With Her First Book, Artist Tariqa Waters Asks, WHO RAISED YOU?
For over a decade, artist and curator Tariqa Waters has brought her potent brand of pop maximalism to Seattle, turning everyday objects and culture references from her childhood into artistic fodder — from larger-than-life sculptures of Julia-themed lunch boxes to her surreal, Pee-wee Herman-esque talk show highlighting the artistic diversity of Seattle. Her world drips with colorful irreverence and cheeky humor, flipping gender scripts, remixing Black cultural touchpoints, and reflecting the contradictions of daily life.
In 2012, in Pioneer Square, Waters opened Martyr Sauce, a subterranean hybrid art gallery, performance space, and beauty supply that featured many of her pop art objects as well as serving as a space for other creatives from across the city to exhibit work. MS PAM (Martyr Sauce Pop Art Museum) debuted nine years later in 2021, extending her concept to a sister space just above her original location. Though Waters closed both spaces last year because of rent increases, both have shaped cultural conversations throughout the region.
Now, Waters has announced her first-ever book, WHO RAISED YOU?: A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette, which is both a survey of Waters’ past 10 years of work in Seattle as well as a personal reflection of her personal life, family, and career as an artist. Recently, the Emerald rang up Waters for a quick chat about her book (due out next spring if she can hit her preorder), her new exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), and the importance of etiquette.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Over the past couple of years, you’ve really been racking up accolades — most prominently, the 2023 Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum. I know your show, Venus is Missing, opens at SAM in the middle of next year, but is there any nugget of info you can give us about what we can expect from that exhibition? I’m dying to know!
I’m always trying to find the nugget of joy when I’m overwhelmed and the world is worlding right now — let’s make a rocket ship and try to see if we can get out of here. So I’m having a lot of fun, as I usually do. I tend to lean on my imagination and really tap into my resources — play and joy and excitement and trying to not overthink too much when it comes to the next natural step in the evolution of my work. … In this exhibition, I’m wanting to shed a bit of that, but having fun in the whole sci-fi realm of storytelling and time travel. There are a couple of large-scale pieces that I’m currently working on that’ll be a surprise — and how it all comes together will be a surprise for me as well!
And also, majorly, next year you’re releasing your first book, WHO RAISED YOU? What was the genesis of this book?
The title came about while I was talking to a publisher, Michelle Dunn Marsh, about the things that I have come up against, primarily in Seattle. I’ve been an artist for over 20 years, and my career started before I came to Seattle, but I was able to do a lot here. So [the book is] focusing on this particular region and my experiences here. Because I have so many pots on the stove, I’m often caught in spaces where I’m asking that question out loud, like, “Who raised you?” Why am I being treated like this and disrespected?
I’m always talking about race here, but that’s not because I want to. … Being in the Pacific Northwest, the way that otherness happens here can be taxing, especially when you’re trying to make work. I’ve had a lot of people come up to me over the years and ask for advice or some kind of guidance on mentorship or just unpacking — So this happened, and I don’t know what to do with it. I thought it would be funny to lampoon those 1960s etiquette books, but doing a monograph of all my work since being here in Seattle — installation works and exhibitions — with the framework of it being A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette.
I don’t hold any close cards. If anybody asks, I’m really upfront with my experiences and my opinions. If I find it helpful to give somebody advice or insight to something, then I generally do that — I try to be as transparent as possible. Especially if it’s like, “Am I crazy?” No, you’re not crazy! [Gaslighting] quite unfortunately is normal. This is how I navigated it, and it may or may not be something that works for you, but at least you will have a reference. Nuggets of information will be sprinkled throughout the book, as well as personal stories and a bit of my upbringing too, about who raised me and how I arrived at some of the outcomes that I’ve arrived at in my life — especially with a creative family. My husband [guitarist Ryan Waters] is a musician, and both of our kids are artists and creatives — they’ve helped out quite a bit with Martyr Sauce — as well as other organizations and institutions in the city too, so they’ll have a hand in some of the comic relief and just their shared experiences as well. Give me a couple of glasses of wine, and I’m an open book! I don’t give a fuck. But it’s more adult to put it in a book.
For millennials and zoomers, etiquette is not really something that I feel like is as drilled in us as it would be for my mom, who’s a Gen Xer from the Midwest. Do you see an importance to etiquette?
I don’t — I think all of that shit has gone out the window.
Etiquette is performative, it’s not something that is generally sincere. It’s just something that you make sure you are abiding by just to get on with life, and make sure you don’t offend. With social media and even in real life now, people don’t even know how to have conversations and don’t know what to say because they’re afraid somebody’s watching, somebody has a phone somewhere, somebody’s recording. Which is crazy to me, because you don’t really have any room for growth or understanding. You’re in a state of fear and anxiety that you’re going to do and ultimately say the wrong thing, because we’re human. So I really do think that etiquette at this point isn’t for me. The way I process it in this book is having fun with it — it’s the whole, “Who raised you?” kind of thing. So you have to go inward and look at, okay, what patterns of behavior have I adopted where it’s now normal for me to even ask somebody about, you know, how long did it take for you to do your hair? Or [say] your art looks “whoreish”? It’s the whole do unto others as you would have them do unto you. [My book] is looking at it in a more individual way of — how are you showing up in the world, and are you mirroring what you want to give back?
I’m curious — who raised you?
I was raised by two, as I see them now, very young early-20-somethings. My mom met my dad at the car wash in Richmond, Virginia. They came from their own set of baggage, their own set of family dramas, but I think that they went in with the best intentions. It was the early ’80s, so, you know, drugs and stuff came into play for my dad. My mom kicked him out and so she became a single mom, and raised me and my sister alone in Richmond until she remarried in the early ’90s. Luckily, my mom’s siblings were all artists, so they took a hand in raising my sister and I, getting us really enthusiastic about the arts in a very matter-of-fact way. We were latchkey kids, so it was a lot of Sesame Street, Jenny Jones, and other weird television we watched [laughs]. And Sesame Street was also a big deal in terms of seeing kids who look like us with very little means that were just on the playground. My father got himself together, and was a pastor — he had his own church and was one of those fire-breathing pastors. I saw everything, and everybody showed up as they were — the good, the bad, the beautiful. I’ve been really fortunate to be able to see their light, and that’s what shows up for me in the work and my story — the shadow ways of people trying to get through the world. I see a lot of those as lessons, and I try not to have them keep me in chokehold too much.
Your career has spanned two decades across so many different mediums — how do you collate that into a coffee table book?
It’s really difficult to try to gather exactly how to distill it so that it’s not too much and it’s not going all over the place. The framework of Martyr Sauce helps in anchoring a lot of the sensibilities that I carry as an artist. What is the root? What’s that thing that has driven me to do what I do, or think the way I think, and show up the way I show up? I’ve never stayed in any place long, and that comes from my family’s migration in the southeast. My parents moved from North Carolina for a better life, from North Carolina to Richmond, and then my mom remarried and moved from Richmond to the Maryland–D.C. area. From there, I left and went to an HBCU at [Florida A&M University], then I was like, ‘Fuck this’ and I left and went all over the country. So it’s baked in me to see what’s next.
[Putting together this book] is about using a lot of like experiences that I’ve had, living all over and living abroad, and just applying that to how I’ve been able to shape-shift and change and adapt and also not take things on. I do find that once I shake myself off a bit and regain my bearings, that I can, I can adjust and figure out something that makes the most sense for me, not necessarily what anybody else thinks I should be doing.
You can preorder WHO RAISED YOU? A Martyr Sauce Guide to Etiquette over on Minor Matters’ website.
