this thing versus this other thing? I think I had a deep interest in material culture, even before I came became a sculptor, and how objects function as another language, another system of belief and value.
Q: How has it informed the way you approach your visual artwork?
A: I think the idea of being an anthropologist is that you’re supposed to step outside of yourself to try to be as objective as possible about what you’re looking at. As an artist, I’m often looking at materials and thinking about the kind of default settings that they might embody, in terms of class or value, and I’m also looking at them aesthetically, like this is a round object, a shiny object, this feels smooth in my hand. So, you can put things together in ways that they weren’t really supposed to belong together.
In this show, we have a series of works that have a bunch of sunglass lenses paired with geodes, for example. They’re both objects that sort of have nothing to do with each other. In one way, one feels very plastic and manufactured and manmade. Another object feels like it’s a beautiful specimen from geology, made from the natural. Actually, both of them are made out of natural materials and both of them, if you were an alien and came to earth, you might encounter both of those things, and they both might end up in your treasure box. I have a 4-year-old and he encounters the world this way, as well. Everything is sort of up for grabs as a possible curiosity, as something that can channel imagination and meaning. I think anthropology gave me this lens upon which to look at material culture and think about the ways in which objects carry so many different ideas and hold different kinds of agencies, but it also gave me this practice of stepping outside of all of that baggage and just looking at things from an outside-or alien-lens of what they could be, as well.
Q: How did you and your sister, Lisa, begin collaborating?
A: In some ways, we’ve been collaborating since we were as old as we can remember, just in terms of how we play. We’re only a year apart, so we were treated almost as a unit in the family. We both decided to go to art school for graduate school at the same time. Lisa was at the University of Florida, and I was at Virginia Commonwealth University. She was in a program for drawing and painting, and I was in a program for sculpture, but we were there in 2003 and 2004 and we kind of aligned at the same time. It was very interesting because neither of us had gone to art school, with a capital A, for undergrad. We didn’t go through a BFA program that was very robust in terms of studying art, so we both felt pretty green, and we felt like we had a lot to catch up on. We started a body of work that we sent back and forth in the mail. It was sort of a secret body of work that wasn’t for critique. It wasn’t for anybody else to see, it was just for us. It felt like, ‘Let’s see what the overlaps in our studios are.’ If we give each other something to react to, rather than having to start with a blank page. Sometimes it can be really challenging to start things, versus if you have somebody else give you a piece of paper with something on it, and you can react to that thing. So, we have this kind of dialogic practice of sending this box with these works on paper through the mail. The box fit in a flat rate mailer, so we always knew how much it was going to cost, and there were no rules involved. You could paint, you could sew through the paper, you could make holes, you could collage; as long as something fit in the box, it was fair game. That was probably our first body of collaborative work. Some of the works had one or two passes and we never touched them again. Some of the works would be labored over and over and over again. It’s almost like this piece of paper has 20 layers of paint on it, or markings on it in some kind of way. I don’t remember, but I think Lisa told one of her professors about it. I think they saw the box in her studio and asked about it, and they liked some of the collaborative drawings, and they curated them into a show. That was one of the first times where we said, ‘Oh, I guess we’re collaborating, we should name ourselves.’ We decided to name ourselves Las Hermanas Iglesias because we had always grown up speaking Spanglish in the home, and we were kind of known as this gaggle of four sisters. So, even beyond ourselves, I think it emphasized this idea of relationality and sisterhood, and sisterhood as being this greater force beyond ourselves. So, it’s a sort of feminist lens and a lens of multiplicity, as well.
We actually started a body of work with our mother, who is a really amazing knitter. She doesn’t consider herself an artist, she considers herself a maker. She was a public school teacher for first grade in Brooklyn, and she has always knitted, usually clothes and sweaters and baby clothes for the grandkids. After my father passed away, we started working with her on a series where she would translate some of those collaborative drawings into knit textile pieces. We’ll show the original work on paper next to our mother’s translation, and we did that series for a while. Then, we started a new series that was looking at other ways of collaborating with her where we would pass these pieces of textile back and forth. Sometimes part of that was unraveled, sometimes somebody would add an embroidery over part of it, sometimes somebody would add just other kinds of elements to it, or add a frame or a way to display it. They would keep changing with whoever’s hands were on it, so we still have a mode of our practice that’s a collaborative conversation with our mother.
In this show, we have cast our mother’s hands in bronze, so those are holding one of the textile pieces that Lisa and I made, and they’re a cast of our mother’s hands in plaster in “Plum and Fathom,” which is another piece. And, casts also of Lisa’s oldest son’s hands that are integrated. While it’s not necessarily collaborative, in terms of the making, we do have those family members who are also part of the exhibition.
