Instagram, art and the naked ambitions of Carrie Riehl

Carrie Riehl shaved off her eyebrows in early June. I know this because I saw it on Instagram, where Riehl maintains — stars in, really — an art-drenched, visually provocative account.

By the standards of someone who’s always a nipple or a pubic hair away from being thrown off the Facebook-owned photo-sharing app, the eyebrow episode seemed demure. She posts often, and her aesthetic is distinctive: lots of breasts, legs, mouths, spit, hair and fashion. Most of all, lots of Carrie Riehl. Instagram has deleted several of her accounts over the past few years — one, somewhat awkwardly, while it was a “Recommended” page. Each time, she has resurfaced within a few days, under a different name. Her followers — on her latest account, h2.0, a couple of thousand and counting — have little trouble finding her again.

I met with Riehl a few days after her eyebrows vanished to discuss That Used to Be Us, the art show she was curating — her first — at Haw Contemporary. Riehl, who is 23, lives with her girlfriend and frequent collaborator, Emily Kenyon, in an apartment on a friendly block in the gentrifying Historic Northeast. Some of Riehl’s friends — mostly students and recent graduates, like Riehl, of the Kansas City Art Institute — were hanging out on the front stoop, grilling vegetable kebabs, drinking beers, smoking cigarettes.

She welcomed me inside, and I mentioned her eyebrows. “Right,” she said. I asked how long she thought it would take for them to grow back. “I’ll let you know,” she said.

A little while later, a friend of hers arrived and said, “Your eyebrows! They’re gone!”

“No way,” she said, her voice droll to the point of boredom.

Later, she told me that she shaved off her eyebrows with the hope that they would grow back thicker than before. “I also kind of want a unibrow,” she added, smiling.

Riehl and her photography convey the strong sense that anything resembling a norm or a social more — particularly in the realm of bodies, sex and gender — requires, at a minimum, reconsideration, if not a permanent trip to the garbage bin. Good luck not feeling square or prudish in the company of the artist or her art, which includes whatever she may have done to her body that day. On Instagram and in Bohemian, the publication that she edits with Kenyon, she has honed a talent for taking photos of herself that brim with messages about fashion, sexuality and the grotesque, often in the same image.

Among her more confrontational images: Riehl in a plain white shirt in which two tiny holes have been cut, so all you see are her nipples poking through; Riehl wearing an open kimono showing almost all of her breasts and torso, her unshaved leg in the foreground (caption: “Your daily reminder that hairy women are beautiful too”); a smearing of menstrual blood on her upper leg with the caption “I’m so sorry if I’m alienating some of you! Your whole fucking culture alienates me.”

In person, Riehl does not come across as especially alienated. She’s friendly, eager to talk art and theory, openly ambitious. She has a subtle Valley-girl lilt to her voice and is as likely to call something or someone “supercute” as she is to bring up “gender binary” — as she did while enthusiastically telling me about the works she had selected for That Used To Be Us.

“It’s all female artists, though I don’t really think of it as a woman’s show,” she said. “I think if there’s a unifying thing, it’s all artists with kind of an activist presence who are creating work about how identity — whether through gender, relationships, infrastructure, politics, family, whatever — is changing in their cultures.”

She continued: “Early on, the plan was to ask local artists to contribute original work exploring some of the topics I was interested in for the show. Then I realized I wanted to include artists who were already working in this territory. So I just started contacting artists whose work I admired — some from the Internet, some from Instagram, some from other places — and asking them if they were interested in letting me show their work.”

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She had taken the exhibition’s title from a Thomas Friedman book of the same name, using it to comment on a gallery world deep into the age of globalization. Some of the artists she chose for the show live in places such as Holland and Hong Kong, and there were many whom Riehl hadn’t met — probably won’t meet — in real life. As she told me who they were, she sometimes recalled Instagram handles and website names more readily than given names.

All of the artists involved signed off on having their work shown in That Used To Be Us, an unintentional but relevant comment on today’s art world. Earlier in the spring, pop artist Richard Prince put up a widely covered show composed of what he called “appropriated” Instagram images. He had turned these photos — some of models and celebrities, some of everyday users of the app — into large-scale works and sold many of them for more than $100,000 to deep-pocketed New York art buyers. ARTnews called Prince “painfully removed from the youth culture in which he’s participating” — a culture in which Riehl dwells full time.

