“I’m digging into the parts of my practice that create opportunities for collaboration with the public.”

Artist. Curator. Educator. Puppeteer. His Instagram is flooded with images of faces: colorful, deconstructed and reimagined. Bright colors with geometric shapes and patterns continue to catch the eyes of visitors both in the studio and on-screen. Anwar Floyd-Pruitt is the St. Kate Art Hotel’s newest artist in residence whose interdisciplinary work reveals a passion for engagement, generosity and breaking barriers.

Ava Ladky: What brings you to St. Kate?

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt: For this residency, I’m really sort of digging into the parts of my practice, that one are clean, but two, accessible and create opportunities for collaboration with the public. If there’s wet paint, then that becomes a little more complicated. Last weekend, there were visitors from out of state. A second grader and a fourth grader. They just collaged for an hour. Guests come in and actually take the collages that they made. Guests have taken that “super swag” curating the wall or building more collages themselves. My whole practice feels like there’s a feedback loop where I’m always finding inspiration in the work or processes that I’m doing. It’s about generosity. It’s about reciprocity. It’s about lowering the barrier to sort of creative acts. Many people, they don’t draw well, they don’t think they’re good artists. You’ll never really know unless you try. I think collage with these pre-punched shapes is a really great way for people to explore their artistic or creative side. I’m happy to facilitate that.

Ava Ladky: Were there any barriers in your life that brought you to the path you find yourself on today?

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt: When I was in middle school, one of my best friends could draw all of the cartoons we liked to watch exactly the way they looked on television. I think I envied that. I moved to New York at a certain point and I was married to a fashion designer. I was really blown away by her ability to take a flat sheet of fabric and turn it into a garment. I started really thinking about clothes more recently, as people powered kinetic sculptures. Clothes look great on a rack, but clothes really look good on the human body when we’re walking or dancing or doing whatever. I mean, that’s what they’re really made for. It was around that time living in New York, I found a book on Henri Matisse’s goulash cutouts. By this point in his career, he was a little bit older, even bedridden at different times. He would use a walking cane or a long stick with a pencil tied to the end. He would draw these large, you know, sort of gestural shapes on paper. He’d cut the paper out and collage those into, oftentimes, studies that were used for maybe stained-glass windows, the covers of magazines and things. They were so expressive and so beautiful. I then thought and realized, well, this is Matisse, right? If this is what Matisse did, then it’s certainly like a path that I would value sort of travel down and explore.

And it was, it was great. The collages were always in small books. I really just wanted to start expanding beyond the sketchbook to wall-hanging objects. I think it’s through exploring papers, sculptural opportunities that I found papercraft puppetry. I don’t have any puppets here today. They’re quite particular. They refuse to make an appearance until the gallery walls are more covered with color.

A: Do you consider yourself a maximalist?

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt: I would say so, I’m definitely a “more is more” type of artist which makes for a very sort of cluttered studio space. I now have this sort of really neat and curated space, that’s a lot less, a lot less congested than my actual studio. Now, the studio space is the exhibition space.

A:  Why is it that community engagement, that person-to-person, physical taking up space, drives your work?

Anwar Floyd-Pruitt:  Part of it is conditioning. When I lived in New York, I worked in the sort of face-to-face marketing. You’re giving people an object; a sample of Vitamin Water, a shot of Malibu, and then the Mardi Gras beads, that sort of thing. I’m quite practiced in engaging people. When I moved back from New York, in 2011, the first sort of thing I did when I got back to Milwaukee was tutoring. I have been working with youth for over a decade, from workshops at schools working with incarcerated youth to LGBT community centers. I think as a child I felt a creative block, it was all sort of made up in my head. I had expectations, I had unrealistic expectations, perhaps, I want to help other people get past those creative blocks as well.