ARCHIVING ACTIVISM: A CONVERSATION WITH MONICA SHEETS

Monica Sheets is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores ideas of participation, authority, and the possibility of civil engagement beyond traditional forms of social activism. Through organizing events, developing archives, and conducting oral histories, she envisions spaces that welcome participants who might not identify as activists yet long to have a voice in the politics impacting their lives. 

Sheets’ artistic practice is a product of the places she has called home—from her upbringing in the Rust Belt city of Toledo, OH, to years spent as an expatriate living in the former East German city of Leipzig. Her work investigates the impact of our past narratives on our present lives from both the individual and the collective perspective.

Claudia Pretelin met Monica in the fall of 2023 during her residency at 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA. She and I continued the conversation over Zoom, focusing on the making and reception of two distinct bodies of work, Das Fundbuero and The Feminist Strip Club, considering how we remember, reckon, and record our histories.

Sarah E Webb : Your interest in art as a social practice is rooted in your experiences growing up in Toledo, Ohio. Can you talk about the evolution of this approach to art-making?

Monica Sheets: I started shooting social documentary photography in my teens but became frustrated by its limitations and potentially exploitative qualities. I wanted to create artwork that wasn’t just commentary on social issues. My friend group came from primarily working-class backgrounds, and I wanted to make work that was relevant to them, work they might encounter and engage with in their everyday lives.

My undergraduate school didn’t foster that kind of experimentation, so I struggled for several years. Things became clearer during my BFA exhibition—an installation about my fraught relationship with the institution of marriage—when the reactions of my coworkers from the fabric store I was working at and the parents, particularly mothers, of fellow students gave me the sense of connecting to an audience that I thought should be possible. I still wasn’t sure how to do this outside the gallery, though. 

After a period of not making art, I began again in some sense where I had left off as an undergrad. With the encouragement of Minneapolis artist Jane Powers, I was able to quickly transition into making interactive works in public space: on the street, in coffee shops, and on the early 2.0 Internet. I became increasingly interested in artwork as a site of exchange and a way to create platforms for communication. Later, in grad school, that led me to conversation and process-based practices, where the audience became participants, helping to shape the work in both process and form.

SEW: Your practice is similar to that of a community organizer in some ways, but it uses different means to achieve a different end. It feels more like a form of political activism but with the intention of archiving. 

MS: I’m interested in how people can feel politically engaged outside of traditional forms of activism, partly because those are spaces I never felt comfortable in myself. An important difference is that there is not usually a specific problem that a project is trying to solve. More often, it’s about creating a space for conversation, documenting that conversation, and making it available to a broader audience afterward. Wallace Heim uses the term “slow activism” to describe artworks that have an impact that may not be immediate but contribute to change over time.  That resonates with me, even though I’m a highly impatient person and would like to see ‘results’ more quickly. 

SEW: How would you describe your creative process? Does it begin with a question?

MS: It doesn’t necessarily begin with a question as much as noticing a lack or an omission—which may be the question because it leads me to wonder why that lack or omission exists and how it might be addressed. In Germany, for example, I was only there a few months, only speaking a rather primitive German, when I realized how much of a need there was for people to have a platform to talk about their experiences in East Germany and with the aftereffects of German re-unification. 

Then, I begin to research: in the library and through formal and informal interviews, talking casually with people, scouting for potential participants, finding organizations that might be doing aligned work, and seeing if there’s a way to collaborate.

It’s important to me to have an open call for participation to find ways to reach potential participants who might not identify as part of an existing community but are interested in or connected to the topic. I like the diversity of opinions this brings to projects, satisfying my need to include people not already networked.

The timeline determines how much structure I propose from the outset: a longer timeline means more openness and more possibilities for participants to shape the process and form. 

SEW: Do you hope your work will spark specific conversations regardless of the diversity of your subject matter?

MS: I see a couple of themes running through my projects regardless of their specific subjects. One is how our discussion of the past influences our present and what we see as possible. Another is how different forms of participation can create better forms of democracy by opening up what it means to be an engaged citizen.

