The Memory Generation

Episode 4: Michael Coppage

INTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: Hey everyone, I’m Rachael Cerrotti. Welcome to The Memory Generation – a podcast about the memories we inherit and the stories that are passed from one generation to the next. Today we are talking with Michael Coppage – a conceptual artist originally from Chicago. He joined me to talk about two of his projects. One is called American Plus which speaks to the resilience of black people throughout the past centuries. And, the other is called Black Box – a community impact project aimed at demystifying black men and women.

We recorded this conversation through Zoom on April 16, 2022. I was here in Portland, Maine and Michael was at his home in Cincinnati.

INTERVIEW

Rachael Cerrotti: Michael, thanks so much for being with me today. You and I met in Cincinnati. That's how we know each other. Sitting in a wine shop. 

Michael Coppage: Yes. Yeah. That’s right.

Rachael Cerrotti: Of all places in like the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the week. So we should give a little shout out to Ludlow Wines in the Clifton neighborhood in Cincinnati. So if you need to get wine or you need to get something notarized which is what you were doing there, that’s the place to go.

Michael Coppage: Yeah, let's be clear, I was there to get it notarized in the middle of the afternoon.

Rachael Cerrotti: Exactly. And I was there because I knew the owner, so it's perfectly appropriate we were both drinking wine on a Wednesday afternoon or whatever day it was. So we got to talking and quickly realized that a lot of the ideas that you're exploring in your work are ideas that I explore in mine, but just from a different cultural space. So I'd love for you to just tell us a bit about what those ideas are. What do you spend your days thinking about?

Michael Coppage: Well, I spent a lot of my time trying to take very complex feelings and ideas, very sensitive topics and distilling them down to something like really kind of emotionally and mentally manageable and I'm speaking from a black space, so most of my work is filtered through that lens. And, you know, I just talk about the realities of skin folk and I try to present them in ways that create a cultural understanding or a more improved cultural competence that hopefully would lead to more empathic interactions. 

Rachael Cerrotti: These topics – like exploring your own identity and your community's identity – are these ideas that you've always instinctually been interested in or questions that you've developed as you've grown up and become a more established artist? 

Michael Coppage: You know, my work comes from a lifetime of accumulated experiences that festered inside of me for most of my life that I really couldn't find a voice for to begin to unpack it. So I let it kind of become kinda toxic to a point where I had to make a decision whether I was going to turn it inward and become more sick or turn it outward and become healthier. And so I chose to kinda crystallize the thoughts and the ideas and the experiences into separate works of art that then I could talk about objectively without some of the charged emotions I might have had once. 

Rachael Cerrotti: So, tell me about the community that you grew up in. Who were the people that raised you? What ideas stimulated your household?

Michael Coppage: I grew up in a neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. The community I grew up in – it was a mixed bag. You know, it was really beautiful from the standpoint that my entire block, each of the houses had families that lived in them and all the families knew each other. And it really felt like a community. And all the children from the families would be outside and playing and I just remember it being really beautiful and it really felt like a village. You know, someone's parents telling me to do something meant just as much as my parents telling me, you know, and if I didn't listen, they would let my parents know and my parents would address it. And it just really felt like a family, an extended family. And I grew up in a house with a couple of generations. I lived in my grandparent’s house initially. a half a block away, my father's mother lived on the street. So she had a house, my other grandma. So that neighborhood was pretty cool from that standpoint. But then you had this kind of this cancer in our community of drugs and crack I would say was pretty big when I was growing up. But you know, so you had the the dope dealers and you had the gang bangers and you had all the people who were addicted to drugs kind of just out in the streets without any kind of services or any kind of help and you know, I had some family members that had become victims in that reality. And so it was difficult from that standpoint but I think I chose and I think this is true to this day – I've always chosen to focus on the like the positive things like the good things that I have going on or the good things that we had going as a family. And so, you know, I really have fond memories of my neighborhood and I go back every couple of months and my grandfather's still there. He's 93. My mom is still there. My father's still there. His mother's still there. She's 93. I refer to my home in Cincinnati as my home because this is where I rest. But Chicago, I feel like, will always be my home because that's what my family is. 

