A Conversation with Elena Yu
Elena Yu is an interdisciplinary artist and arts organizer from Los Angeles, CA now living and practicing in Charlottesville, VA. Continuing her ongoing Dust Jackets project, Yu engaged the archives, material objects, and institutional culture of a historically significant Ethnic Studies library collection at University of California, Santa Barbara as a “fallow place” during her Spring 2024 New City Arts Fellowship. The work she made in response will be on view at Welcome Gallery as part of fallow, a group exhibition featuring work by this year’s Fellows.
Elena Yu was interviewed by Kitty Smith (Summer 2024 New City Arts Intern). The photos in this interview are by Lindsey Leahy.
Maybe before you even quantified yourself as an artist, what’s an early memory of creativity for you?
My dad was an architect who ran his own office in Los Angeles called George Yu Architects. I remember being fascinated by the models he built, with their tiny people and miniature white model cars. He used a lot of materials that felt new to me, like thin sheets of aluminum, orange resin, white foam, and colorful transparencies. Sometimes we would build models together, of airplanes or famous buildings like Notre Dame and the Duomo in Florence. My dad was very social and collaborative. And maybe that impressed on me that creativity isn't necessarily just one person working alone. My mom sews and had a children's clothing company and handbag business out of the backyard studio that my dad designed and built when I was growing up. She was a one-person operation and probably did a lot of the designing and sewing after putting me and my sister to bed. Actually, as I'm saying it, I really have both things. One side of my practice is very social and the other side is me alone in my studio, sewing and just getting sucked into making things.
Did you learn to sew from your mom?
Yes and she also sent me to a sewing class at the local fabric store, and it was a cool class, I feel like they wouldn't do this anymore. The teacher let us make whatever we wanted, individually, so it wasn't like, “Everyone in this class is making a tote bag.” I was probably only 12, but she let us look at these patterns and choose whichever we wanted and then just tutored us all individually but in the same room on making. So, yeah, that probably fostered some creativity and ambition to not just make like the standard, easy kit-thing. She was a pattern maker, and I remember she would really reinforce the perfection of the seams and make us rip them out a lot if they weren't perfect. So maybe that's where attention to craftsmanship comes in for me. I also learned other fiber crafts from my Por Por (my maternal grandmother), who grew up in New Zealand where she and all the aunties would knit and crochet sweaters for all the cousins and send them overseas to us in the U.S.
Has sewing always been a big part of your practice? How has your media evolved every time?
Well, when I was a kid, I really liked fashion, and I drew a lot of clothes. I would look at runway photos and draw copies of the outfits and create fake fashion magazines. I didn't study fashion in school, but I considered it. I studied studio art at UCLA, and it was a very heavy conceptual art kind of program, so I didn't make clothes during that time because in most classes there was kind of an unspoken bias against focusing on craft, technique or functionality. But then after school, I worked for the Joshua Tree-based artist Andrea Zittel for four or five years. Zittel has a conceptual sculpture practice, but her practice is also very rooted in craft and she makes clothing, weavings, ceramics and furniture. So there I had the chance to feel like it was an artistic, valid thing to do in the contemporary art world, to make clothes and work with fabric again. All these boundaries between art and craft are dissolving more these days and people including myself are tired of stressing over them. For the last eight years since I graduated, I've had parallel practices of working with fabric and selling ready to wear consumer items, and then also having more of an experimental, conceptual research-based practice in performance and sculpture. With the project that I'm working on for the fellowship, it's the first time I feel like I'm bringing all those things together. Right now I'm working on making a garment, a duster jacket, that will be in the show. It's with this print of woven together book dust jackets blown up really large. It’s wearable, but it's also a sculpture that I would like to encourage viewers to look at closer than they might normally look at a piece of clothing.
That's so awesome. Yeah, I remember I read your Fellowship prompt and then heard you talk about exploring it in a different way than initially expected. How do you feel like your vision of “fallow” has changed during the process?