Like Riehl, Jennifer Chan (whose video essay “Equality” is part of That Used To Be Us) is immersed in a specific subset of that culture — Internet natives whose work explores the intersecting lines of body image, gender theory, feminism and art.

“I think online feminisms are very individualized and fragmented,” Chan told me. “I can’t call it a movement, but through the kinds of conversations we’ve been having, I think we gain perspectives on different feminist approaches that all strive to arrive at the same goal: to be seen as a human, not an object, and as artists whose work should be as valuable as men’s work.”

To be maximally inclusive of artists outside the area, such as Chan, Riehl decided to make the show mostly prints and multimedia — eliminating the challenges of shipping artwork. Artists sent high-resolution images of their works, which she could print here in Kansas City, and links to videos, which she would download and play on screens at Haw. This approach, though, has a drawback: Gallerists don’t make much money on prints and mixed media.

“I think traditional gallerists don’t really see much value in showing prints or video projects,” Riehl said. “The money is more in painting and sculpture and drawing and other hand-based mediums that have a long tradition in the art world. But I think we need new media forms showing in galleries. Not just showing but selling, too.”

Though the works are for sale, Bill Haw Jr., who owns Haw Contemporary, told me that he saw Riehl’s show — part of ENABLE, a new annual program in which Haw turns over his space to young curators for several weeks each summer — as a loss leader.

“For us, flexibility and openness seem to pay off both psychically and financially, but it [Riehl’s show] might not fit into the agenda at a lot of commercial galleries,” Haw said. “It may not be significant to us financially, but that’s OK. It’s just three weeks out of the year, and we benefit in unquantifiable ways by operating from a position of inclusiveness.” (Riehl called Haw Contemporary “one of the three best places to show in town, along with Bill Brady and Sherry Leedy,” and praised its “equalist” showing practices.)

The last few years, Riehl has taught a class on iPhone photography to adults in KCAI’s continuing-education program. “It’s really exciting to see more people taking iPhone photos as a legitimate medium because it’s already widely accepted in my generation but not often by those older than us,” she said. Instagram art, Riehl added, ought to be evaluated based on traditional characteristics of photography — quality of image, lighting, colors — and new ones specific to social media, such as “captions, overall balance and movement of the feed, and how the images are broken into series versus the individual images.”

Riehl views her Instagram posts as aesthetically relational to “all the awesome women working today and in the past who have time and time again run into resistance against their bodies and artwork” — a list that includes Ruki Kaur and Petra Collins (fellow young artists who have recently run afoul of Instagram’s community guidelines) and Kathleen Hanna, the feminist activist and frontwoman of punk act Bikini Kill (“a huge influence”).

“I think it’s disgusting that our society promotes the idea that a woman’s nipple is always sexual,” Riehl said. “Humans develop nipples before our genders are determined. Women have their periods monthly. It shouldn’t be a gross or embarrassing thing, but we are taught to whisper and have shame about our cramps, needing tampons, etc. I am writing political messages with these images because in today’s society, they have to be political. It’s sad that that’s the case.”

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Riehl is less interested in selfie theory. “I have put myself physically into my art, always. I used to draw myself into images, but starting freshman year at KCAI, I began working with myself in film and photography more. I don’t think there is such a thing as ‘selfie culture’ anymore. They’re just a super-common and usually honest method of portraiture.”

There are other, less obvious advantages to being the star of the show. “I don’t have to worry about asking models to do weird or potentially harmful things to their body when I model by myself,” Riehl said. “I went through a food-dye phase, taking a lot of pictures with it in my eye, and my body was cycling it through my nose and out my mouth. It was gorgeous and scientifically really interesting. But I wouldn’t ask another model to do that.”

Riehl, who was raised in North Kansas City and graduated from Liberty High School, studied illustration at KCAI but didn’t really take to it. “I was more interested in art direction and art business, and I think that’s mostly what I took away from art school,” she told me.

She started Bohemian while she was still at KCAI, and it was originally a traditional zine — photocopied, centered on interviews with local bands and earnest personal essays, the kind of thing you might have picked through over lunch at YJ’s. Over time, though, it has grown into something glossier and more worldly. The Spectrum Issue, which arrived last fall, was a perfect-bound, full-color 100 pages. It included an argument for why the British government should pay for the female sanitary products of low-income women (Instagram: @freetheP); a photo essay shaming men who catcall women; several photos of men’s bare asses; at least one photo of a vagina; and an essay called “38th and Baltimore,” about living with heroin junkies in Kansas City.

