Nicki Green has never immersed herself in a mikveh. It’s a reality that’s partly out of her control — being a trans woman, the 37-year-old Jewish multidisciplinary artist wouldn’t feel safe or comfortable in more traditional and normative mikveh spaces. Of course, today there exist inclusive mikvehs like Mayyim Hayyim or specifically queer mikvehs like the Queer Mikveh Project. But even still, something ineffable has held Nicki back from engaging with the mikveh on a personal level.
The same is not true for her artistic practice.
Over the last near-decade, Nicki has returned to the mikveh in her art time and again. In a video art piece from 2017 called “Blessing for Fermentation,” Nicki recites her own blessing over photos of someone immersing in a mikveh. But since then, her medium has mainly been clay. She’s fashioned vessels adorned in purple designs to hold water as well as mushrooms and fermented matter. She’s built not-quite human-sized bathing tubs and tanks that have seemingly emerged from the ocean drenched in morels and foam. And, more recently, she’s birthed figurative sculptures, engaging in the mikveh ritual. In all of these works, Nicki explores the mikveh, both ritual and place, as a site of Jewish queerness and transness.
Now, Nicki’s conversation on mikveh continues with two concurrent exhibitions, “Firmament” and “The Eye of the Fountain.” Both opened in San Francisco last week, the former at The Contemporary Jewish Museum and the latter at CULT: Aimee Friberg Gallery. In “Firmament,” a reference to the biblical separation between the heavens and the earth, a tent-like canopy expands over a mikveh like a tabernacle. Surrounding the structure are androgynous angels, guardian-like protectors of the space, holding basins and fermentation vessels. Meanwhile, in “The Eye of the Fountain,” the centerpiece of the show is a human-like figure midway through the mikveh immersion positioned below and a figure Nicki lovingly calls “the mikveh lady” who watches from above.
Recently, Nicki spoke with Hey Alma via Zoom to chat about “Firmament” and “The Eye of the Fountain,” the process of making giant androgynous angel sculptures and the sacred Jewish transness of pickles.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What draws you to make art about the mikveh and Jewish ritual objects more generally?
Many years ago, I heard an interview with the artist Kiki Smith, who mentioned that she was using her art practice to process or explore a fraught relationship with Christianity or Catholicism. I don’t totally remember the details, I was in my early 20s at the time. As a kid, I had never really seen queer people in my Reform Jewish community outside of Boston. I think I was aware of my queerness really early on. But growing up in this Jewish community and feeling like there were no queer people around me, or no out queer people around me, that communicated to me that my queerness and my Jewishness are incompatible identities. Because I really couldn’t control or deny my queerness — and didn’t want to deny my queerness — I felt like I had to step away from a deep Jewish identity in an ongoing, evolving capacity. At that time, it felt straightforward. I mean, I was 12, 13, 14 years old.
It really wasn’t until I was in my 20s and read that quote about using art practice to explore a religious identity or religious upbringing… I was living in the Bay Area at the time and starting to meet not just queer and trans Jews, but queer and trans rabbis, which was mind blowing. Queerness and Jewishness are not incompatible, and they actually inform each other and can be in profound relationship. So I became energized by both trying to understand the relationship between my queerness and my Jewishness, but also using art making as a way to explore it.
Do you find that you’re still discovering new or unexpected meaning while exploring the mikveh and queerness in your art?
Yes and no. My coming to the mikveh as a ritual and historical practice was sort of sudden and surprising to me. I was trying to find ways to ritualize my experience of transness and medical intervention. I found this text by Max Strassfeld and Andrew Ramer called “A Pre-Surgery (or any other transition) Mikveh* Ritual” and I used it before engaging in some transition-related engagement. I went to the beach and just got in the water. I don’t even know if I fully dunked, but I put my feet in the water, and had this profound understanding that water is this fluid — I mean water is a fluid full stop — material. It’s life-giving and transformative, and mikveh is a ritual that has been used for so long, through so much history to mark time and directly engage bodies in space through transformative moments.
