Philippa Pham Hughes

The views and opinions expressed by speakers and presenters in connection with Art Restart are their own, and not an endorsement by the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts and the UNC School of the Arts. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The raw materials of Philippa Pham Hughes’ art are human bodies and minds. Since 2007, when she hosted her first gathering of strangers, Philippa has worked as a social sculptor and cultural strategist. What this means is that, through methods drawn from the arts and the humanities, she curates what she calls creative activations. These are carefully planned spaces and events to which groups of complete strangers from different walks of life meet face to face and break bread, often quite literally.

In these activations, with Philippa’s guidance, participants can touch the third rails of polite discussion, whether they be politics or religion, because the intent is always to keep everyone safe and committed to open communication and the makings of a better world. In a time when the bully pulpit of social media makes it easy to dehumanize the perceived enemy, Philippa’s work centers our shared humanity.

Philippa is currently Resident Artist at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and is Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins. She has worked with several institutions in her current hometown of Washington, D.C. and in a variety of settings all over the country, in activations both large and intimate.

Here she describes how she refined the work of others to create her own practice of social sculpting and explains how she maintains her optimism and vigor when it seems like all Americans want to do is scream past one another from a vast distance. 

Choose a question below to begin exploring the interview:

• How does one become a social sculptor, and did you invent the term? Did you know what such a thing was before you became one?
• What led you to the kind of art you’re currently making? How did you develop your career?
• Is there anything in your legal education or practice that you think has come in handy, or was it just a completely tangential moment in your life?
• It sounds like your work is anthropological or sociological. What about your work feels primarily artistic to you?
• At what point did you decide to bring together people who were not primarily art lovers and from different walks of life to share a meal, to have conversations, to break down barriers?
• Given that you do invite randos into your house and oftentimes people with whom you’re pretty certain you’ll disagree on fundamental issues, how do you ensure your overall safety?
• How has your work changed your sense of belonging in the world today?
• Do you ever feel like in your work you are fighting an uphill battle? How do you remain optimistic? Are you optimistic?
• If somebody were to commission you to make work about a controversial issue, would you take the commission? How would you proceed if you were to proceed at all?
• Has there been a moment in any of your activations, your events, where you did have to talk someone off the ledge emotionally?
• I know you’re developing a course for Johns Hopkins, and you also mentioned a course in Michigan that you’re developing. Could you talk about those?

Pier Carlo Talenti: I’ve interviewed a number of different artists for this podcast, but you are the first self-described social sculptor. How does one become a social sculptor, and did you invent the term? Did you know what such a thing was before you became one?

Philippa Pham Hughes: Well, I did not invent the term. An artist named Joseph Beuys from Germany in the 1960s and ’70s invented the term, and so I borrowed it from him. I model a little bit of myself around his work because what he was interested in was social change, using art as the tool for that. He wanted to create a better world, a better society, and we could all contribute to that. He believed everyone was an artist, and so he would create these social sculptures in which people would participate in helping to make the world better. 

But I’ve really evolved from who he was because he was a bit of an egotistical person. He had a much bigger ego than I do [she laughs], and he believed he could single-handedly change the world and that he was almost a cult-like person. He tried to create this cult-like image around himself.

Pier Carlo: He was sculpting his own monument.

Philippa: In a way. He would’ve been great in the age of social media, today’s celebrity-culture worship.

But the thing that I love about what he was trying to do is this idea of, how can art be part of social change? He was intent on political reform as well. Then the other piece that I really love about his work was that he was really pulling from so many different disciplines — anthropology, mythology, nature — and so that’s very resonant with me. I’m really interested in so many different ways of studying human nature and in studying the mind. I think my art really tries to incorporate psychology, sociology, philosophy, all the different disciplines. 

I think he was doing that too, but the thing where I veer off from him is that I started moving into more of a what has been called relational aesthetic. One of the leaders in this world is an artist named Rirkrit Tiravanija. In this field of artistic practice, what he was doing was creating the space, that physical space, in which people would come together and create relationships in those spaces, actually have dialogue in those spaces, but it was less about making objects and more about the relationship as the art piece. So that’s where I think of myself more as a practitioner of relational aesthetic than maybe as a sculptor of objects. I don’t make any objects.

Pier Carlo: You went into law, so you did not immediately decide to become a professional artist. What led you to the kind of art you’re currently making? How did you develop your career?