Rachael Cerrotti: It's something really special about having grandparents as an adult. Having that adult relationship with someone who's of a different generation than you.

Michael Coppage: It's amazing because the country that they live in, the reality that they have is very different than the country that I live in and the reality that I have. And I was fortunate to be able to get my granddad to contribute to my Black Box project and I got to record part of his story. And it's just kind of mind blowing some of the things that he's had to navigate through. So, any time I talk to him, you know, I walk away with a different idea of who he is and a different respect for him. 

Rachael Cerrotti: You have these two primary bodies of work – American Plus and then you have this project called Black Box. Can you share what these projects are both in terms of the visual aspect of them as well as your goals with creating them? 

Michael Coppage: Sure, sure. So American Plus is an adverse response to being categorized as African-American. African-American suggests that my family immigrated to the United States when in fact we came as hostages. So I'm not sure that African American really applies to me. Also because I work with language, I look at African minus American and it just somehow implies that my American is less. And so I started thinking about, you know, some of the things that my grandfather, his grandfather and his grandfather had to navigate through for me to be here, for me to to be where I am in my station in life. And it took a lot of endurance, a lot of resilience, a lot of trauma. I mean, there's a list of words I could use and essentially we've had to go through such an ordeal that not only have we earned the right to be called American, but I would say there's a debt that’s yet to be paid that you know earns us the right to identify ourselves as American Plus because we are still able to find joy given everything we've gone through and happiness and we're still able to be excellent and display excellence in almost every space that we have an opportunity to be a part of. And so American Plus is rooted in showing African-American people, but specifically males as human beings and not as some caricature that, you know, you see in rap videos or on the nightly news or on ESPN. I also depict white people as monkeys which is a term that is kind of used to demean and dehumanize African-Americans for the last century or so. But, the place that I'm coming from is to commit the kinds of atrocities towards African-Americans, you have to really turn off a piece of your humanity. You have to become three fifths of a human to hang someone by their neck and burn them and lynch them and some of the things that have been done here in our present and in our past. And so what I do is I stereotype white people generally by painting them as different species of monkeys as disruptors of harmony. So in Asia, they call people monkeys and it's not really based on color, it’s based on behavior. And this disruption of harmony is the indicator of the difference between humans and primates, essentially. And so when I talk about this work, the easiest kind of connection I can make is, the Europeans, you know, they pretty much disrupted the harmony of every native group on the planet – the Native Americans, the Africans, the Aborigines, the Maori, you name ‘em. You know, the Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, Dutch all traveled around and made those disruptions happen. In today's society, which is what my work is about, that disruption happens by way of gentrification and redlining and redistricting and things like that. So American Plus is this series of paintings that depict black men in interactions with white monkeys. And it's – it's pretty provocative. But I've been traveling around talking about this work for the last 12 months and I'm hoping that this counter-narrative can bond itself to the popular narrative so that we can get some perspective. We can hear what the realities of other groups look like from their vantage and maybe some action happens around it. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I want to talk a bit about the way that you're asking other people to be part of the work. So it's not just the persecuted groups of people's responsibility to work through their own trauma, but it actually becomes a conversation through people who are inheriting this type of history from all different perspectives. Have you found that to be a productive space? Like, have you found there to be some important, productive conversations with your white counterparts? 

