DM: And so, the realism part of something being magical, is that we live in the real world, and we are influenced by that real world. However, the ways in which we feel that real world is astonishing. And that is where we can step into a space that is magical.

BZ: What I love about what you're saying is that earlier, when we were talking about code switching and how to actually describe the work that you do through text, I was thinking about the phrase "in between,” where magic is the reality that is in between other realities, or at least it is the experience of a reality between other realities. "Between" doesn't happen unless there's something to be in between.

DM: I had some kid say, what does "no mad" mean—is it that you're not mad?

BZ: Oh, I love that!

DM: The kid was right, I'm not mad now, because I'm no longer stressed about home insecurity, I could create my own. It took a while but over a period of time I found one of the most poetic definitions of "NOMAD", a term used as a proverb. And the proverb was "birds of passage."

 I met Dominique Moody in Los Angeles because twelve years ago, Dominique met Leigh over the phone, and today, I sometimes harvest corn with Leigh as part of Lauren’s art practice. And perhaps I also met Dominique (or Dominique met me), because a year and a half ago, I had unknowingly met her brother Wayne Moody in Sacramento with Kevin for an astrocartography reading. Or possibly we all met because three years ago, I got a tattoo that says, "MOODY," because my friend Nick had wanted to but never got to, and when we had asked him, well, why is that the tattoo?, he always used to say with feigned exasperation, "because I'm moody!" because he was, like we all are.

And just as likely or unlikely, it could be that we’ve met because we are both Cal alums, with her graduating in 1991, the year I was born. Regardless, Moody and moody have met, and she has agreed to sit for a portrait for me, and I have agreed to draw as-builts for her archives in exchange. Serendipity is everywhere, Dominique Moody tells me.

DM: And I've always said, my work is dependent on, and complete—not necessarily just dependent—but complete when someone or something responds to it.

BZ: The work requires the audience.

DM: It requires the audience. And I am very broad about what my audience is, though. Sometimes my work is done in places and in situations that won't be viewed by a human audience. And yet it still has response. Even in the NOMAD, during its stages of construction and creation. There was one point, one spring, that I went up to it one morning, and on the porch, a bird had tried to nest.

Within one of the stars—the starlights—one of the cones that had a lever that opens it up was broken, and so it just swung out. So each time she tried to put nesting material inside the cone, it would drop out. I was kind of shocked that she was trying to nest within the star, and I wasn't sure that it was a good idea—we had just started to do the electrical, and I was thinking, oh, this is not a good space for you to nest! And I was still doing a lot of heavy duty work with equipment and machinery and hammering, and I thought, that's going to be terrible in terms of the noise and all of this. So I thought I would dissuade her from trying to continue to nest by wiring it shut until I could fix the lever. And the next morning, lo and behold, I realized that I did not prevent her... I helped her. She had pried it open, and the wire supported that one star cone, and so she built her nest inside the star. And that same day, I looked in. The whole nest was there. It had happened really quickly, and I looked through some of the tiny little stars, a friend and I, the electrician, and we saw, through a five-point star cut-out, five little eggs. And we took pictures, viewing through that little star hole. And she raised those little birds inside of a star. I was trying to figure out at first what kind of bird she was. There were a flock of them that had come in... She was found to be a Starling.

BZ: A starling.

DM: Who would've thought? The irony that a starling would be so attracted—to a star and I decided to feel that if a creature felt so welcomed that they would want to make this their home, that's a good sign. 

When Dominique tells me about her home, she tells me by assembling small things like images, memories, objects, ideas—and much larger things, like landscapes, journeys, legacies, and tree rings. A bird named "Blue" who visits her at her studio for over ten years, even when she moved addresses, who signaled to her a nomadic spirit. A redwood tree whose heartwood became a bridge for 150 years after it lived and breathed for centuries before European settlers, whose heartwood she salvaged and transformed into a permanent sculpture for a hospital—and the molding inside the NOMAD. The sudden and irreversible loss of sight she experienced as an emerging visual artist, which gave her the vision to design and build the NOMAD. An afternoon at the laundromat, which provided her the solution for found object windows—washing machine doors. Decades of sweat equity paid in full by her family and communities.

When she tells me about her home, I wish that I could be a very small child at her feet and also a very old man on her porch and also me, across from her in the NOMAD, and one of my wishes comes true.

DM: I think by having that secondary perspective on a culture that is supposed to be your own, but coming from outside, even for that moment of coming from outside gives you a different window, and that window in, it both allows you to come in with a certain level of consciousness about it. Because I'm not just doing it out of happenstance. I learned to jump rope and really study it like it was a science, but also embraced the part in me that is intuitive, said, yeah, I can jump rope. But then revel in the success of it as something that is a very specific cultural expression.