Philippa: Well, there was no path, no straight line, that is for sure. Because you’re right; I didn’t start off pursuing a career in the arts. The thing I always tell people is I have an Asian mother, and in Asian culture, you get three options for a career: doctor, lawyer or engineer, and so I picked what I thought was the easiest one of those three, which was lawyer. 

But I’ve always had this lifelong curiosity. I’ve always loved to write. That was probably my first artistic expression. But after a few years of law practice, I just realized I just wasn’t cut out for that, so my path toward becoming an artist was very circuitous. I just started trying things. I experimented. I tried things. 

Back in 2007 ... actually, let me go back even further than that. I feel like the foundation for this was when I was still practicing law and I just started inviting artists to my house for salons. It sounds so easy and simple, but I just wanted to talk to them and learn about their practices and hear about their works and how they talked about it. I fancied myself a modern-day version of Gertrude Stein, where I would create these spaces where we drink wine and talk about art and what it meant. I feel like those were the very first seeds of the practice that I do now.

Pier Carlo: Is there anything in your legal education or practice that you think has come in handy, or was it just a completely tangential moment in your life?

Philippa: Oh, it was absolutely handy because the thing about law, going to law school, which I loved … .  I hated practicing law.

Pier Carlo: Oh, you loved law school? OK, tell me more.

Philippa: Whenever I say that to other lawyers, they’re like, “You’re crazy.” But the thing that you learn in law school is not the law. What you learn is how to spot problems, figure out what are the problems, and then ask questions so that you can figure out what the solutions are. Being a good lawyer is really about solutions, figuring out what the solutions are, and that has definitely come in handy throughout my life, not just in the artistic practice, but in just really thinking about how to envision this better world. “Here’s our problem. What are we going to do to solve that?”

Pier Carlo: In a way, it sounds like your work is anthropological or sociological. What about your work feels primarily artistic to you?

Philippa: I love that you used the words anthropological and sociological, because I also often joke recently that I’ve become this amateur social scientist.

Pier Carlo: Yeah, probably professional by this point!

Philippa: I know. Because once I started reading and learning more about sociology and psychology and really being more self-reflective and examining myself, I feel like the artistic practice became better. 

It is interesting to try to pull out, what about this is the art in it? Because a lot of people do question whether relational aesthetic is even a real art form at all. I think part of the problem is because you don’t end up with an object at the end. You end up with a relationship or a conversation, and that doesn’t feel satisfactory when you think about art as a sculpture or a painting.

Pier Carlo: But it does, if you think of art as an experience.

Philippa: As an experience. Exactly, exactly. And when you think about art as a way of creating a feeling … . Because even with objects, one way to define their success is, what is the feeling that you have when you view it or hear it or see it? I’m trying to create a feeling, a sense of, “I’ve been transformed in some way,” and that’s really hard. Lots of artists talk about their work as being transformative, and I’m like, “Well, that’s pretty hard to achieve. Have you actually achieved that?” I think it is harder to achieve when you’re just creating objects. 

And I want to stop and say I love art objects. I wish you could see where I’m sitting right now in my living room. I’m surrounded by art objects. I love art objects and collect them passionately, and I go to museums and art spaces all the time because I love them. So I’m not diminishing the object. I’m just trying to create something different, a different way to access these transformative experiences.

Pier Carlo: At what point did you decide to bring together people who were not primarily art lovers and from different walks of life to share a meal, to have conversations, to break down barriers?

Philippa: I’ve always done that. That’s my nature, to bring people together randomly. In fact, my partner always makes fun of me because I’ll have a dinner party and he’ll ask me, “How many randos are coming tonight?” Because I’ll meet somebody for five minutes at an event and think, “Oh my gosh, you seem so interesting. Come to my house, and I’m going to make you dinner.” I’ve always done stuff like that.

And I get it. It’s not easy to do. I’m going to be teaching this course at Johns Hopkins next semester, and I was thinking, “How am I going to teach somebody to do that?” Because I’ve been sort of grappling with, is that just a personality defect in myself or something you can actually teach someone? I do think that that’s something that I’m going to be thinking a lot about in the next few months as I develop a syllabus for that course.

Pier Carlo: Well, that brings me to my next question, which is, given that you do invite randos into your house and oftentimes people with whom you’re pretty certain you’ll disagree on fundamental issues, how do you ensure your overall safety? And I don’t mean just physical, although that’s important, but also the sense that, “Oh, I’m feeling safe in my house after this person’s left and has said a bunch of things that are maybe repellent to me.”

Philippa: Well, I try to think about other people’s safety more than my own, because I have a pretty high threshold for opinions I don’t agree with.

