Art in Covid Times: An interview with Stephanie Eche
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From her apartment across the street from DC’s Malcolm X Park, Stephanie Eche first got the idea of connecting businesses with underrepresented artists while she was working for the real estate developer known today as JGB Smith Properties. At JGB, she created projects that integrated the arts and culture into the company’s sales and marketing efforts — work that inspired her to start her own art consulting company. Eventually, she moved to New York City, and Distill Creative was born.
“More people need to do the work to find the artists who are underrepresented, because they exist—you just might need more resources or to dig a little deeper to find them,” says Eche, who is an artist herself and uses her own family’s history as the inspiration for her pieces.
Distill Creative originally had a dual focus: art consulting and creative activations, the latter of which Eche describes as craft workshops for private groups. At the end of 2019, however, she decided to narrow her focus to consulting only. The timing turned out to be fortuitous, coming just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hola Cultura recently sat down with Stephanie to discuss how she developed Distill Creative and her evolution as an artist.
*Part of our new series interviewing artists about how they have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic
What inspired you to become an artist?
I spent a lot of time with my grandparents growing up. My first memories of making something were with them. I remember making a wooden boat with my grandpa and doing a lot of embroidery with my grandmother. I think that’s what initially inspired me to be creative and make things.
It wasn’t until I got older that I understood that people can make art as a career and you can be an artist full time. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I decided to commit to being an artist and having a regular art practice. I’ve always made things, but it wasn’t until I learned how to weave that I got back into art.. I used to make my own clothes and do fashion design. I helped start up a clothing company and wanted to figure out how to make more than a few yards of fabric, but not have to produce a lot of fabric. It is hard to get an in-between amount of fabric. I was looking for how to weave fabrics specifically and was part of a weaving group in the Shaw neighborhood in D.C.
Could you tell us a bit more about your career path and your interests as an artist?
I took some art classes in college, but never felt like I could pursue art as a career because my parents definitely wanted me to go to college and get a real job. I had no examples in my life of someone who was an artist as their job. I’m still not a full-time artist. I run my business so that I can have time and money to make art. When I was [previously] working for someone else, I was just really burned out. I wanted something to do with my hands that wasn’t behind a computer screen. That’s why I learned how to weave. Weaving is something completely different. It requires complete concentration, but it’s also meditative. You can listen to other things while you’re weaving, but you can’t really weave at the same time as doing something else.
The more I got into weaving, the more I learned about Indigenous communities in Mexico that have eons of experience doing weaving. I’m Chicana, which means I’m American of Mexican descent. Learning more about pre-colonial weaving has been really inspiring to me. I’m still on that journey of learning more of the history of weaving.
I also try to learn more about my mestizo roots and what that means both personally and in today’s context of capitalism and labor. As a consultant, you’re often charging by the hour, but I’ve been trying to charge based on a package or not related to hours. It’s just hard to make money when you’re always calculating your time. With the weaving, I’m starting to keep track of how long it takes to make the piece, but it’s kind of beyond that. It’s not really about, “I put in X amount of hours so I should get paid this amount” for this weaving. It’s more about what I’m putting into it, which is the culmination of a lot of different things, including time, and what the piece might mean to someone.
I’m still pretty new to selling my art. The fiber work has become more and more personal, and also kind of pushed me to accept that I really like the process of weaving even though there are a lot of other kinds of more accepted forms of art. If you’re a painter, people understand that’s what you do. But when I say that I’m a fiber artist, sometimes I don’t even want to say the fiber part because it’s confusing and not considered as high of an art as other art forms, which is really unfair.
Thankfully, now in the art world more and more fiber artists or textile artists are getting recognition. There was just an article in the New York Times about some Indigenous Mexican artists and their tapestries—how they’re using contemporary methods or inspiration with ancient techniques. I’m trying to explore the ancient techniques and what it means to do something so simple and ancient in a time when you can order anything from the internet. Sometimes I wonder, “Why am I still weaving?” but on the other hand, I think it’s really cool to have that connection to history and humanity.
Above: Selected work by Eche in a group exhibition at New York City’s High Line Nine through July 14. Photos by Brian Schutza
Tell us more about how you came up with the idea for Distill Creative and what motivated you to lead your own company.
When I was working at JBG Smith, I was doing creative activations on the side. They were really just creative workshops where I would teach people how to make a cocktail and a craft together. My sister and I started doing that in our living room, across the street from Malcolm X Park, and would just have friends over.
Eventually, we outgrew our living room and started charging people. We went to different coffee shops and other arts and culture spots in D.C. This was about six years ago— before a lot of these things existed. Through that experience, I started getting more opportunities. For example, WeWork asked me to do a series of workshops for their coworking space, and that helped give me the confidence that there was a need for this type of thing. Eventually, I left my job and moved to New York to start doing creative activations full time. I was mostly hired for fashion brand launches or team-building events.