And so I recognized those things early. But people would note, in school or out and about or even in our home, they would always note, where are you from? And they could not connect what they were hearing in terms of some difference—and it may not have even been in the voice, but in the language used, which was picked up and pieced together like a collage or an assemblage, from all these different places we had been—and so we pieced that together and people were like, well where the heck is that from?

Because in order for a lot of people, their comfort zone is hearing the familiar. and once they don't hear that familiar, then they're not quite sure of how to identify you.

Dominique invites me and Rob to a show of architectural work on the topic of housing. We drive together, accidentally arrive fifteen minutes early, and go for a walk. We look at many models, graphics, diagrams, statistics. We leave early, too, and go to St. Elmo Village, where the NOMAD was seeded ten years ago in Dominique’s former studio. In Rob’s current studio, he and Dominique tell me other stories of housing in a tangle of artist homes and studios lived in and painted on and mosaiced and loved, attentively interwoven with the histories and communities of South Central Los Angeles, swept up in blues and painted gnarled trunks and leather shoes for newborn babes and Rob's childhood photographs of a laughing boy taken in Louisiana, developed in California, in another lifetime, yesterday. Earlier, I am quietly proud because Rob and Dominique complimented my parallel parking along a tight South Central street. 

BZ: And the image that I keep returning to is what you told me about earlier with the starling, because one of the things that struck me about that story was—to my Western socialized, settled, settler way of thinking, it feels almost too nonchalant—the way that the mother bird found this place, made this nest, raised her young, and that's that. Right? But that's such an anthropomorphization, that's me projecting the socialization that I have, whereas in reality it was not nonchalant at all. It was very rigorous. She worked very hard. It was very intentional. And it just reflects a different behavior, ethos, whatever is this being's equivalent of culture—intuition, instinct. Wherein she can do it again, somewhere else, and it's not a big deal, and it also isn't nothing. The nonchalance that I would read into it also relates back to a lot of what both of us have talked about, just migrating as individuals and communities. The temptation is to feel that each place matters less or is less of a home if you've moved so many times.

DM: They actually get connected like a strand of beads.

BZ: And each one has care and energy and sweat put into it, and it is very much a big deal, but you allow yourself or are forced to do it again. And so when I hear you speak of possible formats for a residency and the kind of work that you're creating, this is the image that's coming up. Building another nest, building another home.

DM: What I thought was really interesting, too, about the experience with the bird nesting in the star, is that she was very demanding to be able to build a nest in a built environment—she was surrounded, because I did it up in Altadena on a ranch, so this was not in what we would consider completely urbanized space that this bird flew into. It has wonderful natural environment all around it, and each day I would see swarms of the starlings, they tend to really flock. And they were all over the place in the wonderful trees of Altadena. So she could've had her choice, and she made her choice in the built environment. And it actually pushed me to change my day-to-day, even though we kept working, but I always would check in on her.

BZ: And perhaps she had been checking in on you. You were likely being watched before you even knew she was trying to make the nest.

DM: I had the incredible experience one morning, like I usually did in walking up to start my day of work, and I got to the steps, and all of a sudden, all these birds came out and flew out. Now, in my mind, I'm still thinking more in terms of people—oh, she had guests! Maybe guests to come and see her babies! And even though we were looking in, because it's a 28-day cycle, every few days we would look in and they got bigger and bigger and bigger... And I thought, maybe she had some guests who came to see her babies and now they left. And I looked in. And there were none. And I had actually experienced them fledging. And I never quite knew what that term meant—to fledge—until that moment. Because the nest was all cleared out. So it was almost like you had said—the parking lot is empty, and then the NOMAD is there, and then one day, it's not there. Her nest disappeared. It was almost as if it was so magical of an event that didn't actually happen, but I had 28 days of looking in on her. After a while, I would say the first maybe ten days, she would stay in the nest and watch me. She would be able to look right at the door, and sometimes I'd peek out the door, and there she was, sitting on her nest, and she was okay. She was not startled by my presence, my coming and going. It's as if she tolerated my build as much as I tolerated her build.

BZ: You understood each other.

DM: That we were both nesting.

DM: I knew Blue's home was where I was staying. I was her guest. because she was there before me. And I was just keeping her nest warm. [laughs] Right? So that is where I'm hoping will become a greater space of acknowledged humanity in the future. Where there would be welcome for the more fluid movement of all beings. Where these boundaries won't cost them their lives—won't traumatize them.

