GAZING B(L)ACK: Exhibition Interview w/ Chris Leaux

NOTE: These interviews have been edited for clarity and length. Interview conducted and edited by Antenna Communications Coordinator FreeQuency, photos by danielle miles. “Gazing B(l)ack” was on view at Antenna:3718 from September-October, 2025. You can view a virtual tour of Gazing B(l)ack on Antenna’s website and purchase a copy of the accompanying exhibition publication at Antenna’s online bookstore.

FreeQuency: What kind of artist are you? Tell me a bit about your creative practice.

Chris: It feels challenging to [say], I’m an artist. I self-identify as someone who’s always doodling and wants to do more [art], share more and encourage other people to make art and be excited about creating. I think everyone creates and is creative.

I’m really thankful for the opportunity to share what I’ve made with other people, or at gatherings [where] I’m sketching in the corner to navigate the social situation or connect with people indirectly.

Art is what it is and what people decide to embrace it to be.  

FreeQuency: True, but I’m wondering for you at this moment – what does it mean for you given that we are sitting in the middle of your first exhibition?

Chris: I’ve done the “doing” before on a smaller scale and more inconsistently. This is my first time making a cohesive body of work with real intentionality. In preparing and making and getting to show up I had to deal with my own mental health and self. I’ve been jokingly referring to it as “I crawled through a bunch of shrapnel and glass shards to make this art show and all of those prickly bits were just the things within my own head.” With this show, I had to push through the doubts and the external noise. Being able to see my art up and sharing it with other people and having other people get it in whatever way feels good for them – it’s been beautiful. I’m really happy that my art elicited what I wanted people to feel, which was joy, contentment, and just feeling good. 

In terms of self and social identification – where is that line of who gets to determine what an artist is? I’ve been drawing for years but I think there’s some differences in the “doing” and the “sharing”. 

Human beings are always creating in different ways. There’s a lot of opinions on art and creativity that try to distance everyone from their innate human ability to be creative [through] cooking, gardening, writing, drawing, bringing people together or conversation and telling stories verbally, etc. There’s a lot of things that try to divorce us from the fact that humans are innately creative and clever little beings, always trying to care for and make something. And everyone likes art in some way – whether it’s a room that’s put together well or a well- cooked meal or you like looking at a flyer – that’s all creative energy that went into that…so at what point do you differentiate between “now this has become an act of artistry” versus “I’m just doodling in the corner”?

Part of what was hard for me in preparing for this art show was that I felt that [my goal of sharing joy] was superficial and fluff, but then was like, how is a major element of the human spirit and existence superficial and fluff? And I don’t mean toxic positivity, I mean we need to have positive and uplifting and beautiful things in our lives to keep being people, in order to keep going on. 

I was so pleased with this exhibition. I really put my art out there and other people got it and felt good seeing my art and being in the space and being around me as the artist. 

That’s what I’d probably lean into – more of what makes me feel like an artist, being able to share a little bit of the reality I want to have more in the world. I want us to live in beauty and joy and connection. I really believe that beauty should be a basic human right. And beauty runs the gamut of anything like – I think people should have access to parks and walkable neighborhoods, good food that looks colorful and is actually nutritious, buildings or the night sky, …all these different things that can make living so much more worthwhile because you’re living in the present and our spirits are being filled.

FreeQuency: You said a second ago that when people were in here it was exciting talking to you as the artist…so are you an artist? 

Chris: ...oh [laughter]

FreeQuency: I was checking because when you weren’t thinking too hard about it, it came pretty easily to identify yourself as what you are doing and how you are showing up in the world…

Chris: It feels like there’s multiple selves that I’m having to get on board. The reality of my lived experience on opening night was I’m doing something not everybody does and that is special. I am an artist…but at the same time, there’s that noise that’s just like, how could you be an artist? I’m working on leaning into what opening was like, what creation was like when I got into my flow state…I don’t want to call it a spark because a spark sounds fragile, but it felt like I’d turned a porch light on for myself to come home to with wanting to make art. And I want to do more. I want to share more. I want to make more. I want to honor more people. I want to celebrate more people. I want to spread more love and joy. I had the capacity to do and give more and instead of it being draining, it was life giving. I want to be that person in the world and I want more people to continue to be those people.

