Art-Interview 2026 #2 with Vierra Queen
"TEN QUESTIONS WITH JEAN-PIERRE SERGENT" AN INTERVIEW BY VIERRA QUEEN", ART HISTORIAN, NEW YORK, OCTOBER 2026
[Note: THIS ARTICLE IS CURRENTLY BEING WRITTEN]
I'm Vierra Queen, an art historian, curator, and writer from Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. I grew up surrounded by art. My aunt and uncle are artists, and being so close to Washington meant I could hop on the Metro and visit the Smithsonian museums. Art was part of my life long before I understood all the different ways I could make a career out of it. I went on to earn my B.A. in Art History from Spelman College, with a double minor in Curatorial Studies and Public History. I'm now completing my master's in Art Business at Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York.
Over the past few years, I've worked across museums, galleries, auction houses, and artists' studios. From caring for collections at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art to researching the art market at Artnet and working at Christie's and the Guggenheim, I've had the chance to experience art from several different perspectives. Maneuvering through these spaces has made me think more about how art is interpreted, presented, and valued, and how those things can change depending on who's looking. That's also why I enjoy speaking directly with artists. So much of my work has involved understanding what happens to art once it enters a collection, exhibition, or market. But there's an entire process that happens before any of that, and I think some of the most revealing conversations begin there.
Reading your text "Influences" (2012), I kept coming back to your memories of copying images of animals as a child and your later encounter with the prehistoric drawings at Pech Merle. Those moments happened years apart, yet both seem to have found their way into how you work today. I found myself thinking about how much we carry with us from our earliest experiences with art. Toward the end of the text, you describe yourself as an "iconophile et iconophage," someone who loves images and devours them. After reading about the different places, people, and experiences that have influenced your work, that description stayed with me.
— V. Q.: When something catches your eye, whether it's an image, a memory, or an experience, what makes you want to incorporate it into your work?
— J.-P. S. I really hate seeing and witnessing things get lost, to be wasted, to get forgotten in the dustbin of history… For me, sharing everything beautiful I had the chance to encounter during my 'crazy' and rich life, every tiny thing that is alive, stunning, disturbing, beautiful or healing, seems to me so important that I need to share it, to draw it, to bear witness to it; in order to prove my belonging to Humanity as a whole.
Not to impress others with my culture, but to be honest with myself ("Humain trop humain !" would have said Nietzsche).
This is the gleaning process intricately entangled with its redistribution system through and thanks to the art process… If ever I eat and nourish myself with something beautiful and stunning, such as an image, a text quotation, a feeling, a sensation, a soul, a body, a sexual act, a glimpse on beauty, an energy, a spirit, a faint glimmer of hope or a life-force, somewhere in the world… then, at some point, it has to find its way out into my art or into my writings.
The kinds of images I use often—and almost always—reflect and corroborate experiences I've had and gone through… Whether they are spiritual, physical, or just aesthetic.
That is an urge of curiosity with a voracious appetite and also an unmistakable necessity to share it, saying thus to the viewer: "look at that, it's just so beautiful, don't ever waste and forget that special moment in time and in history! That's so fragile, so special and will never happen ever again!"
The encounter with a work of art made thousand of years before me, or an object, a piece of Mayan pottery or a tunic, a spell-like drawing done by someone who was thinking very differently from how I a think and what I know now; gives me the chance to know more, to think differently, to live differently, to paint differently, to access some other levels of knowledge that we have totally lost today…
It's like embodying once again, the spirit of the priest, the Goddess, the shaman, the woman weaver, or the Mother Kali, to embody them truly and be part of the World again.
Not just describing it passively, as most artists do today, as a recollection of their past lives, but to live it fully, living their different worlds, within my own life as an artist at a quintessential level! Again and again indefinitely… As in an eternal Cosmic Life Cycle.