Michael Coppage: I think for other groups of people who aren't black coming into this work, there are a couple of things that happen because, you know, those folks are my actual targeted audience, right? My audience isn't black people because black people already know what this experience has been like for them. So what I do, I tend to center whiteness in almost all of my work because - I had a friend who said, you don’t know, know how deep something cuts until it cuts you. And, it just resonated with me. And when she said it, you know, it was because I was working on a project in a public park where I was lynching a white man, her husband and she was photographing it. And she kind of broke out in tears and she was just saying how hard it was to see her man up there. And even though this was a staged event, it still touched her in a way that she couldn’t imagine how anyone would be able to do this to another person. And you know, we live in this time where it's illegal to teach it. You know, we have people like in such a rush to just move beyond it because they didn't own slaves and they didn't participate in these gatherings and they then do this and that and the main thing is kind of centering whiteness in these either black trauma events or in these scenarios that are very real for black people, but that white people have some responsibility in, but tend not to take ownership of it. You know, like a lot of black problems really aren't you know just black problems. You know, we definitely didn't get to this place that we are as a community and culturally on our own volition. We had lots of help – systemically and regionally and locally and legally and so I am trying to offer an equitable share of trauma experience through American Plus. And in the way that I'm approaching it, I'm going to require you be an active participant and collaborator in the work by either centering you or creating an environment where you can see yourself in so that you have to do some work too. And even if that work is internal and no one knows, that's OK. I don't need to see the action to know that the work is effective. So if I could find a way to help you center yourself within the work, then my issue becomes your issue. And maybe that creates some of the change, you know that prompts some of the change that I think we – we need.

Rachael Cerrotti: You know, I definitely categorize myself as a white person in this country who it's taken well, I think, into my adulthood to understand – it's actually a very much a work in progress to understand my relationship with racism in this country because I inherited privilege here. My grandmother came over as a refugee and actually the first place that she came to in 1950 when she emigrated here was to Cincinnati. And her first experience in the first couple weeks of her time here was that very long story short, is that she ends up getting kicked out of this home of this very extended family that had to sponsored her to come over who knew all about what happened during the Holocaust, who knew that she was the only survivor, that she was on her own from the age of 14 – they end up kicking her out of their house because she befriends a black family and goes to dinner with them. 

Michael Coppage: Oh wow.

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah, and that's how I ended up in Cincinnati. That's why my work brought me there is through that story because here she comes, having fled throughout Europe for all these years because of her identity. And then she gets to this country and suddenly she's part of, you know, the privileged space. 

Michael Coppage: Yeah.

Rachael Cerrotti: It's something that I'm so interested in studying further, how migration impacts your sense of self in that way, like what does it mean to go from one country where you're persecuted for who you are to go to another country where you're privileged for who you are?

Michael Coppage: Well, I can. I can talk a little bit about that, right. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Please. Yeah. 

Michael Coppage: Because, you know, I would say the United States is probably the most hostile country I’ve ever been to in terms of persecution, in terms of being black. The irony is that I get treated so much better when I'm abroad. I kind of got addicted to travel because I loved the way that I felt when I was abroad. I loved the energy. I came back with more facets than I left with. And you know, the reality of who I am in terms of being a world citizen is very different than who I am as an American citizen or how I'm seen as an American citizen. And I would come back from my travels and there would just be some things that just became unacceptable for my reality in the United States and I've become much more vocal and empowered and a lot of the work that I'm making now, if not all of the work is directly inspired by how I see myself because of those travels, you know. Instead of people kind of clamming up around me and holding their purses a little bit tighter or crossing the street or apologizing for standing two feet away from me or whatever micro and macro aggressions I might have experienced, it's a very opposite thing elsewhere. You know, we talked about Asia and the monkeys. So when I'm in Asia, people – they walk towards me, people actually, you know, instead of pulling their children away, they give me their children. They want me to meet their kid because the only place that they've ever seen someone who looks like me sometimes is on TV, right?

Rachael Cerrotti: And it’s a positive… 

Michael Coppage: It is. 

Rachael: Right?

Michael Coppage: And it's so much love. I went to Komodo Island in Indonesia a few years back. And when we got there on the border of the dock, there's a wall that says Komodo Island and the lady's like, Oh, I want to take a picture, you know, as this Asian lady. I'm not sure if she's Indonesian or if she's a tourist from another Asian country. But she wants to take a picture and I'm like, OK, you know, give me your camera. Go ahead. Stand in front of the wall. I’ll take your picture. And she's like, ”no, no with you.” And I was like, lady – you came all the way to Komodo island to take a picture of me. You know, that communicated something to me that 

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah

Michael Coppage: I hadn’t ever considered that not only was beautiful and interesting and mysterious, but I was a creature worth more than this Komodo dragon.