FreeQuency: Tell us about the pieces in your Gazing B(l)ack exhibition, why did you choose to create what you did and display what you did in the way you did it?

Chris: [It was] accidental intentionality, but also intentionality that was thoughtful throughout the whole process. I knew going into this show that I didn’t want to use white paper – the default being whiteness. I first had that experience as a child with one of my parents asking me hey, why are all your characters and all the people you draw white? And I’m like, oh, they’re not meant to be white. The paper’s just white and my lines are black. 

My skin color is innate. The practice, the appearance of being Black, is not necessarily performative, but it’s something that has to continuously, for me, felt like it needed to be reinforced and justified. I wanted to make sure people could tell that these were Black people, but also didn’t want to put Blackness in a small box. I was really excited about the brown paper and then I sat down and paused like, wait…this is brown paper like a paper bag and I was like, son of a bitch! Everything has so many racially coded things in it! I didn’t want people to come in here and [recall that racial history of America] and think “brown paper bag, bad, brown”. So I went back to the drawing board, literally. 

Throughout the process of making art for this show, I learned more about what my process is and really refined what matters to me as a creative. I love colors and wanted to figure out how to make this colorful. The backdrop that [the figures] are popping out of is house paint because I spent a year trying to find the right purple for my bedroom so I had leftovers I mixed to make shades for the backgrounds. I wanted it to feel like someone had painted it so they have paint strokes to add texture.  

I don’t have a studio, gallery space or workspace so there were several challenges starting with making sure that I was consistent with how I approached making several large pieces. I ended up laying them out of the kitchen counter table. I went through my sketchbooks for the past several months and to older drawings I’d done over the years from live figures sessions. Then I put a stool behind my counter to draw larger without a projection or grids and to also just play with the shapes when working to make them bigger (shout out to Angel Predomo for encouraging me to include my sketches in the show). 

From the sketches, I did the larger drawings with the Black paint marker, chose and selected which sketches were going to be included. There’s this fun painter’s tape that’s got colors on it, and that was my way of marking which pieces I wanted to come back to use. After drawing the line art, which was probably my least favorite part, I went back with blue and white oil pastels and started adding more contrast, volume or shading. The last step for me was I wanted to have a contrasting color. I landed on red because I was like oh, that’s that’s bold, it’ll stand out.

FreeQuency: We kind of started to talk about it, but as you were talking about the pieces and I’m looking around and the ones that I see, especially these two, right here, I was starting to notice the eyes and the gaze of the people in the image and being curious about the title. I remember during opening night when you were talking to the crowd about the gaze and the complexity of the gaze and who gets to be looked at and what’s worthy of being seen and I’m also thinking back to that conversation on beauty that you were talking about earlier – there’s something interesting about being gazed at by figures that are naked like in your show. In our human imagination that’s often the most vulnerable time someone can be gazed at. But the figures in your work don’t feel vulnerable, they feel like they are in charge of the gaze in this way that’s really interesting. So I’m just wondering how you settled on the title of Gazing B(l)ack, which is  “Gazing Back” but because you included the parentheses, it’s also has the double title of “Gazing Black”. What did you want to invoke with the titling?

Chris: I’m excited that got through [laughter]. I like wordplay. The title came first because I need something named well or something that excites me with a name to move forward. My mind played with the words “Black” and “back” and I realized I could put parentheses in that to give it multiple meanings. I like the idea that the models are gazing back at us, but also we’re ‘gazing Black’ by looking at Black people. With some of the figures I wanted to emphasize their eyes or different parts of their body that I found powerful and important to show and highlight.