I used to call my workshops “Cocktails and Crafts” when it was kind of a hobby. When I started to be more serious about making it a business, I changed the name to Distill Creative. Right now, I’m focused on art consulting. I help businesses, usually real estate developers, find artists for whatever they need, but there are also businesses that want a mural or some kind of artwork in their offices. I just made more money doing art consulting than doing the craft or creative workshops. I could have increased my workshops or changed that business model, but I really liked them small and intimate. Right after I [decided to] focus on art consulting, COVID happened, so I’m kind of glad that I decided to not do events anymore, because now a lot of people are doing them online.
Can you explain how you decide which clients are a good fit for which artists and vice versa?
Usually, I curate based on what the client wants. I try to work with clients who have values that align with mine. I am a relatively new company, so it’s harder to be picky at the moment, but I have been lucky to get clients whose values I do align with.
In picking an artist for a project, I always start with doing a local art and culture asset map looking at who are the existing art and culture players in that area. For example, I am working on a client right now east of Los Angeles, so the first thing I do is look for all the different arts organizations, artists, and find artists affiliated with them. Then I look back at what the client is looking for. Sometimes clients are looking for something really abstract and sometimes they’re looking for something really figurative or with comic influence. From my initial research, I’ll go back and look for artists who have those types of styles. I’ll expand my reach from there depending on what exists in the area, but I really believe that most places have pretty amazing artists pretty local to where they are. It might be in the nearest big city, but you don’t really need to go too far to find great talent. It’s just that they haven’t had the same opportunities as other artists.
I’m also looking for artists who are interested in doing this kind of work. Not all artists want commissions. Usually the first question I ask an artist is: “Are you even interested in this opportunity?” Some artists are more open to suggestions or color changes than others, so it’s really about being sensitive to that and vice versa.
In reference to your work, do you have a favorite piece and is there a reason why it’s your favorite?
It tends to be the last thing that I’ve made. There’s a weaving, “This Land is Not Your Land,” that’s probably my favorite piece right now. I recently did a writing exchange where I wrote about someone’s artwork and they wrote about mine. She wrote about a lot of the things that I was thinking about when I was making it. It made me really happy that it was successful in translating those ideas. Those ideas include: the green area is an imaginary mass of land and the okra, yellow-y area is not exactly representing a desert, but kind of.
It tends to be the last thing that I’ve made. There’s a weaving, “This Land is Not Your Land,” that’s probably my favorite piece right now. I recently did a writing exchange where I wrote about someone’s artwork and they wrote about mine. She wrote about a lot of the things that I was thinking about when I was making it. It made me really happy that it was successful in translating those ideas. Those ideas include: the green area is an imaginary mass of land and the okra, yellow-y area is not exactly representing a desert, but kind of.
“This Land is Not Your Land,” by Stephanie Eche (all photos courtesy of the artist)
She wrote about how it’s ambiguous lines and separation of territory and borders and that’s definitely what I was thinking about when I was making it because I often get the question of, “Where are you from?” and it’s really annoying to answer because I’ll say Arizona and then they’ll be like, “No, where are you really from?” “Until I say that basically my great-grandparents are from Mexico, they won’t stop asking me where I’m from. To me that’s such a frustrating thing because many of my great-grandparents didn’t even cross the border because there just wasn’t a border. That’s basically what this piece is about: There was no border or the border was changing. I think there’s a lot of physical loss that happens when people migrate. There’s intentional or unintentional taking or stolen land or land that is given up because they decided to move somewhere else. This piece is about some of those specific stories in my family history and then just generally that native people in any place continue to have their land stolen and boundaries created without their consent.
Following up on that, could you discuss a little bit the lack of representation for Black and brown people in the art world? And, obviously, the need for that representation?
There are a lot of reasons for it.
Speaking personally, I didn’t have any artists in my family to look up to, and when I talk to people who come from generationally wealthy families, regardless of what their background is, they do have [working artists] in their family. It’s not to say that you can only be a successful artist if you are wealthy, but I do think that if your family has connections and you have relatives who have done something similar in the past, you are more likely to know that [an art career] is a possibility at a younger age. To some degree, there is some meritocracy involved in the art world. If you get seen in a certain crowd and you are good enough, you probably will get uplifted. The problem is that so many people aren’t ever perceived by that crowd.
At Distill Creative, I focus on presenting Black and brown artists and trying to get clients to hire them, but they still have to be good enough. They’re not going to be necessarily the first person that you find when you search for that type of art. One thing I’ve noticed is that Indigenous artists from any background are not getting the same kind of exposure as whatever the predominant group is, which in America is usually white artists of European or Latino backgrounds. Because “Latino” is a word that includes so many different types of people, it doesn’t really solve the problem in and of itself. There’s some of that too, when you think of American Black versus international Black [artists]. “Who deserves to be seen the most?” I think that’s definitely a really hard question to answer.
I’ve always had imposter syndrome like I’m not good enough or I’m not Latina enough, even. There’s a lot of that for Black and brown artists — you’re not Black enough, you’re not brown enough, you’re not whatever enough. It’s hard to expose yourself as whatever underrepresented group you are part of without feeling like you aren’t enough. I’m trying to work on that.
—Story written by Caitlin Schneider
—Interview by Victoria Hincapié, Linda Hernandez and Caitlin Schneider
*This story was corrected to reflect Stephanie Echeveste’s change of name to Stephanie Eche.
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