The first time we met, I recall talking about archiving, why we do it, who gets to do it, what it is to have a home for all our stories. I think that now, our conversations swirl in a dreamscape, other stories, homes, stories of home. A moment of recognition in the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a young child seeing herself in Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson. A sunshower in Baltimore during a family reunion. An arrival to New York at fifteen to attend Pratt. The youngest ancestor, whose sacred portrait she creates on the side of her work, Ancestral Praise House. A shoebox as a private place.

Her works as tangible elements that connect dreamscape and reality. “I dream a lot of houses and structures,” Dominique says in a special appearance at the California African American Museum. I am sitting in the back in a swirl with the crowd. 

BZ: Well, something else I've been thinking about as you've been speaking is the museum as a Western institution and a Western lens. There's an imposition of the museum, the white cube, where the object has to be dislocated in order to be viewed and valued and commodified.

DM: there is a great cultural value to artistic expression but It also becomes a commodity that often distorts its true value! When I was invited to do my first solo exhibit at the Watts Tower, I was astonished because I had been to Watts Tower, and I'm really amazed by the story of this man who, with very little formal education, and very small in stature, had the audacity to create this monumental piece on this very little small sliver of land that he got in this urban setting in this community that was at the time predominantly Black. And I knew that I needed to start seeding the NOMAD there, because he and the community taught me tenacity. It took him thirty-three years, so what's thirty years for me?

So all of these people had something in common where they built and created an extraordinary space and place, and they needed a very specific place that they were drawn to, and then what they put into that place from the environment was really intentional and narrative. And so, Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, or Nuestro Pueblo, was given as a gift to the community, a community that even if they didn't understand it, were open to the idea that he can and should, and then reveled in it afterward when they realized the scope of it.

But once it becomes commodified as a thing, it then becomes questioned about whether it should even stay in the space, a space that was not a typical setting for a major piece of public art, and yet it was exactly where it should be, in a community that celebrated it and him. And then for artist Noah Purifoy to relocate to the hinterlands of an environment that is the high desert, that is so far removed from both his Watts home and his origin in the South, to the exact opposite coast, to the urban center of Watts, then to this place in between, where he had the freedom in the last portion of his life to create.

DM: One real magical moment, while I was standing, staring at this round corral in Joshua Tree, a set of horses in the early morning came running along the outside. Running through the desert were these two white horses, and they looked like they're having the most extraordinary time, running free, and I knew—they must have escaped. From something. [laughs] Because they were just running and playing with each other, and they were big horses, and they had this weight to them—you could feel it reverberating through the sand. And I'm watching this standing in the midst of this corral. And I thought, wow, that's amazing! Who would've expected that, and just the way that looked on the landscape, on this barren landscape with just these dots of little houses. And so I knew that that space had to be the space. I took all those scrap pieces of wood and bottles and just leaning them up against the fence as if it was complete play. Like the way a child would play with the box that the toy came in. I played with those, I loved the way the light hit the glass, the way the glass distorted the image of the landscape, and I built this thing out of the materials that had been sitting outside for at least a good ten years. And the community began to join me in the process.

But what was never an intention is to try to make those items permanent in that setting. I wanted to build it well—well enough to withstand the rigors of the environment, but I was definitely understanding of the power of the environment out there. No matter what it was, it will erode it. Nature had shaped that massive unique Joshua Tree Park. Those trees that are so gnarled straggle-toothed, some of them are thousands of years old, and the only way that they have survived that is that they're intensely rooted to this place. But everything else, the rocks, the sand, the land, the land underneath the NOMAD shifted just in the time that I was there. The way the water would flow under it, the way the wind would come out of nowhere. So I was under no illusions that I am shaping something in this environment that is built, but that nature will at some point reshape. And I was okay with that. It's a lot of work. I tried to secure it as best as I could. But I know over time, it will do its own thing. But to me it'll go back to being something similar to the piles that I saw the first time with the horses running out of it.

BZ: And the phrase that comes to mind that you used earlier is the “call and response.” Another call, another response. You know that the response will be there, and you're not looking to silence that response somehow by making your call permanent.

DM: Absolutely. And that spring that I left, in April of 2017, two mourning doves had nested in the fence. So once again, they are helping to reshape it and call it a home. And when I went to Noah Purifoy's Art Park, in some of his installations, there were both occupied and unoccupied nests, and they became really a part of it. Because what I experienced is them there—he didn't put them there, but they came there, and therefore that was my experience with them. But as “tattered,” and when you read his poetry, his poetry talked about things that are tattered. And I think, in terms of the Black experience, from my understanding of and lived experience, that there is a certain amount of wear and tear.