These conversations don’t necessarily happen within a given project—though sometimes they do, and participants usually know about my other work and broader interests. It comes up more when looking at my work as a whole and in conversation with other practitioners. That’s one reason it’s important to me to be connected in some way to academic and art world circles in addition to the communities involved in a specific project. I’m interested in reflecting on methodology and philosophy and communicating about the knowledge generated through my participatory work. However, I usually prefer to do this in visual rather than written form. When it’s appropriate and wanted by participants, I try to make connections between them and these other circles. Bringing specialists and laypeople into conversation is a goal in my projects that again extends beyond the specific topic of an individual’s work to a broader philosophical attitude.

SEW: You received your MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany. How did the program support and expand your practice of making?

MS: I chose the Bauhaus program because it focused specifically on making art in the public realm but beyond the modes of monumental sculpture or other permanent installations. What surprised me was how much more language-based my work became while I was there. I hoped working in a region where my native language was not widely spoken would lead to me working more visually, but quite the opposite occurred. To pursue my work about East Germany and German identity, I had to become more fluent in the German language itself.

Weimar was also an incredible place to study public art because every space is overdetermined with historical meaning. The layers go back to prehistory and include the German Enlightenment, but it’s the Nazi era, of course, that’s most fraught. Buchenwald Concentration Camp overlooks the town, and Weimar was a favorite getaway for Hitler. Then there’s the Soviet occupation and the 40 years of East Germany. Most streets and public squares have changed names three or more times in the 20th century alone.

Anyway, my point is that all of this is very much in your face there. If you decide as an artist to ignore it, you must be willing to deal with the consequences because most Germans are well-informed about their local history and will make contextual connections. Working there pushed me to do more and better research about the site and context. In the US, we pretend those layers don’t exist, though that is finally, slowly changing. 

SEW: From 2010 to 2014, you continued to live in Germany and began Das Fundbuero. The project was situated within a storefront in Leipzig, collecting objects, hosting events, and becoming a container to consider the nuances of East German history by the people who lived it and how memory is sometimes held quietly, unspoken, or controlled. Did you find your position as an expatriate to be a help or hindrance?

MS: Being from the US was often an advantage in Das Fundbuero. At that time, the fact that a North American from the United States was interested enough in East German history to focus their life around it garnered media attention that had a twofold effect: It helped spread the word about the project and brought more participants, and it also had symbolic value by communicating that this was a topic of public value and interest, a contentious proposition at the time. 

For many participants, my status as an outsider made me an ideal conversation partner. Even though the US is intrinsically tied to the post-WWII history of Germany, the situation in the 2010s was seen as a German-German conversation, with former West Germans on one side and former East Germans on the other. I was often perceived as a neutral party (though there’s no such thing) and someone to whom people felt they could explain their thoughts, feelings, and experiences without me bringing preconceived ideas or passing judgment.

SEW: Das Fundbuero was never intended to be a stand-alone exhibition within a traditional art institution, yet in 2023, it was shown at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. How was the work reformulated and received within a gallery space, especially to an American audience less familiar with the specific history itself?

MS: During my time in Leipzig, participants often asked if I would bring the archive back to the US and exhibit it there. They felt like it offered an important historical perspective that would help Americans build a more nuanced picture of East Germany than the sort of “victor’s history” that was common. I grew to feel that the archive also offered the possibility for a critical perspective on US history and our claims to being a democratic exemplar.

In creating the work for the Civics Lessons exhibition, the challenge was often to balance this charge from participants with the need to create a context for a US audience. This meant using parts of the space to install objects that demonstrated the history of divided Germany and the story of Das Fundbuero to explain the provenance of the items people would be viewing in other areas of the gallery, but without relying overly on written didactics or constraining the viewer’s own space for thought.

Some works followed a compare/contrast model, exhibiting contemporaneous items from East Germany and the US together, drawing parallels between each country’s social and cultural experience, and inviting the audience to draw conclusions based on visual resonances. This often drew on a sense of nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s, whether this was lived or received. Excerpts from interviews and other archival materials were presented with quasi-obsolete technology like cassette players and cardboard archive boxes with paper documents, encouraging the audience to slow down and enter a different space to connect to this new information.

Comments I got from visitors suggest that the gambit worked. I would often be in the gallery for a meeting, and visitors who had picked up on the fact that I was the artist would come over to talk with me and share their experience of the exhibition. They usually had only the most casual knowledge of East Germany, if any, but would connect to themes about the individual versus the collective and the role of historiography in our lives. The interactive aspects of some works were key to this. 