Rachael Cerrotti: What strikes me about this story also is that it's this example of how being different or being the other doesn't always have to be negative or dangerous. And I think in this country, that's very much what it has become. But then when you travel and you start to go to other places, you realize they see you as different, they see you as the other, but oftentimes that comes with, what's the word like a - a feeling of admiration and a sense of curiosity from a really, in a really wonderful way where to be the other doesn't always have to feel threatening.

Michael Coppage: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I do also understand the reality is that I also have an American passport and I don't know that I fully ever feel American or the comforts that that my passport brings me here in the country itself. When I'm abroad, I really – that's when I feel American. When I went to Spain as an American, I got shown so much love. I had a great time. It was talking to strangers and getting free wine and all of the things, right? But if I was a black man from like Zimbabwe or some other African country –

Rachael Cerrotti: Right

Michael Coppage: I would be seen as different. probably there would be less tolerant for for me in that skin. So I'll say, experiencing myself out of context has been the greatest thing that has happened to me. I think it informs my work, it informs my friendships, my relationships, my world view. And, I feel like a better person as a result. And I think that my work, regardless of what the imagery is, you know, is meant to be a bridge, like a cultural bridge that people can can go back and forth onto or stay on their side and just look from over the bridge, you know. And I think, for the people who have come in contact with it, it's been a great tool. A tool for listening, a tool for insight, a tool for empathy. I often talk to people in regards to The Black Box project –

Rachael Cerrotti: Tell us a bit about that. Describe the black box project for us.

Michael Coppage: Black Box is a project that it’s aim is to demystify black men and women to ground us in our humanity. It's a conversation about the word black, you know, in our country, what we learn about colors is very important in terms of how we see people who identify as black, and most of what we learn about black is that black is bad. You know, there are a number of words: blackmail, black, market, black eyes, black sheep, black cloud, black eye, black Friday, black sole, black hole. You say all of those words and then you get the black man or black woman, it's implied that there's some – something inherently negative about who they are and people treat us in kind, right? So what I try to do is take those words, put them on shirts and line black men and women up side by side so that you read these words like a book. And then the last one read black man or black woman and ask you to consider what your thoughts are, who you think these people are. There's a QR code that you can scan and when you scan it, it takes you to a podcast and you can find the voice of the person behind each of the images, behind each shirt. And you hear their story – a conversation that's unscripted and the conversation is facilitated by someone who is not black. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Why did you choose that? 

Michael Coppage: Because if – if I asked the questions or if I had someone black asked the questions, I feel like the questions would be loaded and it would turn into something different. I think it was important to have someone who was disconnected from black culture and who maybe didn't have a lot of black people, if any, in their life and they could ask all the right questions. Maybe the wrong way, you know. They could be a proxy for the curiosity that so many people have, but maybe don't have the courage to to really, really ask the questions.

Rachael Cerrotti: I think a lot of us get caught up with being like, well I have these questions, but I don't know even if it's appropriate to ask or what the best way to ask or we stumble over our words like – I work with words for a living and yet still, when I talk to people from other cultural groups and I try to ask them about their identity, I definitely stumble over my words very differently than if I talk to people from my own cultural group. 

Michael Coppage: Yeah

Rachael Cerrotti: And I appreciate the permission because I think it does keep a lot of us from asking really important questions is the fear of offending with the question itself before you even get to the conversation. 

Michasel Coppage: I agree. And I think that that fear is creating uhh a delay in some of the progress that we might be able to make. So if I can have someone serve as a proxy and ask those questions and cringe a little bit when I hear them, even, you know, but then get a productive answer and a productive discussion going from it, then I view that as a success because we live in a time, frankly, where words are being policed and it's a very difficult time in terms of how sensitive people are to what you call them and what you say to them.

Rachael Cerrotti: And that’s across the political spectrum 

Michael Coppage: Yeah

Rachael Cerrotti: That doesn’t even matter what you believe in. 

