Born in San Antonio and raised in a Transcendental Meditation community in Fairfield, Iowa, artist Joey Fauerso creates captivating paintings, drawings, videos and installations, many of which draw from personal experiences — from the everyday to the extraordinary.
"I went to the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment and that was a very seminal experience in a lot of ways," Fauerso told the Current. "It was an interesting group of people who moved there from all around the world. That community has led to a lifelong interest in utopian experiments in America and beyond — and how our upbringing fits into that larger experiment, that larger thread of American history."
In 2014, Fauerso was diagnosed with breast cancer and her work began to evolve in a bold new direction. In addition to largely eschewing color in favor of a stark black-and-white palette, she began developing a "subtractive" method of painting by laying down broad fields of acrylic paint and then strategically removing layers to create her subject matter. She also started using herself as a model — and taking creative cues from snippets of her children's conversations.
"I made some big changes that were also big, creative breakthroughs," Fauerso said. "The work became much more personal, very personal. I wanted my art-making and my relationships to be happening all at once, and to have a lot of intimacy all the way through. And that ended up [leading to] the best creative period of my life."
Spanning 2014 to the present, that prolific period in Fauerso's artistic journey recently took shape in an impressive new book from San Antonio-based F&M Projects, the nonprofit publishing arm of the multidisciplinary design studio French & Michigan. Titled after one of Fauerso's works, You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make compiles projects and exhibitions that coincided with international residencies and high-profile grants — including a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors. Punctuating the cloth-bound book's image-driven chapters are thoughtful essays by curator Veronica Roberts, writer Aurvi Sharma and poet Jenny Browne, among others.
As exciting as the book is for Fauerso, it's also a milestone for F&M Projects. In 2018, the platform held an open call and ultimately selected Fauerso along with fellow Texas artists Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Sterling Allen and Ryan Takaba.
"Working with Joey is what dreams are made of — not only because her work is so strong but because she herself is so wonderfully authentic and wholeheartedly funny," French & Michigan co-founder Céleste Wackenhut said. "Through F&M, I'm trying to redefine what it means to be a curator and work with artists in impactful ways. This project really embodies this effort. I feel a lot of responsibility putting these books out in the world because it needs to represent the artist accurately both in text and tone. Joey believed in our ability to do that from the start and recognized the great effort that goes into this production. After all these years, Joey is not just invested in the success of her own book, she's invested in the success of this program. I'm endlessly grateful to her for seeing the big picture."
As a means to share highlights from You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make, the Current flipped through the 296-page book with Fauerso during a visit to her Southtown studio.
Play acting
Following an introduction by Wackenhut and an essay by Roberts, the book opens with a chapter dedicated to Fauerso's 2015 project Dog Hospital. Inspired by a homespun game her sons Brendan and Paul were playing one day, the project pairs washy watercolors with ominous text: "Another dog got a tumor." "You have to take him to the people for the operation."
"This is one of the pieces closest to my heart," Fauerso said. "The boys were playing a game called Dog Hospital, which was [really] about them processing me going through cancer treatment. Part of what I told myself is, 'I'm just going to let the creative process happen in our life.' So I was writing down what was happening and documenting and taking pictures of our life. I wrote down verbatim what they said and made paintings [based on the] text. ... I remember showing it to Jenny Browne and saying, 'I made this thing and I don't even know if it's art. This doesn't feel like my artwork. It feels like something that's just helping me to find joy in this brutal time. But then I ended up making it into a book and people really responded to it."
That positive outpouring landed Dog Hospital in the collections of Ruby City and Austin's Blanton Museum of Art — and landed Fauerso in a Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) exhibition the artist considers "an amazing break."
The art of falling apart
Similarly, Fauerso's years-long endeavor You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make was sparked by an overheard interaction between her sons.
"One day Paul had built something with Legos, and it was around the time that Donald Trump had been [elected]. Paul was crying and he said to Brendan, 'You destroy every special thing I make.' And I wrote it down because it's so sad — but also so funny."
Around that same time, Fauerso was preparing for her 2017 Blue Star Berlin residency and had decided to take her kids along. Since her husband, Artpace Director Riley Robinson, would only be joining them for a short time, Fauerso began devising a project she and her boys could work on together in Berlin. Alluding to the construction and destruction of childhood Lego sets, the concept took shape in precarious arrangements — involving everything from wooden blocks and steel sculptures to paintings and canvas cutouts — that Fauero captured tumbling down in hundreds of videos she later edited into one 10-minute, four-channel video.
Intriguingly, the video — presented in the book as stills and viewable in its entirety at joeyfauerso.com — almost reads as a black-and-white animation project, save for appearances by her "littles" as they blow through the scene to bring the sets crashing down.
"It was kind of an epic thing to make," Fauerso said of the piece, which took two years to complete and made its debut at MASS MoCA in 2019.
Waiting game
While it's highlighted in various sections of the book, Fauerso's distinctive technique of subtractive painting is on full display in the chapter "Wait for It." Named after an exhibition that debuted at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 2021, the chapter features a pair of two-page spreads that showcase the surprisingly organic textures Fauerso achieves by squeegeeing layers of wet paint off canvases she brings to life on her studio floor.
The artist's quick strokes leave behind unpredictably mottled patterns that lend themselves remarkably well to skin tones, landscapes, flora and fauna. Reminiscent of DIY printmaking techniques, these patterns are informed by the dings and bumps in her studio floor — an accidental work of abstract art in its own right.
One of the chapter's key images, Fauerso's 2020 painting The Waiting Room depicts a nude woman lying in a doctor's office. Speaking simultaneously to illness and the role of women throughout art history — one of Fauerso's recurring themes — the painting reads as a conceptual self-portrait.
"Most of the women [in my work] are me," Fauerso confirmed. "In this painting, I was thinking about all the times you're lying in a doctor's waiting room in this vulnerable position and how shitty the art is. I wanted to make my dream waiting room. So there's Eva Hesse, all my favorite painters and my favorite places in nature, Georgia O'Keeffe's studio and one of the Russian Women's Battalion of Death fighters. Every image becomes a portal of something."
A recurring Fauerso motif since Dog Hospital, the crawling woman makes appearances in "Wait for It" and throughout the book.
"I always like to say, 'I like the men to be lazy and sexy, and I like the women to be either in their own dreamy space or scrambling.'"
In the book's introduction, Wackenhut expands on the symbolism behind the figure.
"The crawling woman, while originating as a self-portrait, has developed into a symbol highlighting the invisible labor experienced by all women through an intersectional feminist lens. Her continuous appearance — sometimes centered and sometimes just escaping the frame, sometimes alone and sometimes one of many — becomes a silent rhythmic beat persisting throughout Fauerso's practice."
The "Wait for It" chapter also evidences a slow but steady return to color. In the 2021 painting Under the Table, an almost-monochromatic still life sits atop a tableau of stretching figures and an upside-down cat — yet another curious motif — against a pink-and-blue backdrop that her bumpy studio floor helped push into sunset-like territory.
As we perused the final chapter, simply titled "Paintings," Fauerso summed up the book eloquently.
"[My diagnosis] didn't slow down my work. [In fact] my work kind of exploded at that point. I would say the last 10 years have been the best 10 years — even though hard things happened."
You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make sells for $50 and is available to preorder via frenchandmichigan.com. The book’s official release is set for Saturday, Feb. 24, 2-4 p.m., at French & Michigan, 1200 S. Presa St.
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