We are incredibly strong and resilient as a people, but there's also a weathering of the spirit due to the social dynamics here that has and does leave scars. And I'm not afraid to show those scars and tell the stories through them. But they are there. Sometimes there is this notion, especially using terms like "magical" and the popular term that fairly recently gained a lot of popularity, which was "Black Girl Magic."

And I certainly understood the need to use the term and to express it that way, as a way not to negate anybody else, but it certainly celebrates those who usually do not get praise. And having experienced that in my own life, it was a welcome refrain.

But  unfortunately, much of what we do, and the genius and creativity of what we do, has often been usurped and appropriated, and therefore then almost weaponized against us. So yes, we have been defined also in this inhuman way of being superhuman, as if we don't feel. That Black women are so strong that they don't feel pain, they can handle it, they'll take care of it—they'll save us! You know? No. And we do feel. And we feel deeply.

I have to say, when you showed me your tattoo, the moody tattoo, and then shared with me how that came about, and this whole conversation even about the name Moody... As kids, we were so chided so often by having that name. What's the matter, you're moody! We were almost embarrassed by the name because we felt that when you're defined as having emotional, within the Black community, that can even cost you your life.

So to show overt emotion was something to hide. But when you told the story that moody meant that you are a deeply feeling person, I recognized that immediately. That's what we are. That we were deeply feeling. And therefore out of the nine of us, In my family I personally think we're all creative, but at least six of us have been intensely expressive. And I think the reason is because we deeply feel. And that the way we found an outlet was to create. So that that feeling could come to the surface but not be harmful to us. But now in which you've expanded on the name, I'm like, Yes, I'm moody! What of it? [laughs].

And then when my sister and I had our home interiors business in San Francisco, because we did all the work by word-of-mouth, we never advertised, but what our clients would say to other people who would make a comment about their home is, get those Moody sisters in there and they will Moody-ize your place. You will know when you've been Moody-ized. I do believe that we did bring that, and we pick up on not only our own feelings and emotions, I can honestly say that I can walk into anyone's home, and I will read it. And it will tell me about the people who occupy it. And to me it's a real gift to have it. Sometimes it's hard to shut it off. [laughs] But it is an incredible insight and then, too, it's important that people's homes have a portrait element to it. Because I think it helps to nurture who they are and what they have to do in life. That that nest be a healthy and safe environment that protects and inspires them.

BZ: And that's so palpable in the NOMAD.

DM: And the experience I had where as all too often, in a very traumatic way, in the African American community, too many of us have been unjustly incarcerated and have therefore had the traumatic experience of imprisonment. One day someone came to the NOMAD and was at first very uncomfortable, but was drawn to the welcome-ness of a space, but the confines of the space also harkened back to something else that was very traumatic. And crossing that threshold of the porch created a transition for this person. 

Once inside this person stated softly, "your home is medicine". I had never thought of a home in that way but it made so much sense.

And I feel it is so important that it's not the size of this space, but it is what is in the space, both that will welcome and then nurture and protect. And when he stepped in and realized that it was a safe place for him, he told me, "There's love here. You built love into your house." and you know, these are things that are not tangible. These are not just 2x4s, that you purchase at a Home Depot. [laughs] But it is your intention and your desires, your accumulated wealth of wisdom. That's what you build into your home.

Regardless of where, the NOMAD demands to be encountered as both sculpture and dwelling unapologetically. Moody dwells within her sculpture as a social art practice. Her durational performance of living and traveling with her own home delves deeply into the intersections of race, gender, and ability with migration, agency, and liberation. As a Black Disabled woman artist who designed, built, and owns her own home, Moody uses her body, her movements, and her daily experience as canvas and stage.

In many ways, her work openly disregards architectural discourse—and architectural discourse seems, mistakenly, to disregard her. At the same time, her daily rituals and her corresponding functional organization of objects and forms in space (...architecture?) manifest a profoundly meaningful space in aesthetics and tectonics alike—from filleted laminated plywood window frames, to a translucent skylight following the ridge beam and exposing the rafters, to an expressive and culturally specific porch not typical of mobile homes, to a floor plan that evokes (with great intention) both a chapel and a shotgun house in the space of a prison cell. 

To see and to be in and to know the NOMAD is to recognize that placemakers like Moody do not need our discipline; rather, as spatial designers, our discipline needs them.