Pier Carlo: Oh, and where did that come from?

Philippa: Well, I think it came from life. [She laughs.] I can probably attribute it to being multicultural. I’m a multiracial person, and so I’m inherently struggling with so many different perspectives within my own body all the time. I think that has really genetically made me more open to different ways of thinking. I don’t know. 

I once made a list of every school I attended, and I came up with, I think it was 13 schools before college.

Pier Carlo: Wow.

Philippa: And I was like, “Oh, probably that contributed to my ability to see so many different ways of living and thinking.” 

Pier Carlo: And also, if I understand correctly, you were the child of divorce, right?

Philippa: Yeah, exactly.

Pier Carlo: Which has its own complications. In fact, I think I read somewhere that you lived in Alaska for a while when your father was hiding you from your mom.

Philippa: Oh my gosh, yes. You definitely dive deep. Thank you.

Pier Carlo: So that must do a lot to a kid and her sense of belonging.

Philippa: Yeah, exactly. I didn’t know I was being kidnapped at the time. I just thought we were living with our dad. So it’s another one of those situations where it’s like, “Oh, she didn’t know where we were! She had to hire an investigator to find us.” So I think that was interesting. 

But when we were there, I was 7, and we lived in a predominantly white community. It was a tiny community, so K-12 was all in the same building, and I was treated like a Native child. That was actually one of my very first memories of feeling like, “Oh, I look different from everybody around me.” They were treated very badly, as you might know from that history, and so I thought, “Oh!” I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that as one of my very first memories of not feeling like I belonged.

Pier Carlo: How has your work changed your sense of belonging in the world today?

Philippa: Well, going back to what you were saying earlier about the sociological aspects of my work, it’s almost therapeutic. I think one of the things that I learned after organizing maybe a hundred dinners with people from across the political spectrum is that people are incapable of speaking about politics. The average person. They think that they’re really knowledgeable and everybody’s got an opinion, but people aren’t actually really good at it or ready for it. 

And so one of the things that I’ve started doing with the organizing of these dinners is that I tell people before they come, “You’re not going to talk about politics when you get here,” and I lead them through a series of self-reflection and self-examination interactive pieces that involve some kind of artistic practice. Sometimes it’s poetry, music, something like that.

I’m trying to create space for that same kind of self-reflection and self-examination with the social sculptures that I’m creating. So when people arrive, they have to begin first with those kinds of questions before they can start talking about politics. Politics is the least interesting part of dialogues at this point.

Pier Carlo: So you mean once people show up, this happens as a group?

Philippa: Yes, and then eventually I’ll say, “OK, now here’s a prompt around some quasi-political question.” So that was a long way of saying that I realized after a long period of experimentation that my sense of belonging came from doing a lot of understanding of who I am, what do I stand for. The self-examination helped me to feel a greater sense of belonging in the world as a human and in the different identities that I occupy.

I’m trying to create space for that same kind of self-reflection and self-examination with the social sculptures that I’m creating. So when people arrive, they have to begin first with those kinds of questions before they can start talking about politics. Politics is the least interesting part of dialogues at this point.

Pier Carlo: You yourself describe yourself as exuberant, but you also strike me as being persistently optimistic, which surprises me, because especially in this country in the last few years, I think people have shown their worst stripes. Your work is so much about working against dehumanizing, and what’s happened recently is that — and I’m sure you particularly know this as an Asian American woman in this country today — it is all too easy for dehumanizing to happen on the streets or out and about these days. 

Do you ever feel like in your work you are fighting an uphill battle? How do you remain optimistic? Are you optimistic?

Philippa: I am optimistic, but I’ve definitely had my moments. January 6th was a moment where I lost a lot of my optimism. But here’s the thing. Yes, some people have gone to extreme measures to destroy democracy and to destroy the social fabric of our society. The thing that gives me optimism is that the majority of people aren’t like that. The problem with our society and the way our information age is now is that a very few people have the very loudest voices, and so a lot of our pessimism comes from thinking that those loud voices represent all of us. And they don’t. They absolutely don’t. 

In fact, there’s this really great study by a group called More In Common — it came out a few years ago — and they essentially said that at the time 77% of Americans are what they were calling the exhausted majority, that we were just exhausted by the rhetoric that was surrounding us, especially through media, when in fact most of us care about each other. Most of us want our country to be better and for all of us to be better together.  I think it’s just really important to remember that it’s very few loud voices that create this doom-and-gloom pessimism. Now unfortunately those loud voices hold a lot of sway, so I work very hard to maintain my optimism and exuberance in the face of all of that because I think that’s my greatest weapon against those naysayers.

