Angela Ellsworth was one of the first women I met when I arrived at Arizona State University in 2017. We met for lunch, arranged by a mutual friend. She laughs easily, and I was immediately drawn to her energy and wit. She was excited about her Museum of Walking. “It’s in my office,” she said, “you should visit!” I never made it up to the second floor of the condemned building where the Museum of Walking got its start (the building has since been torn down), but I did attend a some of the Full Moon walks, and I led one of the timed “waves” in the “theWalk” (400 person silent walk in March of 2018). Later, Angela and I had the opportunity to collaborate with Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney from FoAM (Brussels) on a sound walk called, “Dust and Shadow.”
Angela and I readily agreed that the only way to properly conduct an interview about the Museum of Walking would have to be, well, walking. She cited the ancient Peripatetic tradition of walking and philosophizing, and quoted from Rebecca Solnit’s, Wanderlust. Solnit traces Rousseau’s and Kierkegaard’s peripatetic habits, uncovering the long history of the relationship between thinking and walking.
We met in January for a three-mile hike in the scrublands of the Salt River Reservation, wedged between Phoenix and the Tonto National Forest. Angela is fond of saying that “Walking is all about context!” Our conversation meandered along the riparian trails. We became easily distracted by various elements in the habitat: exploding seeds of cattails, butterflies, canals, turtles, birds, passersby, park features, burrowing owls, cracks in the path, the crunching gravel beneath our feet, the cars whizzing by as we hustled across the overpass to the other side of the river. Angela and I stood looking out over the Rio Salado (Salt River), the White Tank Mountain Range painted across the vista’s background, and she pointed to the landmarks, explaining the history of the place where we were standing.
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Angela Ellsworth: We’re at Rio Salado Habitat Restoration Area, which is my favorite place in all of Phoenix because it is a confluence of so many different parts of the city. We are just off of Central Ave in South Phoenix, and we’re right under a flight path; HWY 17 is just there. And this whole area used to be a dump, just landfill. Rio Salado (Salt River) starts all the way up in the White Mountains, and ends in Avondale at the Phoenix Raceway, where it merges with the Verde River. Historically, the Hohokum tribe lived in this area for two millennia; they were farmers and built a complex system of irrigation canals from the Rio Salado to cultivate corn, cotton, beans, squash and tobacco. About a hundred years ago, dams placed on the river caused it to dry up: it was a big dust bowl, and because of its location just south of downtown Phoenix it was deliberately ignored. But over the last decade or so, the restoration project has tended to the river; they took out all of the non-indigenous plants and trees, replanted to bring it back to what it originally was. Now there are over 200 species of birds, there are beaver, some beautiful egrets, a butterfly farm. I think it’s just a very special place. I love it so much! This place has a long history of change and being alive.
Stacey Moran: It seems like a decade ago there was a kind of zeitgeist around walking, there started to be a lot of interest in walking events and walking as an art practice. How is it that The Museum of Walking (MoW) arose in Phoenix, Arizona, of all places–one of the least walkable cities in America?
AE: Well, I think my interest in walking grew naturally out of my training in performance and painting. For years, long before we started the Museum of Walking, whenever I saw something about walking, I would throw it into a file just because I found it so intriguing. It felt very close to my practice. And I remember learning representational drawing back in my 20’s, and my teachers would always quote Paul Klee, “A line is a dot taken out for a walk,” and I thought wow, that’s a body!
There was another really influential thing for me, about walking. It was this 1986 show in Copenhagen, “Walking and Thinking and Walking,” curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, who later came to Direct an Institute Initiative at ASU. I always thought of this exhibition as the first in the visual arts to focus on walking as a medium, as an art practice. It pulled together artists who were incredibly relevant (and since then, they’ve all become art stars, like Francis Alÿs and Mona Hatoum). You’re right, that walking has become such a thing in the last 10 years. Suddenly there were all of these exhibitions on walking, sometimes looking at sculpture and the body, or others on performance, ephemerality, traces, things like that. These were all great shows, but I thought, you know, this had all been done before in 1986, but no one had ever considered it. There was never a nod to how progressive that show was at that time.
SM: So would you say that show in 1986 is like a foundational “text” for the MoW?
AE: Well, yes… it is, but it’s more than a text—it’s really about that grouping of artists and how it pushed boundaries of art institutions back then. And I do think there’s a connection between thinking and walking. (Laughter).
