Volume 07: Unearthing

We're back! After an extended hibernation.

My favorite viral Tik Tok video of the last year features a bear emerging from her hibernation burrow, clawing out with a relatable lethargy. The bear looks adorably disheveled, stiff and sleepy. When she shakes herself awake, a cloud of dust erupts from her coat and tufts of fur fall to the ground. The bear is me. Maybe the bear is you, too. 

Chada the Bear! Photo credit: White Rock Bear Sanctuary Tik Tok via The Miami Herald

It’s been spring for over a month now, but I am just emerging from hibernation. Not just from this past winter (’s seasonal depression), but also from any enthusiastic attempt at a big creative project. While I’ve taken a longer break from this newsletter than intended, I still wrote a fair amount last year—some unfinished pieces, some works in progress, but nothing I felt like sharing. Sometimes all those Google Docs feel like a nursery of cooing, rosy ideas, and other times, they’re a graveyard of zombie projects ready to reanimate…unexpectedly. 

When I’m feeling a bit tapped out, I shift into the mindset of creative crop rotation. To do this, you plant and nurture certain projects one year, then you swap them out for different ones the next. I find that it replenishes nutrients previously absorbed by other modes of expression, encourages other tools, strengthens the soil, and builds resilience in the land. (Lest you forget, you are the land!) 

And so last year, I spent rotating the weekly essays for new creative outlets. I took a hip hop dance class last spring and spent the rest of the year dabbling in a bunch of fiber arts classes where I learned how to sew basic patterns, quilt potholders, and embroider/mend Sashiko-style. My moves? Awkward. My stitches? Wonky. But it was all delightfully messy. No pressure to be good, just the commitment to go for it. I appreciated (and needed!) the jolt of novice energy, the fear of trying, and the frustration and wonder of connecting different ideas to new crafts.

The quilted watermelon potholder of my dreams.

I’m feeling out this tension between aspiring to a productive output where I am able to share my work consistently and listening to the signs that tell me I need to take a break from exposing myself to an audience. Growth is not just in the heights of sunflowers and sequoias—it’s also in the unseen matrix of roots pushing into the darkness, deep underground. I feel in between these things now, readying myself to come back to writing, pushing up from the soil. Shaking off the dust, shedding the fur.

For the past month, I’ve been mulling over this idea of creative hibernation. When do you know you are ready to come back into the world? What is the thing that pulls you out of the ground? I went down an internet research rabbit hole wondering how animals decide when to emerge. For some, it depends on temperature, daylight, hormones, or their brain’s thalamus starts that inevitable nudging towards consciousness. What I understand is that hibernation is not always a sleepy dormancy—it’s a necessary a form of rest, a reserving of resources, and also, protection from harsh elements and predators. (And sometimes the latter comes from within.)

Last month, I started feeling that inexplicable tug to write about art and music again. I went to an author talk and book signing with Xochitl Gonzalez, who was promoting her latest book, Anita de Monte Laughs Last. (I finished her previous book Olga Dies Dreaming in January and really enjoyed it.)

Xochitl Gonzalez (left) and Dr. Adriana Zavala (right) in conversation at Harvard Bookstore / Photo credit: me

While I didn’t know much about this new book before the event, as Xochitl read and cross-referenced selected excerpts with her own experiences as an art history student, I felt familiar pieces of her and her character’s stories resonate with my own.

Not really a spoiler but a heads-up anyway: Anita de Monte Laughs Last is a fictional retelling of the tragic, real-life artist couple Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre, through the characters Anita de Monte and Jack Martin, respectively. On a separate timeline, Raquel Toro is an art history student at Brown in the late 90s. In the process of writing her thesis on Jack Martin, a minimalist sculptor lauded for his genius, and navigating her way through a patriarchal, white, Eurocentric academic canon and campus, she discovers Anita de Monte’s work. It changes everything.

Ok this is definitely a spoiler: Anita, Raquel learns, dies by plummeting from the 34th floor of her apartment building after an argument with her husband Jack. In the book, Jack murders Anita. In real life, Carl Andre was charged of second-degree murder, but ended up acquitted of all charges relating to Ana Mendieta’s death, walking away a free man. Carl Andre died in January 2024. Ana died in September 1985.

At the talk, Xochitl explained, “The canon wasn’t giving her [Raquel] the person who she could see in herself. The canon was giving her the person that buried that person.”

The character Raquel Toro is inspired by Xochitl’s academic experience and her frustration that she had only discovered Ana Mendieta at the end of her senior year. In her interview on NPR’s “Book of the Day” podcast, she describes her time as a “very devoted and obsessed art history student” at Brown:

“I rarely stumbled upon women, let alone Latinas like myself, so when I connected with Ana Mendieta’s art, it stirred an awakening in me. This book was almost an alternative history of what would have happened for me had I encountered her a bit sooner.”

Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez / Photo credit: The New York Times

When I finished the book, I loved how she created the layers to rewrite art history in tandem with her own personal narrative. One of my biggest takeaways is how the timing and combination of exposure, curiosity, and knowledge at specific moments in your life can alter your trajectory completely.

Still, weeks later, this question Xochitl posed echoes in my head:

“Who gets buried in art history?”
(And who is responsible for the digging?)

So this, dear reader, is what pulled me out of hibernation: remembering the same feeling of clawing through the canon for someone that reflected and resonated with me. Reminding myself that so many of us understand this experience. Realizing there’s power in sharing the stories of artists who inspire us and impact our future selves. “It’s important,” Xochitl said at the event, “to teach each other this history. If the scholarship doesn’t exist to study it, then make the scholarship.” It all brought me back to why I wanted to write this newsletter in the first place—to learn by unlearning.

For Volume 07: Unearthing, we’re exploring themes of hibernation, burial, and resurrection…maybe some zombies too.

How does art get buried by power structures and louder narratives? How does resurrection via relevancy happen? (And what does TikTok have to do with it?!) What is the relationship between the death of an artist and the afterlife of their work?

I can’t promise my former weekly cadence, but I’m looking forward to writing about this theme over the next several weeks. Please share your ideas too in the comments!

Lastly, I’ll be honest—it feels very scary to post after so long. It means a lot to me that you took the time to read this, so thank you.