Michael Coppage: Yup

Rachael Cerrotti: There’s also a practice in, you know you said sometimes you have to cringe if someone asks you a question the wrong way. I have my own version of that, being able to take a deep breath and be like, no, no, no, like that they just didn't know how to ask the question and that's a practice on the individuals and to not take offense to things that folks didn't mean offense by.

Michael Coppage: Yeah, sometimes people just don't know, and they have to be given some grace, you know. 

Rachael Cerrotti: Mmhmm

Michael Coppage: And you have to be willing to understand the difference between someone being ignorant just because there's a lack of knowledge and ignorant because they're attempting to be malicious. I think because a lot of white people didn't really have conversations about race during the course of their life because race isn't something that really impacts them as much as someone from another racial group. I feel like white people are in their infancy in terms of these types of conversation and their level of comfort even engaging in, I mean, you can see this so much pushback politically right now in the moment because we're just so early in it that folks are just afraid and I think that in contrast, you know, black people, we tend to start talking about race when we can form sentences so that we can be prepared for the world that we walk out into. We have like PhDs in terms of conversations about race. You can't expect a newborn to converse productively or effectively with a doctor, right? And so they have to be given grace. We have to arm them with the language — the same way you would inculturate a newborn baby in terms of, you know, how they begin to to learn the language and speak in a way that's articulate enough to communicate their feelings and wants and needs, we have to create that same environment for white people, you know. And I know there's a lot of people kind of in a rush, it's been long enough and we should know these things, but the reality is is that we don't. And because we don't, I want to make work that always stimulates productive conversations. I want to create environments where everyone feels welcome. I mean, my reality is my reality. But I'm aware of what my prejudices are or is and I think that, you know, actively working on dismantling that has been something that I'm very proud that I can say that I'm doing and that I've done.

Rachael Cerrotti: I like this idea that we're a work in progress – when you talk about giving grace to folks. We're all trying to work, well, many of us are trying to work to figure this out. And I know you're talking about yourself working through all that and you have a son, right? 

Michael Coppage: Yeah. 

Rachael Cerrotti: How old is your son? 

Michael Coppage: My son is eight years old.

Rachael Cerrotti: Eight years old. So you know, you talk about being born with this language from the black experience. How now, as a father, do you feel like the conversations with yourself have shifted in terms of preparing the next generation to deal with the new reality, right? Earlier you were talking about you and your grandfather live in different versions of America and that might end up being true for you and your son. So what are those conversations like at home? How are you working through all of this with him?

Michael Coppage: Well, my son already lives in a different world. Not necessarily even in a different country. You know, my son is autistic and he has been on the spectrum since he was three. And he'll never experience the lure of like gangs and drugs and some of those things you're exposed to in an urban environment. You know, his reality is just very different. You know, I'll never be able to have a conversation with him about his brown skin and being black and how to interact with police officers and how to do this stuff because his expressive language is severely impacted and his comprehension is also impacted in a way that that conversation for us is impossible. It's a relief for me to not have to have the conversations I had with my parents, with my son, you know? It's a relief for me to not have to explain why, you know, so many black people or people who look like us have been murdered by law enforcement. It's a relief for me to not have to talk to him about race, to not teach him his place in the social hierarchy. I mean, wow, like I feel like I was given a gift even though at the time it didn't feel like that. I always tell people that my son is the most free black person I have ever met. He doesn't have to pick up any of the baggage that comes into his life through his parents and also he doesn't subscribe to social norms or social cues. So, you know, an example is he's never met you, but if I came to visit you and we walked in your house, my son has no problem walking in your house on a self-guided tour, opening your refrigerator. Eating what he wants, going in your bedroom, you know, doing all of the things that a guest who's never been to your home shouldn't do. Right? 

Rachael Cerrotti: Yeah.

Michael Coppage: my son is just alive and he is very secure. I mean, he lives in a world where he's the main character and where everyone and everything is his and is submitted to him. And it's embarrassing for me sometimes because I subscribe to these social norms, but at the same time he's teaching me to care maybe a little less about that stuff and to be more free myself. So, I feel like we're having a conversation, but we're having a conversation about what true liberation looks like. And how we do it and how to be, you know, fearless and how to be unashamed and, in your own skin and in front of other people. And it's just, like, so beautiful. I find myself wanting to be more like him than I want him to be like me. 

