Hits You in Your Heart: A Conversation with Nancer LeMoins
Nancer LeMoins is a printmaker, photographer, and mixed-media artist living in San Francisco. She stated, “I didn’t really start to feel like I was an artist, creating art that mattered until I tested HIV positive in 1986 and started making art about that.”
Sitting down with Brooklyn-based project manager, independent curator, and garden designer Kris Nuzzi, LeMoins discussed the impact of HIV on her practice, climate change, and making work about women unseen by much of society.
Kris Nuzzi
I wanted to start at the beginning of your journey and ask if there are any experiences you would like to share about being a woman artist who was diagnosed in 1986. There was a sea of information and misinformation that rarely represented who you were as a person. How has that journey been for you? What are some resources you were able to turn to?
Nancer LeMoins
I was pretty frustrated at the beginning. I had so many female friends die so fast. It seemed as if men got a lot of resources, and we weren’t in the public eye in the same way. So early on, I joined the WHIS Study, a health study originally only for women. For around 30 years, they’ve done health research on HIV-positive women, and that’s been really good for me. It helped me to consider on my own terms how to understand having HIV and my response to the diagnosis. I learned to appreciate how hard it would be for my physical and mental health and my connections with other people.
Rebecca Denison started an organization called Women Organized to Respond to Life-Threatening Diseases (WORLD). It was an amazing organization back in the 1990s. It still exists, but I’m not involved with it anymore. Through it, I met a lot of other women with HIV and was able to do and teach art to my peers. Art was how I fought to highlight what was going on. I decided that in the future, I didn’t want everything that was going on then with AIDS to be a blurb in a book that removed all the complexities. I started making art about HIV and AIDS so I could address what was really going on.
KN
You were always making art. You wrote that you “attended art school and did all the proper things but didn’t start to feel like you were an artist creating art that mattered until you tested HIV positive and started making art about that.” I would love to hear what you created before and how your work transitioned after your diagnosis.
NL
Absolutely. I don’t want to say my earlier work wasn’t art that mattered because somebody recently showed me some of my earlier work, and I think it’s pretty profound. I did a lot of stuff about women’s issues at the time. I was living in Olympia, Washington, where there was quite a community of women artists. I realized that if I was going to change the world in any way, it would be through making art that people could learn from and just maybe change their perspective a little bit. My whole life has been about connection because I love to talk to people. I love to listen to people. I just love communication. So, the first piece I did about HIV says, “Will art save my life? Will it bring my fucking friends back?”
KN
Sur Rodney (Sur) and I included Will Art Save my Life in the Visual AIDS 25th Anniversary exhibition. It was one of the first works you encountered. The message simply hits you. I’m also drawn to your mixed-media silkscreens on the soles of shoes. Can you tell us about their symbolism?
NL
I was walking around downtown San Francisco, and I had this realization about the ways that people would walk over homeless women as if they weren’t there. It seemed that they took part of their soul, like their literal soul. It rubbed off on the soles of their shoes as people walked by. So I started thinking about putting women’s portraits who were homeless on the soles of shoes, because I felt like it was such an obvious thing.
With their consent, I interviewed and took portraits of these women and paid them a small amount for their time. I distilled what they told me. Distilling what people have to say is a tactic I often use in my work. I drew portraits with pencil with my left hand, which is my nondominant hand. I wanted to create the portrait to have a barrier for me, something that made it harder.
KN
They’re breathtaking, and the story behind them makes them even more poignant. They’re very accurate—or seem like accurate portraits. I can’t believe you did them with your left hand.
NL
Oh, it takes practice, but after a while, it’s pretty easy. After drawing their portraits, I matched up some things that they had said with them. Have you seen the posters that go with it? There’s a shoe, words, a portrait, and a poster for every woman I talked to.
KN
I remember those but didn’t realize they were part of the same series. This makes me love them even more.
You have another body of work that explores vibrant colors, birds, flowers, trees, and other symbols. This work has less text. What are some of the deeper meanings behind this work, in contrast to your text-based work?
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Nancer LeMoins, Flight Pattern 1, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Visual AIDS. -
Nancer LeMoins, Flight Pattern 2, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Visual AIDS. -
Nancer LeMoins, Im Sorry for the Things Ive Done, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Visual AIDS.
NL
These are also pretty political. I was driving around listening to an NPR program about how the warblers are dying out because of climate change. I just love birds. Every one of those pieces is about what we get from birds that our lives would be missing if birds went extinct. Every one of those has a hidden meaning about what that the bird represents, or what a bird represents to me, and why they’re important in our lives. For instance, the one with the cabin at the top, State of My Mind, was inspired by me thinking that the perfect place to live would have many birds around it. The buffalo down at the bottom points backward because they were allowed to go extinct. The birds are pointing forward because I don’t want the birds to go extinct. There are reasons for everything.
KN
When I first saw your work in the Visual AIDS archive, I was inspired by the powerful statements you were making. They felt very direct and something that I could relate to. The work had such an intimate scale at that point, yet the urgency in your messages is larger than life. I thank you for all your work over the years, inspiring future generations.
NL
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
KN
You shared some new work with me today that is much larger in scale than the previous work I’ve seen, which is usually between 12 and 15 inches. These are over five feet tall and include large-scale portraits. What inspired this series?
NL
In the 1990s, I started collaborating with a woman named Sharon Siskin. We did something called Still Here for the art and transit program in San Francisco, which turned them into billboards.
We went to a residence for people on Market Street and interviewed the people living there. It was a similar approach to the shoes and posters. We photographed them, did interviews, and created little stamps from the art they had created. We did writing workshops with the interviewees to create postcards. What they wrote on the postcards was what they wanted to say to somebody to let them know that they were still here, living with AIDS, after all this time. The pieces we’re collaborating on now have to do with people giving back to the community and not just sitting around sucking up time and energy. It’s all about people with disabilities, mostly people with HIV, who have done amazing volunteer work. All the people in that project have volunteered in incredible ways. The words are them talking about their volunteer service.
KN
The work is really beautiful, and the collective story behind it is powerful. What advice would you have for an artist, especially a female or LGBTQ+ artist, who is looking to explore something about their personal identity? Do you have any advice for them as they are starting out?
NL
For me, it was realizing that I had to not give a shit about what anybody thought of my work. I am still like that. I do the best I can, and if people don’t like it, then ah well.
I don’t have the time and energy for that kind of negativity. I just want to get my message across when I can. People were always asking, “Why are you doing this art? This is ridiculous. Why are you wasting your time on this stuff?” Blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, making art feels really important.
My advice is to find out what’s important to you. Walk around in your life and try to notice what hits you in your heart. What really makes your head or soul kind of go “Wow!” and work on that. Right now, I’ve been aware of how many women have been murdered by men. My next series will be a collection of pieces about the phenomenal number of murdered women in history and their energy. I think there’s always this energy from people floating around, and there is a huge mass of energy somewhere out there that’s all the murdered women joining together.
Just follow your heart. I know people say that all the time, but really it is the most important thing.▪︎
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