"Study the science of art. Study the art of Science. Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else." Teaches us so aptly Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519)
— V. Q.: You write that encountering a work of art made thousands of years before your own time can teach you to "think differently" and "paint differently." Can you take me through a painting where an encounter like that changed your approach? I'm curious about what shifted as you worked, beyond the imagery itself.
— J.-P. S: MY WORK IS, BY ITS NATURE AND ESSENCE, A LONG-TERM AND IN-DEPTH ENDEAVOR INTO HISTORICAL TIME & THE TIMELESS SACRED
- #1, THE MAYAN GODDESSES & THE SHAMANIC TRANCES
"Spiritual people find one another, like wild birds of the same species. Their song is similar, regardless of their origin; the same vessels hold identical contents. This is why spiritual people speak the same language and describe the same images regardless of era, race, or religion; unity can be achieved only at the very pinnacle of being—that is, at the summit beyond oppositions and dualities." An Introduction to Roman Symbolism, Marie-Madeleine Davy
My art is somehow always necessarily implies a connection, an interconnection between an experience, one of my own body experiences, I had myself physically, and the image of it, incarnated and depicted into a really old art piece. Often, I am mixing the two experiences.
For example, in this painting, Mayan Diary #94, 2010, I have been redrawing for a long time the image of a Mayan goddess, retrieved from an old Mayan pottery dating from around 800 A.D., the classical period, which I duplicated, creating a mirror effect.
The two women seem to be playing joyfully in a cosmic game with vulva-lips patterns (Life and Death), inspired by a lips tattoo from the Guaraní, Bororo, or Achuar indigenous people of Brazil, taken from the book "Triste Tropique" by the famous French ethnologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.
So somehow, the images I find and recollect give a second truth, a confirmation, a statement to reinitiate and recreate my long artistic process during the image-collecting and silkscreen-printing process.
To honour, describe and bring back to life all those spiritual energies, as some unusual rituals, offerings, meditative praying patterns or obscene sexual acts, etc… Almost all that seems to have vanished today, or at least, that we don't use them anymore, or that we deeply despise them!
Drinking the blood of Kings, the cocoa drinks mixed with very hot chilli peppers, to enter into some trance and meet, talk and get advice from Gods during sacrifices of his own blood or that of human victims, was of course a powerful experience, located very precisely at the exact border of Life and Death!
In that way, we can define them more as ritual pieces and ritual objects, rather than just Art pieces as we see them today!
"The presence of the divine is comparable to an energy, and a mysteriously active force. However, in the West, the presence of the divine and the sacred does not carry the ultimate significance it does in the East—a significance that, for the profane, that is, for the unprepared person, risks having disastrous consequences for their own life, much like coming into contact with a high-voltage current." An Introduction to Roman Symbolism, Marie-Madeleine Davy
- #2, BONDAGE & FREEDOM
"After all, what is art about is trying to make something out of the chaos of existence." Francis Bacon
To fully answer your last question, I also need to include images from cultures other than my own Western Culture, for example, Japanese culture. I have been completing many series on some images of women's bodies tied up in ropes, in bondage or kinbaku-bi (beautiful bondage) practices.
A horrible suffocation and suffering, finishing in the end, in an incomparable liberating pleasure, through the mechanism of the woman's body's orgasm, fallen into trance (or the viewer ejaculating over the image or over this body)…
Transgression and transcendence of ecstatic and ego-destroying physical pleasure experienced not only by the woman wrapped in ropes, tied very tightly at some very sensitive and erotic points, as a package, an object, a gift, an offering… But also for the viewer who gets off on watching (within a too-famous male gaze) this ritualised scene!
"This magic moment when horrible suffering transforms itself into an ocean of pleasure.", In Bondage & Freedom text.
So inevitably, using and collecting images from so many different cultures allows me to transcend my own reality and, through my art, open new horizons, fields, and spaces richer, stronger, and much more alive than what is happening in our contemporary, sick, and dying Western societies… Which are coming ineffably and, indeed, inevitably to their dead ends!