Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. This hour, we're speaking to artists who were selected to be part of The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. The show was organized to celebrate the museum's 200th anniversary. We go now to Melissa Joseph, who spends her time working with felt. Joseph is a trained textile designer who got interested in felt in the last few years. She creates three-dimensional pieces inspired by her biracial family photo archives.

Her piece on view currently at the Brooklyn Museum is called Olive's Hair Salon, which is inspired by Joseph's niece giving her father a haircut in the backyard. Joseph joined us last year to talk about her solo show that was running at the Margot Semel Gallery. We enjoyed speaking to her so much that we figured we'd take the opportunity to hear her story again and to encourage you to go see her work at the Brooklyn Museum. You can also visit her Instagram to see more @melissajoseph_art. I started by asking Melissa, what it is she enjoys about working with felt?

Melissa Joseph: I discovered felt during the pandemic. I had been trained as a textile designer in my 20s and worked mostly with print media. I think maybe especially because of the pandemic and being isolated and not able to be around people, there was something about the softness of the felt that was really, really important for me at that time. I really dug into working with the material during that time.

Alison Stewart: What did you learn about working with felt that you didn't know before?

[laughter]

Melissa Joseph: The truth is I didn't know a lot about it at all. It's an interesting place in textiles where it's really relegated to traditional and craft realms. Even being trained in textiles, I didn't learn it in school. It's starting to have more space in these fine art conversations now. Really, a lot of people don't know about felt. They don't understand how it's made.

I spend a lot of time when people come into the studio or see the work, just kind of talking about how it's made, which is it's actually very intuitive and very fun and cathartic. Well, wet felt is the oldest textile that we have. You use wool and you rub it together with water and some soap and it will lock together. The fibers will lock together. The needle felting that I do mostly now is a newer process. It just involves using a needle and stabbing the surface. The felt will embed itself into whatever you're using.

Alison Stewart: What does it feel like to work with it?

Melissa Joseph: It's so funny. It feels like home. It feels like where I am supposed to be and where I came from. I think any sort of textile is going to speak to the body because that's what we do with them mostly. As soon as you see a textile, you can immediately relate to it on the level of your physical self. I think because my work is interested in talking about how we move through space and how our bodies impact the way that we're permitted to move through space. Then this idea of a fabric and this interface of body and fabric as a protector, as a decorator, as a function, those things all become embedded in any work that uses that material no matter what you're doing with it.

Alison Stewart: One thing I thought was that I went to the show. When you get close, it looks one way. Then when you pull far back, it looks different. They're the same. You understand that it's the same work, but where you stand really makes a difference with the work.

Melissa Joseph: Yes. Because when you get really close, you can really see those individual fibers. Maybe then you can even take yourself to the place of the animal where the fiber came from, right? Then you're getting into this completely different conversation. If you've done meditation and meditative eating and you think about this raisin and then, where did this raisin come from? Not just where did it grow, but the truck and the people and everybody, the hands that have touched it. That kind of thinking is embedded into-- I think ancestry is a big part of why I use these images from my family photo archive. I'm actually curious, knowing that you wrote the book about stuff and junk.

[laughter]

Melissa Joseph: How you felt about seeing the way that I'm using some of these cast-off and discarded objects in conjunction with the felt.

Alison Stewart: I just love the idea of something coming from an object that contains memory. Because the hard thing is for people, when they don't want to throw something away, it's because they don't want to throw away the memory. How great would it be to have the memory become part of something else? I love that idea of. I think it's beyond recycling.

Melissa Joseph: Yes, thank you. I'm so happy to hear you say that. I feel that too. I was talking to a friend of mine named Jacob before this broadcast. He was saying just that. I can't say in words always what I can do with the material. I can't articulate always perfectly why. There's just this feeling. Sometimes the feeling is that it's that memory or that story that I just feel. I see it or I recognize it.

It's like recognizing the humanity and the people who had those objects and in the animals. I've been vegetarian now for 30-some years. I think that I do have this very, very deep empathy for living beings. I know a lot of people. That doesn't make me unique. I think a lot of people have that. The art really gives me an opportunity to sit with that and to engage with that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Melissa Joseph. Let's talk about a couple of pieces. There's a work called Owen, which is in two different images set inside a double-circle frame. Tell me about Owen.

Melissa Joseph: Okay, Owen is my nephew. He's two years old. [chuckles] A lot of my work includes images of my niece, especially because when I was felting, Owen wasn't born yet. This is one of the first works that I've actually done with my nephew. That object is like a standpipe or a holder that is found by someone I collaborate with. I call him my rust guy, but his name is Jeff Adelberg. He lives in Massachusetts. His Instagram is how I found a lot of the objects that I work with because I don't have time to go and be picking at flea markets and stuff anymore.

That piece, the whole show, I understood to be about furniture. As I was selecting images for the show, which I do intuitively, they had images of furniture in them. There was always a character that was a piece of furniture in almost every piece. That was from a series of images of Owen moving around on this chair in the front yard. I knew I had the two openings where I could put images. I thought of it almost like a real or like a Muybridge showing different moments in time, almost like a video. Those little ones are tricky because you don't have a lot of space to make moves.

Alison Stewart: They're small. I wanted to let people know that they're really small. They're a diameter. Would you say that?

Melissa Joseph: Yes, I would say. Yes, maybe 4 inches across. 3.5 or 4 inches across, yes. That's something that's magic about felt too. I painted for most of my life. I don't have the same facility with paint to scale up and down the way that I do with felt. Somehow the materiality of the felt itself can scale in ways that inherently make it interesting, or at least I can understand how to do that.

In those little pieces, one hair, one fiber can make or break a likeness or a sentiment. It's like an interesting conversation you're having with the material as you go. That one, I'm thrilled that he's here in the world with us. My brother and his wife were trying for a long time to have a second child. He finally came to us as a little miracle. Yes, I just wanted to include him in our story.

Alison Stewart: Then there's the two-panel piece I mentioned of the girls, young women getting ready in bed. There's curlers and someone's putting on stockings. Where is that image from?

Melissa Joseph: Oh, my gosh. That one, I love. That's actually from a slide that was digitized by my uncle. It's my mom's first wedding. My mom got married when she was in her 20s. My mom's in the curlers. They're getting ready for her wedding and she's putting stockings on her youngest sister, who's 16 years younger than her, who's probably about eight at the time. There was another woman in that photograph and I didn't know who it was. I asked my mom and she didn't even remember. My mom's like, "I wonder whose wedding that was."

[laughter]

Melissa Joseph: Our Aunt Peg is the family historian and she was able to remember. It was a friend from college that was visiting. Since that person wasn't someone who I really had a connection with, I decided to remove her. I took a photo of myself in the same position in the same clothes.

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Melissa Joseph: I put myself in that space, which is a new departure for me. I haven't done that before. I didn't want to make it a false image where I was actually there, so I separated them in the plane. They're actually framed separately as a diptych. It's a departure. It's a new way of working.

Alison Stewart: Oh, so the separation is because of you?

Melissa Joseph: Yes, it's because I wasn't actually there. I wanted to conjecture about what it would be like to be there, but I didn't want to actually create that fantasy that I was there.

Alison Stewart: Do you think you'll continue to work with felt?

Melissa Joseph: Oh, my gosh, yes. Felt is like I was a felter in a past life or a sheep or something.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Melissa Joseph: Felt is, for me, forever.

Alison Stewart: That was Brooklyn-based artist Melissa Joseph speaking with me last year about her work with felt. One of Melissa's pieces, Olive's Hair Salon, was selected to be part of The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum this year celebrating the museum's 200th anniversary. The show is on view through January 26th.