I realize earlier you asked specifically what draws me to making mikveh art. I think it’s always been this center of my interest in ritual and ritual practice. Since I was a teen and then into my 20s, I’ve been working in ceramic materials. Vessel language, the study of the vessel, is such a major part of that world. The ceramic world and the development of ceramics as a technology or a set of technologies, is set around clay’s ability to hold water and food. It’s such a central way that we’ve evolved as species, sort of materially, technically and sustenance-ly that, you know, it sort of started to fold into my interest in mikveh pretty seamlessly. Though over time I’ve learned about the ways in which ritual and cultural practice and law really separates mikveh from vessel-hood. Mikveh is not not a vessel, it’s a collection.
But I think that over time the meaning of mikveh in my art has definitely evolved because I’m evolving and my art practice and my life and thoughts evolve. The big thing that became present and new in the past few years, and actually what’s in relation to these shows, is this relationship to architecture. Mikveh is accessible in the way that it is because of architecture and because of the way in which it’s been brought indoors, though the origin is the ocean or the river. But through architectural technology, we’ve been able to change the way in which we engage mikveh as a ritual. And so in that sense, I feel like in the past handful of years, I’ve been thinking about the way in which, not just ritual objects exist, but I’ve been making figurative sculpture as a way to place bodies who are in the midst of ritual into an interior space that then implicates the interior space. “Eye of the Fountain” has these two figurative sculptures that are at the center of the show. You walk into the space and on the ground floor you see a body dunking, sort of in mid-immersion. And then the architecture of the gallery is such that there are stairs that step up onto a second level, and on that second level is a sculpture I semi-sarcastically refer to as “the mikveh lady,” because she’s the one witnessing the immersion. By placing the figurative sculptures into this architectural specificity, the gallery becomes a mikveh.
I’ve thought a lot about how queer and inclusive mikveh spaces are often so DIY and outside near bodies of water. I love that you’ve created this space where queer and trans Jews can engage with the mikveh in an actual architectural space.
I’ve never been to an indoor mikveh before. I mean, I know that there are places that would welcome my trans body. Do you know Mayyim Hayyim in Boston?
Yes!
Maybe a decade ago when I started this mikveh work, I got a grant to go study with them. They’re really at the forefront of the movement to make mikveh accessible for queer and trans folks, and to build liturgy and ritual around queerness and transness. Now, this is my second year of living on the East Coast, and I’m like, “Oh, maybe I could use this space and I actually could have pursued using this space before.” But at the time, I was like, “Oh, I live in California. I’m only here for a day or two. And this is a research trip. I’m not going to immerse myself in this mikveh. I’m here to study.” Though as soon as I say that out loud to you, I’m realizing that ritual practice and immersion is an embodied study. Clearly there was something else going on where I felt not open to engaging in immersing.
It feels bizarre to admit right now, but actually, I don’t know that I really understood that when I say, “implicating architecture,” what I’m also doing is creating that space. I think people have said it to me before like, “Oh, you’re making mikveh accessible or welcoming to trans folks.” And I’ve always been like, “Yeah, I’m making art about mikveh. It’s different.” But there’s something about actually materializing the space, functional or otherwise, that maybe makes it feel like it’s actually possible to have that physical interior. I’m not sure that I actually put that together until you said that just now. So thank you for that.
Thank you. You talked a little bit about doing more figurative sculpture. Could you tell me about the process of making the angels?
So they’re all coil built, meaning that I’m squeezing and rolling clay into long ropes and then I’m using a fork or a tool to score the clay so it’ll kind of join itself. And then I’m really squeezing and shaping clay through pressure and through manipulating with my fingers. Because of that, and because I don’t try to erase that mark-making or that contact, they have the record of my touch. My fingerprints are everywhere on these objects. But also they have this pocky, lumpy, wonky kind of texture to them in a lot of ways. I’m really not trying to make them look hyperrealistic.
I was working on one of the angels with a grad student here at the university that I teach at. She was helping me with a piece that kept collapsing. She has this unbelievable history of going to Italian figurative atelier, and I’m amazed by that sort of skill set. Anyway, she was helping me with some structural stuff, and she said something to me that I keep thinking about. She was like, “Why aren’t you looking at photos of bodies to make these?” And I said, “Well, I think that there’s something kind of exciting about not looking at reference materials. I’m really trying hard not to feel bound by what I think is accurate.” And she said something like, “Oh yeah, because you understand these bodies through touch.” What a beautiful and poetic way of saying that my understanding of anatomy is not through studying musculature, but it’s through what it feels like to squeeze a body. And so then by squeezing clay, I’m kind of replicating that experience.