Yeah, so I’m doing a different project than I initially proposed in part because I decided to focus on my initial project idea (responding to lichen in cemeteries) for my solo show at Welcome Gallery in October 2025. Honestly, I keep having to go back to reread MaKshya’s prompt to reground myself in "fallow." The specific words in the prompt are so evocative. I think it has inspired different visions for me around my interest in archives and suppressed histories. I think one of the first lines in the prompt was about yellowing, and that definitely connects to my research and this project being connected to a library— a library being a place where books get old and yellow and maybe “die” even though they should be used. The spark of my fellowship project was my visit to the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Santa Barbara, specifically these two rooms full of abandoned objects and papers from staff members who had their offices there from the 70s or 80s through the mid 2010s. They hadn’t worked there in a number of years, but all their things just got left. These office spaces felt like fallow places, really rich with history and relationships with students and other staff and books, but the energy that permeated the spaces when they were occupied just got cut off. And all of the staff’s belongings are now holding all of that history and energy in a liminal way. These belongings weren’t deemed important enough by the university archivists to put into Special Collections, so after I went through and took some of them, including the dust jackets, the rest of the office contents were thrown out. I’m reanimating and re-engergizing the objects that were in those offices. Now the offices are basically empty, they're group study rooms with no art or personality on the walls. Next year, I’m going to have a temporary site-specific installation in the UCSB Ethnic Studies Library that I’m working on with some of their librarians and archivists to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection. I'm making curtains that have imagery from my dust jacket weavings, from paper weavings I made with students, and from the UCSB archives. The curtains are going to be displayed in the windows of the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection, including in the windows of the former offices. One of these curtains is going to be in the Welcome Gallery Fellowship show.
I feel like this empty study room fits the idea of a fallow space so well.
I guess the way I’ve defined “fallow” in my head, it is a place that has potential, but it is not being utilized, not being harvested, right? So the place could be harvested or regenerated in the future. And maybe part of what I'm trying to do with the Ethnic Studies library’s history and the objects I found in the offices is to reactivate them in a new way.
I feel like so many themes within that overlap with your ongoing projects that I've seen. Do you always feel like history, making these stories visible, is something that you think comes into your work a lot?
Yeah, I'm still trying to understand what the throughlines are because the work seems really disparate sometimes. I think one throughline is my interest in history and researching and learning new things myself through the process of creating work. And then pointing the viewers through my art to something that is right there in front of them but maybe doesn't get acknowledged enough. Something like lichen, that people might not even know the name of, or have noticed really passively but then once it's named and pointed to then you just realize that it's everywhere, it's beautiful, and it's not harming anything. I guess, yeah, same with history, I think especially the history of Ethnic Studies. In California it's kind of taken for granted by the current generation that one could study those subjects in university. But Ethnic Studies programs only came to be through student activism beginning in the late 60s. I’m not an expert in lichen or in Ethnic Studies, so by focusing on them in my art practice, I’m partially embarking on a journey of self education that then gets translated through my artworks.
There’s so much deep noticing in your work. When things are rooted in so much research, what is the process of balancing it with the making of the art? When do you feel like you're ready to put it into a form?
I actually feel like the making comes easier to me. As much as I'm interested in history and research, I worry that I'm a bad researcher. In the past, I’ve lived more in the space of generating new ideas than actually materializing them. I'll quickly get inspired to make something new and not go as deep as I want to. It feels different with the Ethnic Studies Library body of work that I’ve kept expanding and iterating on for about a year now. I don't necessarily think my work needs to have all of the facts in it. Maybe what I'm doing is taking that little bit of inspiration and using it to make something intriguing that then prompts other people to do their own research if they want to.
It's very cool seeing your work breathe life into things that I think could go forgotten. I think about that a lot— there kind of being a critical period where, if you don't keep a story alive, if you don't keep an object alive, it just won’t be remembered, and how much we lose when we don't have that. I love that your work is a vessel to keep people engaging with these ideas and histories.
Yeah, thank you for noticing that! It reminds me of a really early project of mine that I started in college that I call the object memory archive. I interviewed people about an object memory and had them tell me about what they remember of that object, what it looked like, any connection, any story behind it. I have 35 pages of transcribed interviews about people’s objects. And I made some sculptures inspired by the objects. And then I would do workshops where we would gather object memory stories as a group. People would exchange stories with each other and then make a garment or a sculpture inspired by another person’s story. At the end of the workshop each participant would gift their “object memory homages” to the person whose object memory they were connected to. So yeah, reanimating and revitalizing memory connected to specific objects and stories is definitely something that has popped up in my work for a long time.
