Blue Reinhard’s name—Blue—signals itself. He parades his laptop to the corner of his concrete-padded studio in Los Angeles; my Zoom screen repositions his artwork into view. There’s the mirror he found, without its mirror, on the side of the road, prepped into a painting surface. I see a regular cotton canvas embedded with braids of cotton rope, painted edge-to-edge in the deepest ultramarine which could give Yves Klein or Maggie Nelson a run for their money. Blue tells of the stuffed shellac frame he made for the piece that hangs from the ceiling. Straddling lines of Jewish identity, queerness, participatory action, and a further globalizing art practice, it becomes clearer to me that Blue’s work investigates the cultural and material resistances of the contemporary world, without any fear of art’s polemic.
I first met Blue in 2023—virtually—when we were both remote summer interns at the Jewish Museum in New York. During this time, we funneled ourselves into separate creative projects, though Blue’s ardor for art praxis gleamed beyond just the chat box confines of our cohort Zoom calls. One Thursday, I found myself multi-tasking: taking a guest speaker call while on the Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan for leisurely non-intern purposes. As my data slowed to a halt in the middlemost straits of the Hudson River, Blue proffered an insightful question to the Zoom room; I looked into the direction of the far-along Upper East Side, hoping for the Museum’s physical edifice to fill in the silence. Even as Zoom froze, I was curious to know more; I followed Blue’s art account on Instagram after the summer ended. I’ve been following his work, with paradigmatic eyes, ever since. The reward was a chance to speak with him about the words that tailed off and stilled while I ported into the busy Whitehall Terminal.
New Voices is envisioning a future where Jewish student artists receive direct interfacing with the worlds they inhabit—worlds of conceptual and restorative thought. This future begins with the emphatically entitled KOL!, our interview feature series with Jewish student artists and their art practices. KOL! neither begins nor ends with Blue; there is a movement of young, college-aged Jewish artists who choose to affix themselves to the collective moral ailing of the world. Art, like the divine voice, is a prophetic call to action and change. KOL! celebrates the artist as a divined Jew, forced to inhabit the in-betweens of heavy circumstance.
In the following exchange, Blue directs me to the power of queer utopia, of body and matter as one godly invention, and of radical imagination for the world to come. At the end of this KOL! feature, you can find New Voices’ inaugural lightning round, “The Divine New Voice,” where the artist answers three rapid-fire questions about culture and consciousness.
Where did you go to school? What did you study or continue to study? All that stuff.
I graduated from Occidental College in 2023 and I was a studio art major. Technically, my degree is in art and art history and I did the studio track. And now I’m a post-baccalaureate at Occidental. Specifically, I work at OXY ARTS, which is Occidental College’s art gallery. A big part of my undergrad experience was also teaching through OXY ARTS. We have really amazing educational programs there. So my post-bacc situation is focused on arts education, which is a big part of my art practice. I see them as very intertwined.
I would say my junior year of college was sort of the beginning of my practice. Everything since then comes from a seed that was planted in a class I took about participatory media. Participation is a really important part of my practice, in several ways that I can get into. In terms of being a student, I see myself as learning all the time.
What are you currently working on? Or, could you describe your art more generally? Just in that realm of what you’re currently creating or making.
I’ll start with the aforementioned seed, which was a collaborative zine called “Little Ram” or “אײלונית„. I compiled quotes from interviews with queer Jews and talked about their experiences. Then they submitted art to have alongside the work in the zine. One of the questions I asked during the interviews was: “Are there any Jewish rituals that give you gender euphoria?” The answers to that question were really funny and also powerful. After the interviews and after I made the zine, those sorts of stories that emerged from that question really stuck in my brain.
Then, for my thesis project, I did a triptych where I had three paintings. Each one was based on a different story and told an answer to that question. My work is usually either interview-based—so the participation happens as part of the project formulation—or there’s physical participation in the installation of the work.
