Tiff Massey is a Detroit artist whose practice centers around adornment and community. Massey creates jewelry, sculpture, performance, video, and music, as well as immersive art environments. Massey was the first Black woman to earn an MFA in metal smithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She draws on 1980s hip-hop culture and her experiences as a Detroit native to examine the concept of adornment as an examination of the African diaspora and contemporary issues of race, class, and popular culture.
We spoke with her on the occasion of the opening of her new solo exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, “7 Mile and Livernois”. She is the youngest artist to show a solo exhibition in the museum’s history.
I’d like to begin by just asking about the broad framework of this new solo exhibition at the DIA. How did the exhibition come to be? How did you go about choosing the title?
7 Mile and Livernois is home to me, so if I’m going to have the largest platform to speak to and show work, it only made sense that I represent for my city. Detroiters, especially people who have grown up in Detroit, this is what you would utilize as a destination to say where you’re from or where you grew up—it’s like an origin type thing, it’s like “east side”, “west side”, or “7 mile and Livernois”, very specific things, not like the conversations now where it’s like, “what neighborhood do you live in?” We didn’t really have that type of conversation. For me it was another way to represent my home and my influences, and the intersection that actually produced the elements, the sauce, that you’re going to see on Saturday.
From what I’ve read there are brand new pieces that were commissioned by the DIA specifically for this exhibition, could you talk about those? I read that they are curated to be in conversation with preexisting pieces from the museum’s collection, did this context shape the works at all?
When museums put on exhibitions, they have curators whose whole job is to do research and figure out what exhibitions they are going to house. It was an associate curator that was working at the DIA at the time, Juana Williams and Katie Pfohl, who approached me about possibly doing this exhibition, and it was about me responding to the DIA’s permanent collection. I chose to respond to Donald Judd and Louise Nevelson, and I chose Donald Judd because I remember this piece specifically from when I was a kid and my mom would take me to all of these institutions. I haven’t seen it since I was a kid until recently seeing it installed in the exhibition. I wanted to respond to Louise Nevelson because she has come up in conversation when people have seen a particular body of work that I produced called Quilt Codes, and the first time her name was mentioned to me it was just because I utilized the color black. So basically I wanted to have these mashups with these artists that are highly recognized in every contemporary art museum, and I wanted to show the 7 Mile and Livernois response to these pieces.
This publication focuses mainly on the social role of artwork—what are the different jobs that art and culture perform in society— how do you define the social role of your practice? Community identity, examining issues related to race, class, pop culture.
I’ve purchased land and the goal is to develop it to be able to house creative events and give opportunities to other small businesses—and I’m calling artists small business—and then to be able to give back in the capacity to teach. I consider that an aspect of my art practice, developing space for the future. Within the context of the work, I think depending on what body of work we’re talking about I am talking about historical context, I’m talking about Detroit, I’m representing Black Detroit as a Black Queer woman. Regardless if it’s blatant or written on the wall, I’m representing those things all the time. At the end of the day my focus is to make sure that Black culture is seen at these levels because usually Black culture is exploited or appropriated and then sold back, but in actuality we are the originators of the sauce and we should be getting these types of platforms to show you how saucy things can actually get. It’s how do I create a larger table for people who look like me to eat, or how do I make sure that they get the opportunity to express themselves because now they have access to tooling. These are all the things I think about all the time.
You provided a great segue there— l was curious about reading how you’ve merged your artistic practice with real estate. Could you talk a little more about the relationship between these two fields that I think a lot of people see as unrelated but are in many ways so intertwined within one another?
They are very much so related to me just because that’s how I think about space, I think about how people enter those spaces—it could be a new coffee shop or a new restaurant—it’s also the same thing of how I approach these objects, especially when we are talking about the scales that I am reaching. And so all of these things are very much important. I also think about design and Black design, and also how design is used to exclude, gentrification, cause you can go to places in Black ass Detroit and you don’t see any Detroiters at all. I think about all of these things, and it is very important for me to design highly designed spaces. I think its dope as fuck that we’re a UNESCO city of design, and I’ve been talking about this in every interview but I don’t think we’re taking that designation seriously enough, and so to me it’s like how can I bring these elements and make sure that we have highly curated, beautiful spaces in the hood too.
Last question, maybe the vaguest and most abstract: So often art and science are held as diametrically opposed, and similarly on a smaller scale with art and design. As someone who has studied science, works in jewelry which is sometimes labeled a decorative or practical art, does the classification of “fine art” hold a specific meaning to you?
I definitely compartmentalize aspects, but I’m not going to compartmentalize this business. This is a business. I think what happens is because of the system of how art is taught, they don’t teach you that you are a business because there is a whole business industry that is surrounding it that they want to house you. It’s like, “we’re gonna teach you how to hone your skills and then when you get out, but these people got it.” Why would I give my life’s work to someone else to decide where it should go and what the importance of it is.
But also something about how you framed the question made me think about art in general. There’s many ways to make a living as an artist, and not every artist wants to be at a museum, and not every artist wants people to know their name, so I think it’s really specific to what that artist is doing. There’s corporate art, where it’s 9 times out of 10 not going to be placed in an institution. I think design is a perfect example, everything we’re looking at is designed by somebody, but people don’t want their kids to be artists or be creative, or the way they leave the A out of STEM. All great inventors had to draw, they had to have a blueprint. It’s weird. We had to document the dissection, we had to draw the blueprints. Somebody had to design this coffee cup to go that could actually last a couple hours with this hot ass fluid in it. So it’s just crazy to me that people say, “don’t be an artist,” when we pick all these objects specifically because we’re attracted to them. All this shit is a business, so I take it all very seriously. The thing is how do you give this shit back. I know that I’m rare with the level of skills that I do have from Detroit, or just in the damn world. There’s not metalsmith classes in the hood, or any neighborhood, so the access to the field whether its ceramics or metals is rare.