Do you find these interconnections and interviews playing into your work often?
I think as a social person, I need to balance out the more contained, focused headspace I can get into when I’m in an engaging conversation, with the awe-struck, expansive headspace that being alone in the outdoors can facilitate. Most people might think of socializing as an outward activity and walking alone in the woods as an inward activity, but I think it's the opposite for me. I want my own art to push and pull the viewer between these inward and outward spaces of attention. I think it’s important to maintain a connection to both.
But yeah, I think that conversations with people are often part of my research, and maybe the part that I like better than reading books or articles online and gathering and organizing notes. For my current project related to the UCSB Ethnic Studies Collection, I connected with Alyce Harris, a retired UCSB library staff person whose office was one of the spaces that I got to go into. Alyce worked in what is now the Ethnic Studies Collection from 1982-2016. When she first arrived at UCSB, there was no Ethnic Studies Collection, there was a Black Studies Collection and a Chicana/o Studies Collection called Colección Tloque Nahuaque and Alyce was the Black Studies library assistant. We talked on the phone for a couple hours and she just told me tons of stories. I had already been working with the dust jackets and weaving them together, but through our conversation I learned she’d kept those dust jackets in her office file cabinets to make impromptu displays in the windows of the Ethnic and Gender Studies Collection area of the library to attract and welcome people and to make the space feel connected to Ethnic Studies. That interview was really important, finding out that I was working with the same exact material that Alyce worked with for a shared purpose, which is to enliven the library with materials related to Ethnic Studies that will encourage students, staff and faculty of color to feel ownership over the space.
Finding that common thread must have been so exciting when you were talking to her.
Yeah, the relationships that form during my processes are really important for me. To varying degrees, they’ve been part of the actual artwork. When I did the object memory workshops, just creating space for two people to talk to each other was a major part of the art. Other times it's not as much part of the finished art, but it's part of my process of researching and it makes my job as an artist more enjoyable.
When did you start to realize that dialogue could be not just part of the process of the art, but part of the art itself?
When I was in college, I primarily focused on performance art, and I had four professors in particular who used a lot of dialogue or direct addressing of the audience in their own work: Andrea Fraser, Simone Forti, MPA, and Julie Tolentino. They all engaged with the audience and broke the fourth wall, often by talking and making eye or physical contact with viewers, so I think that's where I learned that. I ended up at UCLA because having grown up in LA, it was the nearest strong school to go to and I had an excellent art teacher in high school who encouraged me to go there. I’m really lucky to have been accepted and ended up in such a great art program.
What has the shift from California to Virginia been like?
I lived in Joshua Tree, California for 7 years after college and spent a lot of time contributing to the arts community there. On any given Thursday night we might watch a friend’s band perform, then on Friday attend a zine-making workshop led by a neighbor, on Saturday celebrate an art exhibit that a friend curated, and on Sunday drive out to the dive bar in the middle of the desert for brunch, to drink $2 Bloody Mary’s and just enjoy being together. That kind of community nourishes my creative life, but I’ve found that my lower key social life since moving to Charlottesville in 2023 has nourished my individual studio practice. I find myself going to my studio and making art more than ever. But there are also lots of wonderful people and things to do here, too!
New City Arts and Visible Records were actually two of the art spaces I found online before coming to Charlottesville that made me feel excited to move here. I think what they're both doing feels really welcoming and inclusive. You can be a newbie who knows nobody and just go meet new friends and participate. That’s how it felt to me when I came here. After having a studio at McGuffey Art Center as part of the Incubator program for my first year in Charlottesville, I moved into a studio at Visible Records this past July, so I’m excited to get settled there.
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship studio space was located at The Underground: A Center for Creative Collaboration (The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative), an artist-run creative co-working space on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia. A cohort of four artist Fellows received a month-long studio space grant, a $500 stipend, and a stocked pantry with their favorite drinks and snacks. The Fellowship season (March 2024 - July 2024) culminates in fallow, a group exhibition at Welcome Gallery in September.
The 2024 New City Arts Fellowship is made possible with support from anonymous donors, the Anne & Gene Worrell Foundation, the Community Endowment Fund at the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, Pam Sutton-Wallace and Maurice Wallace, and a partnership with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative.