Another moment of pessimism that I’ve had recently that I’m still not able to deal with yet, but I’m working on it, is: I’ve been organizing these cross-political conversations since right after the 2016 election. The first group of people came to my house for dinner about a month after the election, so I’ve been at this a long time. I’ve been really involved in a lot of bridge-building groups and met a lot of depolarizers. One thing I started to realize after a few years of doing this was that I rarely …  in fact, I can’t think of anybody off the top of my head right this moment who leans conservative and has started a bridge-building, depolarizing group. OK, no, I take that back. I can think of one.

But anyway, 99% of the people I come into contact with who are trying to bridge divides and have these kind of dialogues are from the left. I think that’s a real problem when it’s just one side trying to reach across and have these conversations.

Pier Carlo: Do you have hypotheses as to why that’s the case?

Philippa: Well, my one hypothesis is that people who tend to lean left have more consensus-building mindsets, and so we want to hear all the sides and come to consensus together, build a big tent, include everybody. It’s almost a way of looking at the world. And people who are more patriarchal ... . Have you read this Jonathan Haidt book, “The Righteous Mind”? He talks a lot about these value systems. People who think about the world in these hierarchical ways tend to lean more conservative. In a hierarchical world, somebody at the top tells you, “This is how it’s going to be.” It’s less consensus-building. 

So anyway, that is my very amateur way of thinking about, “Oh, well, it’s just inherently the kind of person who leans this way or that way who is more likely to have a bridging conversation or not.” 

In fact, just to add one quick thing to that. One of the things that made me a little bit frustrated was that when I’m organizing these larger dinners in communities around the country with 50 to 80 people sometimes, I spend so much time trying to recruit people from the right to attend the dinners. The amount of time I spent doing that was becoming very frustrating. I started wondering, “Why is this so hard?” But people on the left are like, “Count me in.” I always have too many lefties.

Pier Carlo: It’s so interesting. I recently saw over here in Chapel Hill at Carolina Performing Arts, a group called Rimini Protokoll do a piece. They did a residency here and, based on a range of demographics of this area, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, got 100 people to take part in this theatrical event about the sociology of this area. It was fascinating.

Near the end, though, they acknowledged they weren’t fully representative politically because they had such a hard time getting people who leaned right politically, because those people felt that in an artistic setting, they would be immediately judged. Isn’t that interesting?

Philippa: I’ve heard that over and over. As I’m recruiting, people will say, “Oh, you liberals are going to try to ambush me.” And I’m like, “Ambush? That’s a pretty strong word. What do you mean by that?” And they probably will be politically judged. Ambushed is a little strong, but yes, you probably will be. So I have to reassure them, “No, I’m trying to create space where it’s not about judgment. In fact, judgment is absolutely the antithesis of what we’re trying to do here.” So I spend a lot of time trying to convince people like, “No, no, we’re really trying to create something different here.”

Pier Carlo: One instance, I think, currently if not historically, where the left is as rigid as the right is Israel and Palestine. As I’m speaking to you, I think we’re in the second or third week of the current Israel-Hamas war. And talk about lack of dialogue, especially in college campuses now. It’s getting really heated, and people are losing their jobs and job offers. 

So I have a question for you, which it may be unfair to ambush you with right now. Let’s say if somebody, a foundation, were to commission you. “Phillipa, we’re going to commission you to make work at Harvard or Berkeley specifically about this issue,” would you take the commission? Is it too hot or dangerous right now to start this work? How would you proceed if you were to proceed at all?

Philippa: I think I would say no to that, and the reason is because people are too emotional right now to have any kind of dialogue about that issue. And in order to have these kinds of dialogues … it’s not about suppressing your feelings and emotions, but you have to be able to have a conversation that is driven by understanding, and people can’t have conversations about understanding when their emotions have taken over. It’s just human nature.

Pier Carlo: Right. It’s our brains. We’re leaving the prefrontal cortex and going to the mammalian brain.

Philippa: Exactly, so you’re not even thinking clearly. You’re literally not even thinking straight. It’s the same reason why we organized a series of dialogues around these local issues in Michigan last year, right before the midterms. The issues were things that were on the local ballot. There was a housing question, a transportation question, but one of the things was an amendment to the state constitution about abortion. We specifically decided not to do an artistic interaction around that question because people are too emotional and they can’t have a conversation about it.

