Voicing Investigation
Painter and scholar Noelle Barr is a researcher through and through. In both art and life, Barr investigates issues of personal identity and culture, representing narratives about social and political issues which extend beyond the artist’s own singular journey as a transracial adoptee. The New York-based artist creates nostalgic images filled with both the highly specific and broadly familiar. Perhaps it’s the intermingling of what we perceive to be universally recognizable, such as ‘made in china’ patterned text scattered throughout scenes of domestic life pulled directly from photo albums. Even in the play of studied portraits against fluid washes of color and light does the artist evoke the haziness and required focus of searches for clarity and understanding. Barr’s investigation is an ambitious one, and one that coordinates with history, culture, and change. Noelle Barr’s autobiographical work not only resonates as a piece of personal research, but as work that illuminates and voices the experience of understanding and defining an identity on one’s own, over time.
Part One: Who is Noelle Barr?
Question #1: Who are you?
Born in Guiyang, China, Noelle was adopted by two American citizens and was raised in Southern California. She was intuitively drawn to the visual and performing arts, leading her to study Music and the History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2017. An ambitious student, Noelle conducted interdisciplinary research that bridges the sociocultural history of classical music in nineteenth-century France, earning her awards, a research fellowship, and a spot at Johns Hopkins’ 2020 and 2021 research symposium. She interned and worked for local museums, artists, and organizations, where she produced a body of work including curated exhibitions, podcasts, and published articles.
Noelle is currently pursuing her master’s degree at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Her area of specialization is in 19th-century French painting, in which she aims to deconstruct the sociocultural and economic intersections of music and art while applying a post-feminist and critically theoretical lens.
Question #2: Who are you as an artist?
Noelle’s artistic pursuits intersect with her personal role as an advocate for racial equity, women’s rights, and progressive changes in the arts as an institution. Most recently, she has created a series of works in response to the rise of AAPI hate crimes, catalyzed by the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, as an expression of her identity as a transracial adoptee and Asian American woman.
Question #3: What do you think about while creating?
I envision my artistic practice as an infinite spiral as I continue to discover and explore my multifaceted identity. Informing my visual work is the intersection between both imagined and experienced realities — from attempting to trace my origins to embracing the environments within which I have immersed myself. The idiosyncratic narrative I aim to covey is suspended in a field of isolation, loss, and the desire to connect.
Question #4: What is something you wish someone had told you at some point in your life?
To find yourself before trying to offer something you might not be able to give
Question #4: What is something you wish someone had told you at some point in your life?
To find yourself before trying to offer something you might not be able to give.
Question #5: Why do you need art your life?
It keeps the flame in my heart ignited and is the my vehicle for expression and human connection. It is what I turn to when I feel lost or disconnected.
Question #6: Is your artwork for yourself or for others?
My artwork is autobiographical, however I believe that only makes it a part of a larger web of stories that connect me to other individuals who have encountered similar experiences, struggles, and ambitions.
Question #7: What is your escape?
My escape is music and art — creating it and studying it.
Part Two: Untangling Identity
How would you describe your work and practice?
My latest work emerged long before I started to seriously study the arts. In high school, I was in an art class trying to figure out a theme for concentration. One failed attempt was for my to collect any tag from an imported product with the words “Made In China.”
Now that I have a more sophisticated grasp on the making of good art, I have internalized those three words. Looking at myself during the influx of AAPI hate crimes, I imagined myself, my body, as another export that was “made in China.” I have a lot to untangle, and these pieces are not intended as a negative response to my adoption — more of a sense of disillusion. Not having a biological lineage, no medical history when asked in the doctor’s office, stripped of my cultural heritage, my mother tongue nothing more than sound waves. The only way I had any source to imagine my life before my adoption was by looking through photo albums. These pictures are what I study for my paintings as they are the only record of where I came from. Transracial adoptee experiences are not often voiced in the sea of cultural and racial diversity. I am here to share mine for the benefit of discovering my identity and representing a facet of the Asian American community.
| Where/ How can Vacant Museum viewers see more of your work and where can they purchase it? |
| Purchases and my virtual gallery are available at noellebarr.com |