Q: Generally, what is your process for the way the two of you approach your collaborations? Do you generally have an established system, or does the process depend on the particular project?
A: It really depends on the project, and all the other kind of logistical and particulars of that moment, honestly. I think when we first started collaborating and we shared a studio and we had a lot of flexibility with our time, we were trying to make all the decisions together about everything all at once. Kind of developing projects from the ground up together. Maybe we would have a distribution of labor of, ‘You do this, I do that,’ or ‘I’ll finish this, you finish that,’ but very quickly, we began to understand that we needed to be quite flexible if we were going to keep collaborating with each other because we both had other careers going on. We had our solo work, but we also had academic careers going on. Lisa became a mom in 2012 with her first son, so she moved away to take an academic job and also had a kid. All of our situations of having a full-time studio at the time, or what made sense for the production of that particular project, kept changing and we’ve allowed that to be super flexible.
This exhibition at the ICA is such a gift because they were super supportive in just giving us the time and space to work with one another. We’re across the country right now and we send a lot of things in the mail, we visit each other with suitcases full of things, but it’s still really challenging to kind of have that on-site, one-on-one time together in real life, in person, in the studio. Lisa came, I think, four times during the development of the exhibition, for about a week. One of the times, I think, she came for two weeks with her son, and he attended camp in San Diego. During summer camp, she would come to my studio at UCSD every day, and we’ve also done a bunch of residencies together. That’s also been kind of focused studio time where we both have been able to just be in the studio together making work. In the spring of 2024, we were at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire together and we both were on sabbatical for our academic jobs. That was a very meaningful two weeks of just complete studio time; we’re not making food, we’re not taking care of anybody, we’re just waking up in the studio with coffee and making things. Then, Lisa had these amazing kind of mini-residencies in my studio. Other times, I would visit her (in western Massachusetts) and we’d go to her studio, I’d bring things back. So many of the objects of the show were brought back and forth between our studios many different times, and a lot of the casts that were made were made together when we were having this kind of focused studio time.
Q: “wontloversrevoltnow” is currently on display through Dec. 27 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego’s Encinitas location. How did you and Lisa work on this exhibition together? When did the work on this exhibition start?
A: We had a show at a project space at the Blanton Museum, which is part of the University of Texas at Austin. They have this fantastic contemporary project space and we created an installation, “Plumb & Fathom,” that’s also in this show and that has this large textile with extra warping, that’s being kind of woven and unwoven through this network of copper and network of plaster hands. We also created a palindrome, “Dammit I’m Mad,” so it reads the same backwards and frontwards. That show really came out of the fact that I gave birth to my son in 2020 and Lisa gave birth to her daughter, Lucia, in 2021, and it was also right around the time that “Roe v. Wade” was overturned, and COVID hit. We were really thinking about both this shift of reproductive rights, and all of these cracks in the system that were becoming more and more evident with the way that COVID played out, in terms of caregiving and essential labor and all these different things. So, we’re thinking about all these networks of care, but also in the ways that women show up for one another and support each other, and also this reproductive rights movement in the Americas. That show was really kind of rooted in that, and that was in 2023. I think it became much more expansive in terms of thinking about reproductive rights, but also thinking about all these different forces and crises and struggles that are happening.
Q: A description of this exhibition from ICA San Diego says that you each address your own “navigations of loss, motherhood and current events into works that speak to how we value, define, and provide caregiving.” Can you talk about your perspective on working your way through these things-loss, motherhood, what’s happening around us right now-and the ways that those experiences have informed your view of caregiving?
A: Between Lisa and I, we’ve had quite an expanse of personal experience with everything from Lisa had a stillbirth in 2018 with her daughter Luna at 39 weeks, and was later diagnosed as infertile, as well. Everything from trying not to get pregnant, to trying to get pregnant, to having really positive birth experiences and really traumatic birth experiences, and our own experiences with trying to figure out how to start a family and how to have the kind of financial, structural, emotional, familial support networks of how to get through all of those things. Realizing and learning a lot about what are the ways that we can show up for each other, and what are the ways we can show up for other folks around us.
I think it’s a very personal showing. When I first gave birth to my son, I don’t think anybody held my son for the first six or eight months. We had family that wasn’t able to travel because of COVID, I had a newborn and we had other extended family members who, unfortunately, passed from COVID and there were all kinds of things happening. I remember having this newborn and Jordan (Karney Chaim, curator at ICA) showing up at my door with all this food. She had a 4-month-old newborn herself, and an older child. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this person is amazing.’ They just rang the doorbell and said, “You don’t have to come out. I just wanted to leave you this food in case you need it. You can freeze it, you can give it to a neighbor, you can do whatever, but I thought it might be helpful.” One of those small acts of kindness that actually meant so much at the time.