I made this installation based on a story my friend told me during an interview: They were late to Shabbat dinner in Brooklyn with their Orthodox family because they were in the Hamptons on, essentially, a Grindr date having gay sex on the beach. They ended up coming out to their sister as non-binary because their sister was giving them shit, like, why the fuck are you so late? or whatever. And they came out as queer and non-binary at the same time. The installation was two large-scale paintings, suspended by paracord in the gallery space. Reenactment is also a big part of my practice. So I pulled out the essence of these two scenes—Shabbat dinner and sex on the beach—and accessed them through my own personal experience. My partner and my best friend reenacted the beach scene through this playful portrait of them embracing in the water. With my mom, we did a Shabbat scene where she’s touching my head to bless me. Between the two paintings were 500 pounds of beach sand, or play sand. And then a sculptural Shabbat setting on a table in the center. During the opening, people were invited to take off each other’s shoes and step and play in the sand. There were kids there, so there was actually playing in the sand.
Clockwise, respectively: Over The Years, The Candles Watch Us Burn; After We Leave, The Water Will Remember Our Secrets; Kiddush Cup, People Candles, Challah Men
2023
Oil on unstretched canvas; 〃; ceramic, wax, challah bread
72” × 48”; 〃
Courtesy of the artist
In more recent projects, I am also really focused on making sculptural paintings. I’m moving away from the traditional painting surface of oil on canvas, stretched over stretcher bars.
I see that materiality really comes into transitioning away from traditional painting or in these found surfaces to work with. I’m wondering what also really inspires your transition away from traditional painting. What do you see for your medium? How are you evolving in that way? And I wonder if that comes necessarily from inspiration, or where are you drawing this energy or this source from?
I like that question. I think at the core of my practice and way of seeing the world is this idea of queerness, and seeing queerness as a reimagining of the world. Being queer, you basically rethink the structure of relationships, rethink gender expectations, and reimagine the way that we connect with each other in the world. Even “queer time”—how queer time functions differently. I’m very influenced by José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of queer futurity, specifically from his book Cruising Utopia, and thinking about how we, as queer people, manifest utopia on an interpersonal level through this restructuring of our relationships. That idea also impacts the way that I use materials. Especially because I do a lot of oil painting, I’m coming from this very traditional Western canon background. But through rethinking what could be a surface for a painting, I feel like it queers that tradition. Similar to that, I think even as we create new worlds through our queer relationality, there’s still existing in the context of the greater world, which is not as quick to catch up with our utopias. There’s a relationship there.
I’m also just really inspired by non-traditional materials. I just got bored of painting on a traditional canvas. And at first, I saw myself as a sculptor and a painter. I’ve made a lot of sculptural candles and ceramic-type oracle and altar pieces. Converging those two loves has been really special because the sculpture part of my brain is very focused on problem solving and logistics, and I really love exercising that part of my brain—like figuring out how things piece together and work. Then the painting part of my brain is a little bit more spiritual and deeply concerned with color and intuition. So, combining the two parts is really important to me, in terms of process but also how it reflects in the way my work is interacted with.
This idea of queering relationships is also deeply connected to the Jewish practices in my life, and also to what I express through art in terms of reimagining the Jewish identity and practice and relationality between each other as Jews. It’s all very intertwined.
You speak to queer futurity. I’m wondering if there is a “Jewish futurity” that you also envision for your work.
My point of access to “Jewish futurity,” or Jewish reimagining, comes from the idea of viewing Judaism through the lens of queer futurity and applying the lessons from queer futurity to Judaism.
I’m really interested in talking about color now. You mentioned painting as a spiritual practice. I think it’s very clear in your artwork, or at least in my reading, how color manifests in your work—that there’s a thermal quality to it. The body has a very thermal quality. I’m wondering exactly if there’s a certain gesture to the body, or is there a decision to represent the body the way you might choose to represent it?
Totally. A lot of my paintings are depicting figures by candlelight, and I like to think of those figures as candles themselves. There’s usually centers of light, that sort of glow. I think of it as glowing from within the flesh. Painting has a lot to do with light, which I think a lot about in terms of a candlelit painting.
I’ve been thinking about this idea not just of the light, but of darkness. I tend to have the darkness be pretty opaque, and I like for the figures to emerge from the darkness. This idea of emergence—it’s kind of hard with painting, because what I love about it is it being a wordless expression. So I find myself struggling a little bit with articulating this.
