Meet Hannah Lutz Winkler | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Hannah Lutz Winkler and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Hannah, let’s start by talking about what inspires you?
I’m a creature freak. I work on multiple long-term projects at a time, exploring different human-animal contexts. I usually start by researching a particular species—bowerbirds, sheep, crows, guinea pigs. I’m inspired both by the animals’ material world (wool, fur, feathers) and their social dynamics (art as a courtship ritual, for bowerbirds; roosting in the same tree each night, for crows)

In 2019, I had spent six years studying the Australian Bowerbird, birds utterly obsessed by color. The males build courtship structures (bowers) and decorate them with monochrome objects. Then the females go bower to bower, selecting the male whose bower they like best. There’s everything there—sex, sculpture, display, obsession. The project devolved/evolved into a total focus on the color yellow—I was only making yellow work; I paid attention to yellow wherever and whenever I saw it. Learning about this bird had morphed into this daily attentional practice.

When I was in LA for Thanksgiving in November 2019, I decided to translate this personal practice into a participatory performance. For my piece Please Follow Me, produced on Venice Beach, I hired performers off of LA Craigslist, telling them to wear yellow shirts and meet me at the Venice canals. I provided verbal instructions and handmade objects designed to spark an obsession of the yellow-shirted person in front of them—a stranger that had become a member of their flock—as the group strode from the canals to the ocean.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’m increasingly interested in creating interactive pieces or objects that guide human attention towards other species. My most recent project involves the unique co-evolutionarily relationship humans have with sheep. After dogs, they were the second animals to be domesticated. Our histories are intertwined; I think our futures could and should be too—teams of goats and sheep already do an incredible job clearing flammable brush in drier parts of the United States. In the context of the climate crisis, I believe facilitating this shift isn’t merely therapeutic (though anyone who’s spent a day grazing with these animals can attest that it is), it also makes the work of environmental care an interspecies endeavor.

I have been working with five sheep who are brought to Governors Island in the New York Harbor every summer to eat “invasive species” like mugwort and phragmites. In collaboration with these animals, I organized a participatory performance called “Watching Sheep” in summer 2023. During the 30-minute, guided sheep-watching experience, I took human participants into the paddock and led them through a series of instructions and rituals designed to focus their attention on different aspects of the sheep. I made custom furniture and costumes for the performance. Some of these, like the smock and crook costume I made for myself, referenced existing shepherding traditions, while others were attentional aides: a stool for sitting on in the paddock, a massage chair re-outfitted for the sole purpose of observing mugwort growing in the sheep paddock. I designed and printed an instructional zine in collaboration with the LA-based art book publisher Allowing Many Forms, outlining the performance’s choreography. This included smelling/breathing rituals, drinking mugwort tea, tracking the sheep, following me on a tether, and other actions. I invited 20 artists, friends, and visitors to the island to participate in sheep watching sessions.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live in Brooklyn, but have LA-born and based family members and have spent a lot of time there over the years. I love the Museum of Jurassic Technology. I’m not going to go into too much detail because I really think it’s a place that benefits from a visit without much preamble—just go. I have a soft spot for the Getty, mostly for the experience of taking the tram up there and then being in a hill-museum. My main family activity in LA is always hiking, I try to trek out to Point Dume when I’m in town for some Pacific moments. In more recent years I have been learning about and visiting the LA River, which I had the pleasure of being introduced to by my friend Bz Zhang. They are awesome and have been observing, organizing around, and making work about the river for years. I think my favorite place in the city is Venice Beach. For many years, my family had a tradition of going there every year on Thanksgiving Day or the day after, when it had an extremely strange and wonderful tourist-site-sans-tourists vibe. I’m obsessed with how it exists as a stage for that blurry space between active performance and people just doing their thing: the bodybuilders flexing at the open-air gym, the musicians busking, the skateboarders doing their tricks, the conspicuous selfie-snappers. Finally, I have to shout out the baby mammoth statue crying for its mom sinking into the tar pit outside the La Brea Museum—best sculpture in the city. The site-specificity! The drama!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I have to start with my family—I’m so lucky to come from a family of artists, scientists, anthropologists, crafters, musicians, and other artsy-nerdy-type people. I feel surrounded by their material and emotional support in every project I undertake, whether using ceramics skills my grandma taught me, or getting my dad’s advice on some video editing technique, or weaving wool from my mom’s sheep into my textile pieces, or remaking videos from my sister’s primatology lab. It’s an incredible privilege to come from people who have always seen me as an artist and who know what it’s like to live a creative life themselves.

I also want to shout out an after-school arts program I went to when I was growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, called New Urban Arts, where teens who are interested in making things are matched up with mentors. Because of school budget cuts, I actually never took a single visual arts class in high school, so New Urban Arts was both this essential space where I could make with other artists, and also where I learned how to create independently.

And Last but not least (pun acknowledged), I want to shout out my fiancé (or husband if this runs after June 2, 2024) Natan Last. He is the most brilliant, creative, and curious person I know, and is beyond supportive of my work and practice. I know it’s real because he bought a painting from me years before we got together, which could have been an incredible long-game tactic to get me to fall in love with him but most likely just means he’s genuinely interested in my work. He’s my favorite animal.

Website: hannahlutzwinkler.com

Instagram: hwinx

Other: Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/user77204254

Image Credits
Natan Last, Rebecca Senn, Rafe Scobey-Thal, Folarin Ajileye