When my sister lost her daughter, too, there were a lot of ways in which other people were uncomfortable and didn’t know how to interact with her and felt like they would start crying, or their own sense of what was appropriate, or how to respond, kind of got in the way of them actually showing up for her. We talked so much with each other about how we can help other people that may have gone through this, and how can we spread resources that were helpful for us. So, online, we have this ongoing GoogleDoc with different ideas that we’ve come across, different articles, different podcasts, different books that have been really helpful with folks that have experiences with abortion, with miscarriage, with infant loss, with stillbirth, with being infertile, the spectrum of all the things that are really challenging to go through in really different ways. There are also resources for getting more involved with reproductive rights and learning about different ideas and theories and stories and radical networks of care that have to do with reproductive rights, as well.
Often, when we have shows where any of these themes or ideas are happening, we’ll also provide a link or somehow insert that resource into the mix. I think one of the things we realized was through this fabulous quote by Grace Lee Boggs. We were in a show in Anchorage called “How to Survive” and it comes from this Grace Lee Boggs quote where she’s basically saying that the way that we’re going to survive is through helping each other. That’s how we’re going to survive. So, I think the ethos of the show is how to extend toward each other, how to lean in and be there for each other, especially during these moments of extreme divisiveness and overwhelm where, sometimes, our nervous system sort of retreats, rather than leans in. I think the ethos of the show is really about trying to emphasize our interconnectedness and the ways that we can lean in and be there for each other, and then to also hold space for all these different feelings that we might be experiencing-rage, personal joy, extreme grief. There’s an installation of beeswax hands in the show called “Heart Before the Course,” and they’re sort of in these knots. We’ve really been thinking about this feeling of your insides being in knots and not really knowing what to do. Feeling like your hands are tied and how can you help each other? How can you show up? The piece also has this feeling of hopefulness. It’s made out of beeswax and it almost has a feeling of a vigil of hands coming together and holding candles, so there’s both this sense of grief and frustration and overwhelm. We’re also trying to hold space for hands that are also reaching out to offer space and offer support to others and to not give up and not shut down.
Q: I was curious about the title; where is that coming from?
A: For quite a while for Lisa and I, one of the threads throughout our work have involved wordplay. So, “wontloversrevoltnow” is a palindrome, it reads the same left to right, right to left. We’ve been kind of collecting palindromes and learning about different ones and finding different ones for a long time. They’ve often come up as titles for projects, or been part of text-based pieces, so this is a title we created a poster for in 2016 with the phrase, “Won’t lovers revolt now?” It really centers this idea of love within the idea of revolution. It has both this call for change, but also this idea that change needs to be in a space of love. Like, even anger and rage can come from a space of love, and that the space of love should be what leads you in how you proceed. It felt like it’s a one-liner in terms of this palindrome, but it also feels very resonant, especially in this moment, in terms of how can we do things differently? How can we create positive change? Let’s not roll over and kind of retreat in our overwhelm, but how can we resist? How can we come together in these moments? There’s so much happening-we’re getting alerts for fires and natural disasters, there are these ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) kidnappings happening, there’s war, people are losing their medical coverage, there’s just so much happening day to day. There’s currently a question about voting rights and democratic fundamentals are up for grabs and in question. How can we stand up for each other and for ourselves right now, and how can we come together, rather than retreating into our own individualism, to get through this?A lot of the titles of the show are also other kinds of wordplay. “The Heart Before the Course” is spoonerism, which is when you switch the first letter of a common phrase, so instead of “the cart before the horse” it’s “the heart before the course.” There’s another piece called “Chewing the Doors” and that’s a spoonerism for “doing the chores.” We’re looking at the original statement of “doing the chores” like who’s doing the work, but with “Chewing the Doors” I feel like we’re all in this space of processing and trying to figure out what should we do? How do we get out of this mess? “The Heart Before the Course” is how do we move forward with our hearts before we set a course? Make sure that our hearts are in line with whatever course we set.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: I have a really hard time making decisions. I feel like I’m sort of closing other possibilities by making big decisions, so people saying that you have to close one door for another door to open has always been really helpful for me. The only way to keep evolving and having other possibilities is to close one door in order for another door to open. As soon as you say no to something, it actually allows you to say yes to a lot of other things.
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: In my college years, I went skydiving. I’m also a certified yoga instructor.
Q: Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: Going to the beach with friends. Our favorite spot is Torrey Pines, where they have that kind of tidal slough that comes in, so there’s this great shallow area for the kiddos to play and watch for pelicans and try to find some fish in the water. I adore the coast here and Torrey Pines feels, oftentimes, like is this real? Do I live here?We also really like having brunch with friends, having folks come over.