Ray Anthony Barrett, the artist behind Who by Fire, joins PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art Kristan Kennedy to discuss the exhibition's background, his process, and the highly collaborative nature of this special project.

Kristan Kennedy: Can you talk about the origin of the title Who By Fire? What questions or provocations are embedded in it for you?

Ray Anthony Barrett: The title comes from the Leonard Cohen song [“Who by Fire”]. It’s a haunting piece about death and dying. Music helps me organize images and ideas. Sometimes a song inspires a gesture in the landscape. Other times, after working  in the field, a song helps me edit or clarify. So music is both generative and organizing. 

The song’s refrain conjured images of an Earth scorched by greed and the hubris of a culture in opposition to the natural world. [The Cohen song] “Who by Fire” helped me frame how my practice has engaged with fire since I started cooking, and my recent attempts to harness its power for surviving the future. 

KK: This exhibition continues your exploration of the American West. What has this region revealed to you about Black relationships to land and self-sufficiency?

RAB: The path to liberation almost always leads back to the land. And it’s also where we face the most resistance. I lived on a farm for 90 days on 120 acres inherited by a white man. Being there, I couldn’t ignore the legacy anymore. My people were promised land. Then denied it. Then stripped of it. That history is still there. Even when we reclaim land, systems are in place to take it back. Legal, financial, social barriers. So we have to ask: How do we defend what we’ve built? How do we build something that lasts? That leads to questions of sovereignty, self-defense, and community. Because land isn’t just property. It’s memory. It’s the future.

KK: Open-fire cooking is central to both your daily life and your art. What does fire teach you that a kitchen stove can’t?

RAB: It’s the difference between flipping a switch and starting from scratch. Lighting a fire exposes every step you skipped. Kindling is everything. You have to be slow, intentional. There’s no shortcut. When I cook rice over a fire, I never waste a grain. You’ve earned it. You’ve worked for that golden brown. Fire connects you to the elements—to the wind, the animal, the earth. It’s spiritual. And it brings you into communion.

Killing an animal for food—that’s not a metaphor. That's a sacrifice. People cry when they catch a fish. They kiss it. It’s joy and grief. Fire brings me closer to that kind of knowledge.

KK: You’ve said food is a kind of communion—not metaphorically, but literally. How do the meals in this exhibition operate as part of the artwork?

RAB: When I moved into food, people thought I quit art. But I approach food as an artist. What first inspired me was the supper club model, like happenings or art events. I had seen food-related art before, but it often felt like attempts to make food into art. I thought, food is already art. Food is sculpture. It engages every sense. It’s social. It is dependent on a network of people, from farm to table. Yet food is often placed below “fine art” in a hierarchy. That’s part of the same system we’re trying to dismantle. Food is an art project.

KK: Can you describe the process of making the firelays and other sculptural objects in the show? What did you learn in the process?

RAB: These firelays are functional sculptures designed for surviving through the freeze of a cold winter night. Placing them in the context of an exhibition shifts the function to focus on what it means to survive more broadly, and what it means to become the architect of my survival.  Working with these materials connects me to the wisdom of my Indigenous ancestors. They offer the blueprint.

KK: What role do slowness, hard work, and ancestral craft play in your broader practice—and specifically in this exhibition?

RAB: In a time when everything I care about feels under threat, the more I can do to reduce dependency on a system steeped in consumption, industrialized terror, and genocide, the closer I am to decolonizing myself. Learning how to make fire with flint and steel, or by friction, is a gesture of resistance. Yes, it’s slower and requires the acquisition of techniques only experience can yield, but Western culture rewards speed. Algorithms encourage hot takes. Quantity over quality. My practice embodies a refusal to acquiesce to constructs rooted in colonialism and white supremacy. It’s a labor of liberation. 

KK: How do you feel about learning through digital media? Do you ever wish for a mentor beside you?

RAB: I think about how I learned to cook. My mom taught me that cooking is an act of love, but I learned how to cook by watching the best chefs in the world onscreen. That's still how I learn; last night I watched a YouTube video about friction fires. That teacher had learned from someone else, and so on. That’s lineage. I’m a visual learner, and grateful for how much knowledge is available. Before written history, we learned through mimicry, by watching.