Rachael Cerrotti: I imagine that your experience raising him has really impacted the type of art that you make in the way that you think about your art. 

Michael Coppage: Yeah, I mean the work that I make, I have to be fearless. I have to be able to walk into a room with a predominantly white audience and tell them I see them as monkeys. And here's why, you know. I have to be fearless to stage a lynching of a white man in a public park, you know, and photograph it and then deal with the whatever comes with it when I actually reveal it to the public. I have to be fearless in all things and I'm not sure if I was ever fearless before I met my son. So I would say my relationship with him is directly connected to the work that I'm making. Here I am carrying around all this baggage all my life because I'm too afraid to, like, talk about it because I don't want to be canceled or I don't want to be targeted or I don't want to be uncomfortable. And then he comes along and he's like, you know, ‘fuck your couch, I'm Rick James,’ you know. And I'm like, Yeah, OK, like, like as embarrassing as that is for me, the first time after the tenth time, I'm like, ahh you know, that's just, that's just cannon, right? So — 

Rachael Cerrotti: yeah, 

Michael Coppage: So I need – so I needed to take a page out of his book and become Michael Co-pagge and really step into this experience. And it's really been therapeutic for me. It's really been a process of healing, you know. I've taken these things that have kind of poisoned me for so long and really purified myself and my lens and now I'm able to work from a – a healthier place. And I think that, that's where I wanted to be, you know, I don't want all my work to be so heavy and to be so traumatic and to be so polarizing. Like I needed to work through that stuff and get that stuff out so that I could make space for joy and for relaxation.

Rachael Cerrotti: That resonates with me right now. That trying to work through stuff so you can find the joy. That that hits hard. Thank you for this conversation. It's not that often that I get to sit with a black man and talk about these difficult topics and I appreciate you giving me the chance to do that. 

Michael Coppage: You know, it's you I'm thankful for because you're introducing me to folks who I would have never met. Who might not have ever met me. And I think it's really important in the time that we live, that we collaborate to – for recreation, but for education, to nurture and foster relationships and cultural competence and empathy and love and all of the things.

Rachael Cerrotti: All the good things. Yeah. Well, Michael, thank you so much. I know I look forward to more conversations with you in the future, and next time I'm in Cincinnati, we'll meet again at the wine – at the wine shop.

Michael Coppage: Yeah, that'll be great. 

TESTIMONY CLIP OF MICHAEL’s GRANDFATHER

Leroy: I grew up in the south, which was segregated. I mean really segregated. There been many a times where I've been told what to do, when to do and how long to do it. Those were days that the south had the strict segregation. You couldn't go into restaurants. I used to remember when in the city, we'd go to a show. Being white, and with privilege, you go in the front, get your ticket. You go in there being black, you get your ticket, go around to the back and go to the fire escape stairs, go upstairs. This was normal. It was an accepted thing. Being in the South at that time, you had – police was white, the jailer was white, the juror was white, the jury was white, and you was just black get back.

OUTRO

Rachael Cerrotti: That was a clip of Michael’s grandfather, Leroy. You can hear more from Leroy and others by following the link on our website to the Black Box podcast. On our website, you will also find Michael’s TedX talk titled “Everybody’s Racist… And it’s O.K.”  Thank you to Michael for joining me today. It always feels a little extra special when a stranger you meet while traveling becomes a friend in real life.

This show was created in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation which is home to more than 55,000 testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide. You can learn more about their work and the Visual History Archive at sfi.usc.edu.

You can find additional links, book lists, testimony clips and all types of other resources and stories on our website: memorygenerationpodcast.com. Our editor is Lene Bech Sillesen. Our executive producer and co-creator of this show is Stephen Smith. The music is from Kodomo.

I’m Rachael Cerrotti. We’ll be back next week.