In art making, we’d refer to it as — sorry, this is a kind of cringe — “haptic knowledge,” the understanding of something through touch. The understanding that it’s inaccurate, or that something feels off and that I should change it is something I grapple with in the making process. Like, for example, feeling like proportions are wrong. And it’s like… these are angels. They’re not right or wrong.
You’ve said that mobility and diaspora is a core tenant of “Firmament.” Why is it important to you to incorporate that into the show?
Yeah, that feels like the central theme here, in the way that the tabernacle is the central sculpture in the show. I should also say that the textile of it, what I’ve been referring to as “the skin of the tent” is called firmament and it’s woven by my collaborator, Ricki Dwyer. My b’nai mitzvah portion was Terumah, which is the plans for the tabernacle. And it’s such a fun one, right? I think a lot of people are like, “The plans of the tabernacle…?” It’s so granular, it’s this list of forms and textiles and woven materials. As an artist I’m like, “Oh my God. It’s the coolest thing to think about the materiality of the tabernacle.” I definitely didn’t think that as a 12-year-old, but now I’m like, “Oh, it’s perfect.”
I think dolphin skins are on that list, right? I always think about that and like, how did they get those?
Totally. It’s like, what? And why? And where did it come from? It’s so fascinating. But, to me, the tabernacle is this central diasporic idea in the study of the story of the Jewish people. It’s this idea that in diaspora, we as Jews, still have access to God on this earth. We can create opportunities to convene with God, and it does not have to be a temple as it was pre-diaspora. There is power and significance in understanding the sacredness of our relationship to the Divine, and the idea that that relationship is something that we take with us everywhere. And so the tabernacle is this reminder, for me, personally, that it’s actually never been about nationality — or maybe not never been about nationality. But for the majority of the story of the Jewish people, it’s not actually about arriving at the place. It’s what happens when we move through space and are uprooted and have to find significance and holiness in the yearning for a place but not actually getting there. There’s this amazing performance artist and activist and writer and incredible trans Jew named Ita Segev. She was talking to me once about the holiness in yearning. I’m obsessed with that idea.
So much of the show is anchored around the aesthetics of diaspora. The tent structure was not actually shipped from the East Coast. We made plans and the museum built it. There’s a kind of mutability there, you know? It’s just going to be what the museum builds, and then we stretch this beautiful textile over the top of it, and place the angels around it. And the angels are on these platforms that have holes for a forklift to go into. They’re 4,000 pound ceramic sculptures that can just be picked up and moved really easily. And we’re showing pieces on the crates that they arrived in. I’ll be the first to say that there’s very little ceramic in Torah, because ceramic is not a great diasporic object. It’s heavy and fragile, the worst combination. But I think the show also kind of reinforces this idea that movement is holy.
I’ll be fully transparent, diaspora feels like a really intentional alternative to nationalism for me. I’ve never had a practiced interest in Israel. It’s just never been part of my Jewishness? I guess now they are doing an LGBT Birthright trip. But when Birthright was offered to me as a young queer person or a young trans Jewish person, I didn’t feel safe doing that. And that’s complex. Like what is safety? All that to say that Zionism has never been part of my relationship to Judaism. It’s been part of Jews around me, but it’s not mine. My relationship to Jewishness is not a nationalist Judaism, it is a diaspora Judaism. And there’s holiness in that that feels really exciting to me, full stop. Like, what does diasporist Judaism even look like? “Firmament” was an attempt to explore that. Could I build a show around diasporism and use the aesthetics of diaspora and not say, “This is what this is. This is diaspora or this is the aesthetics of a Jewish diaspora.” But instead ask, what does it look like? I’m fully disinterested in making definitive statements and rather want to just ask questions.
This answer is almost sort of folding around to, you know, I was talking about Kiki Smith and how art practice is an opportunity to ask questions like: What does it look like to reenter a relationship with Jewishness? What does that look like materially? Illustratively? Physically? Aesthetically? How do I center the questioning? Which I feel is this really Jewish practice of asking questions and answering questions with more questions. There’s something that feels diasporist about refusing to be definitive.
“The Eye of the Fountain” is on display at CULT: Aimee Friberg from Sept. 6, 2024 through Nov. 16, 2024. “Firmament” is on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum from Sept. 5, 2024 until Feb. 2, 2025.