SM: Let me ask you about your co-founder of MoW, Steven Yazzie. He was originally your student, is that right?
AE: Yes! I guess maybe it was in 2012 when I started working with him at ASU. Steve was a returning undergraduate who had served in the military, and he had come back to ASU to finish his BA in Intermedia. We were working together, and we had these really great conversations. We started talking about walking and his Navajo/Diné ancestry and my Mormon lineage. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Steve grew up on the Arizona reservation in Dziłíjiin (Black Mesa). So we started all this by talking about the land itself, and the first people of the land, and about the Mormon missionary tradition of “placement,” where they would take young Navajo kids and place them in Mormon homes to indoctrinate them. We realized that we both had these points of contact and contention with the Mormon settlements in Arizona. And so I just kind of threw this idea out there, “Why don’t we create a museum of walking?” and Steve was totally into it. So then we had all these discussions about what it would look like. At first, he thought the museum could be a collecting institution. But I thought, you know, I already have too much stuff. I don’t want to collect other people’s things. And that’s how we came to the idea that the museum was not a brick-and-mortar space.
SM: And collecting things from the land, putting them on display seems antithetical to the whole project, to the confrontation with the colonial history of Arizona that the museum contends with.
AE: Exactly! We thought, well, what does a museum do? Museums promise education and beauty. But if this all starts with the land, it’s all about thinking about being in the world and of the world, and not just looking at things in a museum. I made these postcards that said, “Beauty begins outside the museum.”
One instance of the teaching aspect of MoW is the Spatializing Experience walk at the Indian School in Phoenix where we explored the layers of history, memory and trauma done to the indigenous peoples of Arizona. It was held in tandem with the “Challenging Power in Place” conference (ASU IHR 2019).
SM: It seems to me that the MoW is quite different from other walking organizations. Is that fair to say? What are the values inherent in your walking practice that distinguish MoW from others?
AE: Yes, I think that’s right. I think that all of these walking organizations, we all owe our history to the European tradition of the flâneur, the city walker, and artist groups like the Situationists, with their psychogeography. The MoW is no exception, of course! But for us, I think I would want to distinguish the MoW from other urban types of walking that are more keen to reference the self, you know, to notice the ways that advertising or capitalism or whatever it is that moves the individual, and so on. They seem a bit too egoistic, related to a kind of spectacle of the self, or “being seen” that has European roots. MoW does walk in the city too. Like other organizations we address local social and environmental issues: global warming and the urban heat island, water, migration, the desert environment, animal habitats, and other ecological effects, as well as health, colonial history, public/private space, and infrastructure. But at the same time, these walking practices are done from the perspective of the land, and they help us to realize that walking is not simply a personal experience, but that we walk with the land. Maybe the clearest example of this is Sharon Day, Ojibwe leader and Native American activist, who led the Nibi Walk on the Rio Salado. This 5-day walk is a prayer for the water celebrating the life-giving force of water; we walk to remind the river of its original state, and to let the river know that we love and will care for the water.
SM: I’m reminded of Solnit’s idea that walking cuts across all the disciplines–philosophy, anatomy, anthropology, religion, and even “lurches” into allegory, courtship, and heartbreak. In addition to organizing all the walks, you also consider the MoW a teaching practice and put on exhibitions, is that right?
AE: Yes, all of that! I really wanted to include a teaching component for several reasons. You know, taking students out for a walk, walking for six hours in silence; even just taking them out for a one-hour class period, walking, observing, doing nothing… except walking… can be frustrating for this generation of people. Even for us too, to be honest! But more so this generation who have been rewired to always be doing something. There is a fear or irritation of wasting time, a mood of reluctance, let’s call it, to just do this small, human thing.
SM: Yes, I also find this reluctance in my students when I have them follow Tania Willard’s Site/ation walk or Annette Arlander’s “have a conversation with a tree.” They sort of scoff at it, not believing that it has any potential use for them, that it’s a waste of time.
AE: It’s hard because this is a completely unknown, unexplored (or perhaps entirely lost?) way of knowing and being in the world that is very difficult to bring back in a meaningful way. One thing I just love is the indigenous practice of listening to the earth; literally putting your ear to the earth to hear a herd of buffalo or troops arriving. This action should be the new smart phone.
