Interview - Christian Holstad
by Fabrizio Meris
by Fabrizio Meris
[Fabrizio Meris] Let’s start from the very beginning. You were born in 1972 in Anaheim, California — a place I had to Google, I’ll be honest. What struck me immediately is that it’s a sort of constructed place, almost a non-place. And obviously Disneyland is right there, which is perhaps the ultimate symbol of consumerist culture. Given that your practice has been so focused on ecology and the impact of waste on society, I wondered whether that early contact with that world left any kind of mark.
[Christian Holstad] Definitely. My mother and father had just moved there from Minnesota with my sister — it was a very different world for them. And Anaheim in 1972 is not what it is today. Most people say the first three years of life are the formative ones, psychologically. And for my parents, who were young and struggling, Anaheim was what was available. There was nothing green around — just trashy strip malls and, from what I understand, prostitutes on the outskirts. Which is probably why Disneyland was built there in the first place — people would come from all over the world, and that kind of thing tends to follow. At the same time, Disneyland was the only green place around. So my parents, in a sort of 1972 euphoria, bought year passes because they weren’t expensive. I was going multiple times a week, because it was simply where we had a park, where there was grass. My first three years were just full of Mickey Mouse.
[FM] And how does that make you feel now, in retrospect?
[CH] It made a huge impression. I think I formed a very early, very visceral understanding of American culture at its peak of propaganda. Hollywood and Disney are not so far apart — they’re different things, but really the same thing. They constructed what people thought, their morals, their beliefs, the language they used. I understood the colors; I understood the grammar of it. And at the same time, even at three years old, at some point you see Mickey Mouse take his head off. So there was always this awareness of the reality underneath. And then we moved to Indiana, which was almost the opposite — I knew immediately it was not the same world.
[FM] Indiana is also where your actual education began, I imagine.
[CH] Yes. Early on, I went to a private school, even though my parents didn’t have money — the neighborhoods we were in weren’t good, and neither were the public schools. Growing up in Minneapolis, though — which is where I really grew up — they had the Walker Art Center. And in the eighties, the Walker was at an extraordinary level: the curators, the shows. I was really lucky to be able to see so much, so early.
[FM] The previous interview I did was with the Italian artist Salvatore Arancio. His story was completely different: he grew up in Sicily, with no contemporary art museum whatsoever. He told me his entire aesthetic was formed by cinema, because it was the only thing available. So it’s striking that you had direct access to a major contemporary institution at such a young age.
[CH] Minneapolis had two good museums — there was the encyclopedic one, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, like a local Met, and then there was the Walker. It’s also where I fell into ceramics, which is actually how I started. My high school had a ceramics studio better than most colleges, and the teacher was exceptional. So I started really early — I remember riding my motor scooter to ceramics class at fifteen. That’s what I went to art school for, in Kansas City, which at the time was probably the best undergraduate program for ceramics in the country.
[FM] And then, inevitably, New York. Which neighborhood were you living in when you arrived?
[CH] I moved into the East Village, because that’s what was available and I really loved it. I still think of it, in some ways, as my home there.
[FM] I’d love to attach some specific places to that time — independent art spaces, clubs, bars. Things that really shaped your experience of the city.
[CH] I think I got there around 1991. At the time, I was paying $175 for my room, living with friends, and for a long time I genuinely couldn’t afford to pay even that. That’s just not available anymore — and it’s true of most big cities, Milan included. And it’s not good for cities. They have to find some way to support people in that position, because if you lose them, they get replaced by something else entirely, and then you’re missing something you can’t name until it’s gone. In terms of physical spaces, there was a club called Rubulad where a group of artists would host events, sometimes there, sometimes in other spaces, all interconnected. They were smart, diverse — musicians, visual artists, different ways of thinking — and it made for really good shows. And the pleasure of doing it was so much greater than any awareness of it. It was really just about following your joy.
[FM] Would you name a creative figure who inspired your own path?
[CH] There are so many it’s almost impossible. But going back to ceramics — and back to high school, actually — a huge amount of the ceramics culture of that region came through one man named Warren MacKenzie. With him came an entire philosophy. He’s part of the reason I organized the pottery sale in Milan last May, because it was partly a reference to him.
[FM] Why was his practice so special?
[CH] What he did was really miraculous. He had a studio just outside Stillwater with interns and friends; potters would come and go on residencies, and at some point people started buying his work and storing it, or reselling it through galleries. So he stopped signing individual pieces and instead used a single stamp for the entire studio — it didn’t matter who made something, it just received the stamp. And when you went to buy something, the encouragement was always to choose something you liked, something you would actually use. Not something to put into storage. Because a pot in storage, in his view, has no value. That made an enormous impression on me. I knew at some point I was going to find a way to communicate something of that through my work.