KK: You’re collaborating with local Black farmers to host a dinner and brunch [during the run of the exhibition]. How did those relationships form, and what are your hopes for these shared meals?

RAB: The idea was to build community through ongoing shared meals, to keep resetting the table. It came from geopolitical thinking: when collapse accelerates, who do we want around us? The longer vision was to eventually find land and build something—a retreat or a school where the farm generates materials and the network sustains itself.

In Portland, Sharita Towne connected us to a web of farmers and purveyors who have been doing this kind of land stewardship, collaboration, and community building long before I arrived. There’s a deep community here. I am just here for a short time, so I am grateful to be let in and for their willingness to share with me. Some of the farmers said things like, "I want to see how our food gets cooked." Often, they give away food and never see where it ends up. These meals let them witness how their food inspires others.

Same with the makers [who contributed objects to the exhibition]. Potters rarely see the wares they create in use. This project invites them into that full circle.The farm offers raw materials—like the indigo used by Bridgitte Hickey, who is dyeing our table linens by hand. Potters are working with local clay. I recently learned about oyas: ceramic vessels buried underground to slowly water plants. That’s an artist contributing to agriculture.

Eventually I want to work with blacksmiths, textile artists, and others. Artists have a historical role to add meaning, flair, and intention to the tools we live with. I am interested in seeing that return. 

A lot of farming still relies on extractive systems—plastic, industrial tools, monoculture. But this new generation of farmers and artists can shift that. Potters need clay. Textile artists need flax. Agriculture supports these practices. The next step is connecting makers and farmers. I see this in action here with the people refiguring these systems. It is inspiring, and their contributions to a creative future should not be underestimated. 

KK: How has working with local craftspeople influenced this exhibition? Can you tell us more about the tableware or chandelier collaborations?

RAB: During the pandemic, I realized how fragile everything is. I lost faith in the people in power. I left for the desert south of Joshua Tree for two months in solitude. It was enlightening and terrifying. Biblical.

I realized survival requires food, water—and community. Community is a risk, but it’s also everything. After that I stayed on a farm in Northern California. That brought me closer to people, but raised new questions: What kind of community? How do we build it?

In the face of climate catastrophe, we need each other. So with this show, I wanted to create a situation where designing tools for living is encouraged. I was reading Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." Pair that with the Akan term from Ghana of Sankofa: go back, retrieve what’s useful, bring it forward. As a chef, I think we can ferment the Empire—take what’s rotting and transform it into something nourishing.

The dining table involves woodwork. The glassware involves blowing, molding. I thought about light, too. Our grid is extractive. Electric cars rely on exploited labor and mined materials. So I asked: What about candlelight? That’s where the chandelier came in, which is handmade by Emily Endo and will illuminate our meals. A gesture toward nonextractive illumination. The makers I’m working with are using natural or repurposed materials and transforming castoffs through fire, one of the show’s core materials.

KK: What questions are you bringing to this table—literally and metaphorically?

RAB: Right now, I’m preoccupied with setting the table. But the core questions are: Who do I invite? What will we talk about? How can I guide the conversation toward something that builds a better future? The people I want around this table are makers. People who know how to create useful things. Because the future we’re headed toward? It doesn’t look good. We need new ways of being. And we need to make them visible—make them tangible. That’s where food comes in. It’s the highest form of social sculpture. It engages every sense. It’s inherently communal. We could survive on Soylent. But why not make something delicious? Something shared? That’s where art lives.

I’m from Missouri—the “Show Me State.” So show me the future. Let’s build it together.

KK: How are you thinking about ownership—of land, tools, time—in your practice? What would real emancipation look like today?

RAB: Frantz Fanon said, "Nothing is more important to the colonized individual than land." Land is the foundation. These dinners and conversations are steps toward building a community capable of holding a retreat. A literal one, but also a spiritual retreat. A place to rest. Regroup. Reimagine.

The pandemic was a turning point. Watching how the world responded—or didn’t—changed everything for me. The art, the food, the gatherings—they’re all evidence of my process in searching for another way to live.