2023
Oil on canvas
3’ × 4’
Courtesy of the artist
I mean, something that I love to think about is everything being made of the same stuff, like matter being this collective material, especially when thinking about the notion of tikkun olam—from the Kabbalistic standpoint of when the world was created. The Divine Light was shattered, and our role on Earth is to bring the shattered pieces back together, and that Divine Light exists in all of us and in everything. I think about Divine Light as this matter that everything’s made of. With that, I try to treat the different objects or figures in a painting as if they’re made of the same stuff—that idea of seeing the figures as candles, and the candles as figures, and how use of color can connect everything. In terms of the opaque darkness, I’ve been thinking about how if the whole world was pitch-black darkness, everything would be one—that idea of the light separating things into separate forms. If you think about night versus day, it’s almost like we’re constantly experiencing this shift from everything being one under the darkness and then everything separating again—this constant shattering of the light. Part of the idea of tikkun olam is bringing those shattered pieces of light back together. By rejoining the shattered pieces, we realize the illusion of separation, which is that anything is actually separate from each other. And through this rejoining, it’s not the idea that you’re bringing things back to how they were when everything was one. The idea is that there’s a new sense of wholeness and a transformation that happens. I think that has to do with painting. When rendering objects in different, unique, specific ways, there’s just the fact that it’s all made of paint—even though you’re painting separate things. And I think that’s really powerful.
Ever since I was first making art, I have thought the practice of painting puts you in this really intuitive way—a state of mind—where you’re paying such close attention to detail. When I paint faces, I use photos, and I zoom in and find all the different colors that are hidden within the flesh because I feel like there’s this illusion that your skin would be one color. But when you really focus in on the subtleties of the shadow (what are the undertones of this person’s complexion?) and find all those different colors, you can create a harmony between them in the painting. When I paint for hours, and then I walk outside, everything is so vibrant. And you can see all those nuances in the world. In terms of spirituality, that’s a really important part of my practice and why I love painting so much.
Why is artmaking important for you? Or, why is it important for the world?
First of all: Art makes life worth living. Second of all, in terms of specifically visual art—like painting, sculpture, installation: Similar to the idea of how queerness allows us to reimagine our relationships on an interpersonal level, I feel that visual art can create physical spaces that allow us to experience a different world and expand our imagination for how the world could be.
I think a lot about radical imagination in relation to capitalist realism and how—within capitalism, imperialism, settler colonialism—there’s this sense we can’t picture alternatives or a world outside of our current systems. Something really magical that all art does is the creation of spaces where we can expand our radical imaginary. We have to imagine those futures if we’re going to make them happen. With visual art, I think it’s really powerful how you can enter a space and feel those possibilities in your body and imagine liberation. The physicality—the somatic knowledge of existing in a space with art that is trying to imagine liberation—is really important.
I have a painting called Visions from Utopia: Raspberry Afternoon. When I was involved in some of the encampments for Palestine, it was really powerful because the students created these microcosms of liberation. You could really feel within this space that people took on different roles out of desire to protect one another, to contribute. People opted to do labor, like source food and materials, lead an art build on making a huge banner. Stuff like that. That really makes you envision a world outside of capitalism—creating that space in that physical level where you could feel liberation. I had a conversation with a student who said that it was the first time that she felt what liberation could be. I think that’s affected my practice a lot in terms of the radical imaginary. Imagination often feels rooted in our brains, but I’m really interested in that somatic body level of experiencing liberation.
And now…
What’s a no-skip song or album?
I would say Mystic Familiar by Dan Deacon. I mean, honestly, several of his albums are no-skip. Either Gliss Riffer or Mystic Familiar.
Where do you want to be this summer? Wherever your heart wants to be, wherever your soul wants to be, wherever you physically want to be.
Spiritually, I think I would like to be in a state of surrender to what I cannot change and nourishment for what I can change—nourishment for the practice of enacting change.
In one word, what do you believe in?
Rhizome.