[FM] Which brings me to the question of living in Italy — and specifically in Brisighella. Why did you move there?
[CH] I’ve been going back and forth to work in Faenza with Bottega Gatti for somewhere between twelve and fifteen years now. That family, in particular — I have a great love for them. And being in a place where ceramics is so central just feels right. On my very first trip, a man from Gatti — Davide Servadei — drove me out to eat in the countryside, not far from Brisighella. In the front seat he had a piece of pottery with a seatbelt fastened around it. I was in the back. We couldn’t speak the same language at all, so it was a silent ride. And while we were driving, he had his hand out the window, just moving it through the air. I had jet lag and I just thought: I want to live here. I want to live somewhere so beautiful that it feels completely normal for a grown man to ride with his hand out the window like that. I said it to myself, and I meant it so completely that it felt like planting a seed. When the pandemic arrived and I wanted to reduce my flying, it also made practical sense to stay longer — the ceramics process takes time, and the longer I’m here, the deeper I get into the community. Even someone in Faenza who doesn’t work in ceramics will have a family member or friend who does. So conversations can immediately go deeper. Right now, I really just want to immerse myself.
[FM] Living in Italy means a constant proximity to dense, layered history, which can feel both grounding and overwhelming. Has that influenced the way you think about time in relation to your work? Because ceramics can be very fast, but also an extremely slow form of work.
[CH] It can be the slowest thing in the world, depending on what you’re making. And what I love about it is that it has its own time. You have to surrender to that time. If you don’t, you’ll be fighting it constantly. Practically speaking, I know when a piece is done — not because I decide, but because the material says so. The hard part is always what comes afterward: letting it exist outside of me. Opening the kiln is always like opening a Christmas present. It may not be one you like. But it’s always the same feeling.
[FM] And that’s partly because of fire — or heat, in this case. The alchemy of it.
[CH] I think about it a lot. Anytime someone tries to simulate gold, there’s a reason, and it has to do with value. But on another level, gold is simply the thing that best reflects the sun. So it’s both symbolic and potentially real, simultaneously. And that connects to something much older — what people in the ancient world were doing when they looked at the sky, the sun, the stars. That’s one of the things I truly love about ceramics: no one owns it. The art world doesn’t own it. The craft world doesn’t own it. Everyone owns it. It began before ownership existed. There’s a freedom in that.
[FM] The first time I saw your work in person was at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Cornucopia installation floating outside the Riva degli Schiavoni. At the time, honestly, I was distracted — the Biennale is overwhelming sometimes. But I’ve had time to research it properly since then, and considering everything that’s happened since 2019, I think it was extraordinarily prescient. For me, this conversation has come full circle, because we’ve gone from consumerist California back to an installation about consumption and waste in what is arguably the most mythologized city in the world. Your environmental concern seems to run as an undercurrent through everything you do. How did that awareness take shape over time?
[CH] It was always there. In third grade, I organized some classmates to lie down in the street. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing — part of it was simply doing something against what we were supposed to be doing. But on some level I did understand that if nothing happened, things were going to get worse. They were going to cut down some trees, I think — I can’t remember the exact story. And my mother didn’t punish me for it. She encouraged me to think for myself. She’s always volunteering, always engaged. Her values — they’re not Americanized in the conventional sense.
[FM] Do you think there’s a connection between ceramics and a certain feminine culture? I ask because your work in the nineties — the drawings, the cutouts — was very gay, very masculine in a certain way. Ceramics carries a different kind of energy. There seems to be a balance between the two running through your work.
[CH] It’s true. And I think that, in order to gain some self-esteem, early on I gravitated toward spaces where women were — because I’d rather be with women, usually. I was learning things I could actually use in my life. My mother taught me to sew. She encouraged me to move between worlds. And I did move between them, literally — I had long hair, I wore skirts and dresses, and I could walk into a room and people wouldn’t know I was a boy. I’d be treated as a girl, differently. Then the next day I could change my look and walk in differently. I did this for years. It became a very particular kind of knowledge.
[FM] Have you ever tried to address that directly in your work — the question of gender imbalance?
[CH] I recently read something — I wish I could remember the exact quote — along the lines of: when I start thinking in terms of masculine and feminine, I know I’m in the wrong place. Because none of these categories ultimately exist. I understand what the younger generation is saying, and I think they’re right — it’s as constructed as any other set of rules. I hope that what I am is bigger than all of that. And I know that to be true for myself.