SEW: More recently, you founded The Feminist Strip Club, a series of collaborative projects with erotic dancers that explored the current conditions of and utopian visions for stripping. As someone who had worked within the industry as a dancer, what was it like to approach this work from an insider’s perspective? 

MS: My perspective in The Feminist Strip Club was that of an insider and an outsider. It’s been multiple decades since I was actively dancing, and the socio-economic context of dancing in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2019-2023, is quite different from that of Toledo, Ohio, in the 1990s.  Because of my experience, there were topics that I was particularly interested in—the misclassification of dancers as independent contractors rather than employees, for example— that ended up not being as urgent for some participants. It’s always a challenge to balance competing interests in collaborative work, and I knew that might be more the case for this project. On occasion, some participants completely devalued my experience, a situation I didn’t anticipate because it’s so antithetical to my own working philosophy. 

After a short time, it became clear that administrative aspects of this project couldn’t be shared the way they had been in Das Fundbuero, that I needed to be entirely a facilitator, and that I would need to put any desires I had to be a participant on the back burner. So, ironically, the project in which I had lived experience of the subject matter turned out to be the one in which I had less personal creative expression.

SEW: Who are the writers, artists, organizers, and cultural workers inspiring you today?

MS: I have a long-standing love of and admiration for Bruce Springsteen for his ability to connect with audiences and tackle social issues with nuance and sincerity. The self-questioning and reflective nature of his personality, evident in interviews and his autobiography, demonstrate an ideal artist type for me. 

I find a lot of intellectual inspiration in philosophy and critical theory. Svetlana Boym’s writings about how nostalgia can be a tool of critique, particularly in the post-socialist context, were critical for Das Fundbuero but extended beyond that context, too. Chantal Mouffe’s writings on agonism and democracy, as well as other perspectives on democracy like Jürgen Habermas’, provide a theoretical backdrop for my practice. And Simone de Beauvoir’s writings explore our ethical obligations to each other and the social constructs that may constrain us from a powerful perspective. 

I also admire novelist Jenny Erpenbeck’s ability to place individual stories within historical context and show how these intertwine without writing what one would consider “historical novels” per se. It’s impressive that she writes about such specifically East German experiences in some ways yet has achieved such widespread acclaim.

SEW: What’s next?

MS: I’m working on a series of solo pieces that draw from my experiences as an erotic dancer when I was a teenager, exploring some of the more personal themes that came up for me during The Feminist Strip Club, but that weren’t appropriate for that project. In some sense, I’m turning the documentary eye toward myself in this work, interviewing myself about my experiences and using these to approach issues about sexuality, aging, and memory. The work includes a series of floorplans drawn from memory of the clubs I worked at, accompanied by an audio narration of the process of remembering these spaces and events within them. I want the final format to play with the relationship between the intimacy of memory and an exhibition’s public nature — both in the gallery and the strip club.

SEW: What is your favorite instrument of memory?

MS: Oral history is my favorite instrument of memory. It’s subjective and fallible, of course, but it’s simultaneously very individual and connected to the collective memory of events. 

SEW: Thank you, Monica!

Monica Sheets is a Saint Louis-based artist who creates sculpture and installation, organizes events, and develops archives and oral histories to understand what it means to be an engaged citizen in the world beyond traditional forms of activism. The throughline of her work is a focus on historiography and identity, exploring how our stories about the past play out in our lives today. Sheets was born in Toledo, Ohio and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her experiences in the Rust Belt (the former industrial heart of the US) were pivotal to her decision to work directly with participants, to reach audiences who might not normally visit galleries and museums. From 2010 to 2014 she led Das Fundbuero, a storefront space in Leipzig that collected objects, hosted events and created a space for considering the nuances of East German history by the people who lived it. More recently, she worked on a series of collaborative projects with erotic dancers to explore the current conditions of and utopian visions for stripping. Sheets received an MFA in Public Art and New Artistic Strategies from the Bauhaus-University Weimar, Germany. Her work has been recognized by the Minnesota State Arts Board, FORECAST Public Art, the MCAD-Jerome Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the Culture Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and A Blade of Grass Foundation’s Fellowship for Socially Engaged Art.

If you want to learn more about Monica’s work, check out her http://www.monicasheets.com or follow her on IG @monicasheets.