I used to figure model years ago. Not everything about the experience was great, but it helped with my self-esteem and feeling better about my body. My body was being experienced in a non-sexual way as a 20 year old person who then identified as a woman. I didn’t have a car at that point, so I was constantly getting cat-called and experiencing gender based street harassment, nonstop every day. It was horrific, but then being in a space with artists [as a figure model], and generally the vibe being non-sexual…it was really powerful to be witnessed in that way. There were the occasional experiences that felt off putting and troubling because the audiences tended to be more white because those were the people or institutions who could afford to have a live figure model. And sometimes the remarks were weird or after everyone’s drawn, I would see some parts of my body they would fixate or put a particular amount of attention to that just felt weird and like you don’t see a lot of Black people, do you? 

I really wanted to do something where I focused on drawing Black nude people while challenging the dichotomy of “artist and observer”, of “I’m looking at you, I’m gazing AT you and putting whatever meaning or message I want on your body because you’re my tool for creating my art”. I wanted this to be different where the figures, the people, had a presence and they were actively involved with my process of their creation. Those drawing sessions were really [my community and I] catching up most of the time because a lot of these are people I know and I’m drawing them in my living room or in a space that they felt comfortable. 

The title ‘Gazing B(l)ack” also served as my research question – what does it mean to move with more care with the figure models that I’m working with? What does it mean to move with more care with how I depict different people? I realized if I move with too much urgency, too quickly, that it could limit my ability to show the care that I wanted to. I realized with this exhibition that how I feel about my body and my comfort with being naked in front of people is not the norm. 

My experience with figure modeling made me realize that not owning being an artist and not wanting to share what I make as an artist supports others making art that shows people like me – that shows Black women or Black queer and nonbinary people – outside of our gaze…that I was leaving our image in the hands of someone else who may not fully see Black people. I realized I needed to share how I view my existence with other people. 

FreeQuency: You’ve kind of touched on it a little bit but given the history of the brutal gaze this country has historically had and still has on Black people and their bodies – from Sarah Bartman to human zoos – I’m curious about how you got into figure drawing and what it means within that space to be so intentional about which bodies you’re choosing to depict and what that interruption means in that field that you’re in. 

Chris: My first experience doing a live nude figure drawing was in undergraduate school. I think prior to that point I might have been drawing random pictures from the Internet and manga. [Drawing live from a figure] just felt good…I felt alive. 

[After this figure drawing class], my drawings ended up being…I don’t want to say love letters to the models, but…I felt like I got to know more about the models – I could see how the parts of their body connect and how their shapes exist. If you draw the same person a few times, even over one session, you realize their shaping – like their arm has a kind of flow to it – and I fell in love with that whole process/exchange. I didn’t have that experience with public school art classes and I found it refreshing. From that point on, I knew I wanted to do more of this. 

The kind of narrative that comes to mind for me is the “strong Black woman”. I’m personally over it. It makes me so sad that for some people, the only way they can uplift and honor those in their family or those people that they know is through their suffering, that they’ve overcome so much and they’ve been so resilient. 

I just wanted to be like, can’t I just be lounging? Can’t I just be chilling and enjoying life and just existing? I wanted to change how we are shown Black people as either strong or as a negative stereotype like scary or dangerous…just let us just be, you know?

Many of my best friends are Black and have different body types and many of the people I’ve loved and cared about have had larger bodies. For instance, my mom has a larger body and seeing how the world has treated her and tried to deny her beauty because of how we exalt thinness and villainize fatness has always hurt my heart.

FreeQuency: Ok Final Question…are You an Artist? 

Chris: Oh, nooo…the pain…we can do it. Yes. I am an artist. 

FreeQuency: Wonderful [laughter] 

Chris: Well my drawings are all around me like bro, how are you not going to answer this? Are we a joke to you? Like, do you not see us? Do you not remember what you just labored to do? 

Yes, I’m an artist…I don’t know if this is one of the components of what makes an artist an artist, but I genuinely believe that a byproduct of my existence is making things and creating. It feels like I breathe and I make things.