The exhibitions began small. We started out in my office in that condemned building, and the office had this horrible, trippy carpet from like 1971 and no one could pull it up or get it clean. It was just a nightmare. But we brought in books about walking and created a library and tiny exhibition space. I was interested in all the questions that walking brings up: who gets to walk, who refuses to walk, who can’t walk. Working in that building the students started to understand that even if you’re working with awful parts, you can make something really interesting grow out of it. So the front of my office became the museum, and it was so small that only about three people could fit inside at a time.
SM: And what was your first exhibition like?
AE: The very first one was a group exhibition by graduate students who were interested in investigating the “15-minute city,” which is a concept from sustainable urban planning. The “15-minute city” tries to make cities more walkable, reduce carbon emissions, and so on. The students mapped out their walk, when they began in the same place, and walked out in different directions for fifteen minutes, then they collected things on their paths. The found objects were presented in an archaeological format. The exhibition was called “Radius,” and it was a beautiful little show in this very odd space referencing each artist’s 15-minute walk from the MoW in various directions.
For another exhibition, we nodded to the 1986 exhibition in Denmark. Some artists were well-known by then, and others have become extremely well-known in the contemporary art world since. There was no way our tiny museum would be able to borrow any original artworks for our exhibition so I called the curator, Bruce W. Ferguson, who was the president of Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles at the time, and I asked him if I could re-present his exhibition with my students. I told him, “It’s so critical and it still hasn’t been considered. No one’s talking about that exhibition, and they should!” So I asked him to Xerox the images and text from the catalogue. I said “I don’t care if the images or text are copied perfectly… they can actually be crooked!” So the graduate students and I curated the show, “Walking and Thinking and Walking” which was Part I of the exhibition; Part II comprised graduate student responses to the exhibition. Both exhibitions occurred at ASU Art Museum’s downtown satellite space in Phoenix. Everything was small-scale; Xerox copies of the originals and each student made a response piece. It served a kind of public pedagogy on walking as an art practice: the grad students spoke to everyone who came to the exhibition about where that show originated and how walking has become an art practice since then. I think that’s a critical part of the thinking about the Museum of Walking, the teaching aspect.
SM: We talked before about how your training in painting and performance influenced your move into walking, but would you say that walking was also a big part of your healing process during your illness?
AE: Sure, there were times when I only walked, when I was living in Europe. As soon as there was no car at my disposal, then there was walking. All the time. Doing everything. Going to work, to the studio, all of it. But, yeah also, when I got sick, when I had just come out of chemo and radiation (yuck yuck yuck), I remember how my body had changed so much, I could feel it getting weaker and weaker and all I could really do was walk slowly. I would do a little more each day. I didn’t know it at the time, but walking turned out to be a healing experience for me. It was a constant reminder, of being in the world, of feeling my body. That kind of stuff. It was so simple. It was really quite simple.
SM: This talk about feeling the body is making me think about your entire body of work in terms of embodiment. I mean, you have so many different bodies in your work. There is the female body, the ancestral body affiliated with Mormon lineage, and the Seer Bonnets, which was a translation of the embodied experience of women in the LDS church. Then there are the early performance art works you did with TT Takemoto during your chemo, exploring the diseased body and its return to health. And finally, there is walking as an art practice, a participatory and collective practice. And probably not a lot of people know that in high school you were a competitive skier! I see this thread running clearly through your work. Your body of work is saturated with your body.
AE: I guess it is, yes. This makes me think of my father, who is 86 now and really not doing well. His whole life, he was a beautiful skier. But now he sort of shuffles around and is just trying not to fall while walking. The balance doesn’t come as easy as it did before. It is so interesting how our body is constantly changing, and we have to adapt to a new way of being in its shell.
SM: The shuffle.
AE: Yes, the shuffle! How do you know this shuffle, is it your mom?
SM: My grandparents. As they aged, the balance was less sure, and their gait got smaller and smaller.
AE: There’s the fear of falling.
SM: Yeah, I personally have been thinking about this as I myself am aging. We have, over our lifetime, inhabited so many bodies: child and adolescent, sick and healthy, athletic and strong (yours), pregnant and not pregnant (mine), still and moving, sexed and gendered. And this is something that I love about your work, this evolving multiplicity of bodies.
AE: Right? So many bodies.
SM: So many bodies we have.
AE: Yes, from our first steps as a child we try to stand and keep balance. Then in adulthood we try to keep moving smoothly without falling. This “balancing shuffle” is just another form of being alive and not falling before our time.
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Stacey Moran