It’s not to say that we shouldn’t talk about those kinds of difficult issues; it’s just that you can’t have a conversation like that in the moment. You need to have established a relationship first before you can have those conversations. And so if I were to organize, maybe I would say yes to the offer from Berkeley if we could do a year’s worth of dialogues that began with just the relationship-building part and we didn’t even talk about the situation for six months. But nobody wants that. Everybody wants to argue and yell at each other about that right now, and I just don’t see how they can when they’re not even in relationship with each other.

Pier Carlo: Has there been a moment in any of your activations, your events, where you did have to talk someone off the ledge emotionally?

Philippa: Well, very early on when I didn’t really know what I was doing at all, before I realized, “Oh, you have to lay more of a foundation before you can have those difficult conversations,” on the very early days, people would just come over and start arguing about politics, and that just was chaos. And I realized, oh, people can’t just walk in the door and start doing that again without having some kind of relationship, even if it’s minimal. 

But very early on, there was this guy who said — I’m obviously paraphrasing — but he basically said, “Well, Japanese internment wasn’t so bad. People had a place to live, and they were fed every day. Their businesses weren’t stolen; they were purchased.” [She laughs.] I was like, “Oh my gosh.” That was a moment when the whole table just erupted.

Pier Carlo: You hear that argument still today about slavery sometimes.

Philippa: Yeah, exactly. And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s really not right.” I guess a lot of times I’m accused of, “Well, you’re just being a both-sider,” and I’m like, “I don’t think so.” We did not allow that. The whole point of having the dialogue was so that other people at the table could correct him essentially. But we have to be able to do that in a respectful, humanizing way. I just don’t think he knew. He didn’t understand the history. If he clung to that opinion even after being respectfully told what the actual history was, then maybe we can be angry with him, but I’m just not going to get angry with him at first.

One of the things that I say to people, the most important rule of these dialogues — and I say it over and over, even in the experience at the moment — is we have to assume best intentions. We have to assume that this person isn’t trying to hurt us. As long as we always assume best intentions, I think that’s the beginning of getting somewhere with these conversations.

Pier Carlo: I know you’re developing a course for Johns Hopkins, and you also mentioned a course in Michigan that you’re developing. Could you talk about those?

Philippa: Yeah, I’m really excited. I’m going to be the artist in residence at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, and as part of that, I’m going to be curating an exhibit in a small space in the museum and then organizing a series of dialogues across the political spectrum, engaging people in civic conversations. I’m just really excited because I’ve landed on this theme of patriotism for the exhibit and having dialogues around, what does it mean to be patriotic? I realized, “Oh, I’m probably going to provoke people,” but this time it’ll be provoking people on the left more than the right.

Pier Carlo: Oh right, because patriotism tends to be more associated with the right.

Philippa: In our current political climate, I think it is, right? The themes for previous dialogues across the political spectrum have been, what does it mean to be American? That has been really interesting because I thought about it as if we could come to some kind of cohesive idea of what it means to be American, maybe we could repair our social fabric through those ideas. Still working on that. 

But then I started thinking about patriotism as an ideal of some people about what it means to be American. In fact, one of the people I met in Arkansas when I was organizing dialogues across the country, this guy Joe, he called me a great, patriotic American, and I’ve always clung to that. I thought, “Oh, it’s so cool that this white Christian man — “

Pier Carlo: What did he mean by that?

Philippa: Well, that’s the thing. I think he understood that I love being American. One of my missions is not just to repair our humanity and our social fabric of the society, but it’s to repair our democracy, to live in an America that actually lives up to its democratic ideals. I really love all of that. So I think he really saw that in me, and I took it as one of the greatest compliments. Even though we very deeply disagreed on politics, I think he really understood that I was doing this because I love America, not because I hate America and I’m trying to destroy anything. I’m actually trying to build it.

Pier Carlo: You wouldn’t be doing this work unless you loved America.

Philippa: I think that’s right. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of my work until relatively recently. I spent several months in France recently, and I thought, “I love it here so much.” And the lifestyle. You know, there’s so many things I love about France, but being away and looking back at America actually made me love it more when I realized how much I have gotten from being an American. I think sometimes we take it for granted. Being away made me realize I don’t take it for granted anymore. I really think about all the opportunities I have here.

And that is not to say that ... there’s plenty to fix and there’s plenty of opportunity that many people in our country don’t have access to. And I think that is why I keep going with this work is because I want that opportunity to be available to everyone.