Studio Visit: Robert Pruitt

It’s Sunday afternoon and echoes of the Puerto Rican Day parade are pouring into the South Bronx studio of multidisciplinary artist Robert Pruitt. The studio walls are covered with his life-sized drawings, older and unfinished portraits he’s revisiting as he prepares a new body of work. A rack of thrifted costumes rests in the corner. A collection of his comics, catalogs, and zines are densely packed within the bookcases. Pruitt sits cozily on a brown sofa, wearing a red fez that compliments the Apple watchband bearing the colors of the Pan-African flag.

Born in Houston and based in Harlem, Pruitt is a skilled draftsman best known for his figurative compositions. While African mythologies, Black historical references, and pop cultural aesthetics are embedded in his work, Pruitt cites comics as his primary point of departure. As an art form, comics enhance our visual literacy, combining text and images to tell stories and communicate cultural, societal, and political messages. As an extension of his artistic practice and a nod toward his unending passion for comics, Pruitt created Fantastic Sagas, a publishing platform that houses his zines and animation work. His most recent comic, Electric Wolf (2023), explores the increasing tension between humans and technology by using ChatGPT to establish a conceptual framework for two drawings. The thoughtful and reflective exchange between Pruitt and the artificial intelligence model is masterfully sketched into an action-packed visual narrative, with Pruitt as a lone soldier engaged in combat against an impenetrable robot.

Pruitt’s portraits possess an intricate graphic sensibility and, most strikingly, the world-building qualities of a comic. In the absence of text, the stories in these portraits unfold through captivating renderings of defiant and self-possessed Black figures.

What is the first step in your creative process? Where do you begin?

I have a running list of ideas, and this fuzzy starting process is just me scrolling through these ideas. As I go through my day, if I have a thought that seems like it’d be an interesting work, I write it down. When I’m actually in the studio, I’ll look at that [list] and I’ll start planning very loose ideas in my mind.

I started playing around in Garage Band as a creative space that has no sense of pressure to be good. I just like to make beats, so I mess around for half an hour. The first step is shifting my brain by pushing buttons and making sounds. I think life is so full of minutiae, bills, and emails. None of that is useful in the studio. This helps me transition out of that.

Do you have a uniform while working?

Old T-shirts, old clothes. I wear the same pair of Adidas running shoes. They’re really comfortable and they’re really dirty. I try to keep the studio clean, but it’s really, really dirty, so everything is covered in charcoal. I have an apron that I wear for some stuff when it’s just charcoal everywhere. Sometimes I wear a mask.

If you had to describe your ideal creative conditions in three words, which words would you choose?
A backyard studio. I want my studio closer to where I live. I want to be able to wake up in the middle of the night, go, and come back. I just want the rhythm of it to be different. Right now, it’s like a nine-to-five.

Tell us about your studio. Where is it located? How long have you been in this space?

My studio is in the South Bronx, in a warehouse district. I have been in this studio for, I don’t know, let’s say four years.

How did you find it?

I was Googling and I found a website with this guy’s number who owns this building and another building a few blocks away. I went and looked at a space. It was a great space except it had no windows. It was like $500 a month but not this much space. Then I found a space in Greenpoint. I was sharing a studio with three other people. My space was in the front. People had to walk through my space to get to their space. It felt like grad school. It was really cheap, but I eventually realized that price, space, and distance all come into play. After a while, I was like, You know what? Let me call this man again.

Where in your studio do you most enjoy working?

There’s one spot that’s most ideal if you are facing the windows on the left side of the studio, furthest from the door. I make these big drawings. They’re tacked to the wall, so I can work on about four or five large drawings at a time if I’m really in that groove.

Describe your studio schedule or artistic rhythm.

I come in. If I walk or I ride my bike, I might feel a little tired, so I might just sit at my computer. But other than that, I come in, play around in Garage Band, and then I try to sneak up on the work. It is weird. Sometimes I can just get right to it, but sometimes I have to ease my way into actually picking up a pencil, going to the paper, and drawing. I try to keep a schedule of 12 p.m. to 6 p.m.

What are you currently working on?

I am preparing for two gallery shows next year and I produce a lot of work, so I’m trying to create the conditions to produce that work. I’m planning drawings. I’m working on old drawings to work up a lather. As I start planning these other drawings and thinking through what I want them to be, I need something else to work on until those things feel like they’re ready, so I found a bunch of old incomplete work and pulled it out for planning and researching.

Do you feel that living and working in this place has changed your practice in any significant way?

Yes, yes, yes. I moved to New York from Houston. It’s been like seven or eight years now, and my practice here is so different from home. I was doing a bunch of collaborative projects that made my own studio practice secondary in a way that I did not realize. New York can be a very isolating place, but moving here, getting situated, and finally falling in love with my studio has opened up my practice.

What’s one thing you really enjoy doing outside of the studio?

I still love reading comics and I’ve kind of reconnected to that. I think that there’s a relationship to my childhood that I’m kind of moving through when I’m doing this. I’m revisiting these characters that I read when I was 10 and 12. Comics as a form are just fascinating to me.