It’s possible to see Bohemian as a trial run at how Riehl put together the Haw show. “We find a topic and then go out and find people who can best speak about it,” Riehl told me when I asked her how she assembles an issue. “We’ll either ask them to submit something new or, if they’ve already done something Emily and I like, ask if we can republish it.”

She added: “I’ve gotten a lot of contributors through Instagram. I can see the quality of their work, what kinds of references they’re making, if they’re following interesting artists. And you can see whether a person’s consistent because you see what they’re posting on a day-to-day basis. That’s all stuff you wouldn’t really get from an ordinary artist website.”

Along with Bohemian, Riehl and Kenyon regularly stage events that land somewhere between a happening and performance art. To celebrate the release of the Spectrum Issue, they re-created a teenage girl’s bedroom fantasy inside the Paragraph Gallery. “We had a selfie station inside bed netting, and a full wardrobe and temporary tattoos, tarot-card readings,” Riehl said. “It was like a sleepover.”

For an open-studios evening at Paragraph — where Riehl and Kenyon were granted a 2014 writing residency from the Charlotte Street Foundation — they installed a formal business conference room, complete with actors dressed as businessmen and secretaries. “It was sort of our way of paying homage to the people who essentially paid for our residency — all the banks down there in the financial district,” Riehl said. “We had these cubicles and desks, and we covered the lights with this off-color acetate that cast a weird, depressing glow in the room. It was this very normcore setting. And we were the first room when you got off the elevators. Half the people walked in and freaked out and left.”

In May, Bohemian was awarded a $6,000 Rocket Grant from Charlotte Street to continue its publishing mission. The money was to go toward printing the magazine (which doesn’t run ads), photo production costs, hiring a developer and a designer for its website, and paying contributors. Not long after the award was announced, though, it was revoked. A condition of Rocket Grant recipients is that they be more than one year out of school. Riehl and Kenyon both graduated from KCAI in 2014 — a fact that had gone overlooked during the application process.

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Julia Cole, coordinator of the Rocket Grant program, said the panel that selected Bohemian for the grant liked “the activist stance Carrie and her team were taking in their choices of topics for recent and proposed editions of Bohemian.” She went on: “I think the panel appreciated the overall gutsy, self-confident stance of these young women who are rejecting, choosing and reinventing their identities.”

Riehl and Kenyon subsequently started an Indiegogo campaign to try to make up for the loss of sponsorship. It brought in nearly $3,000. Riehl said the next Bohemian, a fashion- and photo-heavy issue titled Fresh Air, will come out before the end of summer.

In the meantime, Riehl has been doing more video work. She and Kenyon recently directed and styled a music video for local act Organized Crimes. She also told me that her Instagram presence has helped her land paid production work locally.

“I try to explain this to people who don’t see the point in investing time in Instagram or other social media unless there’s a direct capital gain for them,” Riehl said. “But, for example, I’m interested in cinematography. I didn’t go to school for film — I’m not technically trained in editing or anything — but I’ve been able to work with filmmakers because they’ve seen on my Instagram that I’m pretty good at editing and design. That’s a direct financial gain for me, more or less due to Instagram. Also, I’ve had the Museum of Contemporary Art [Chicago] and a couple of large magazines following me on Instagram. That’s not actual money, but it’s pretty cool to have major art institutions looking at your work. And who knows where that leads?”

That Used To Be Us opened at Haw Contemporary on Friday, June 26, the day when the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t stop gay couples from marrying. Turnout was strong — maybe a couple of hundred people, most of them young, stylish and attractive.

Riehl had given the front room at Haw over to Megan Mantia and Leone Reeves, the performance duo Blanket Undercover, who had plastered the walls from floor to ceiling with photographs of naked male statues — what they called “Hotties of Art History.” For three hours, Mantia and Reeves, wearing nude leotards and neon-studded bikini tops, sat atop pedestals in the center of the room and chatted vaguely about art with guests while smoking joints and drinking Don Julio tequila from the bottle. It was like a live version of Drunk History, reconfigured to mock art lectures; they called the performance “High and Dumb.” The pedestals contained kegs of Boulevard Wheat, requiring gallerygoers filling their cups to engage with Blanket Undercover on some level.

Riehl, barefoot and wearing pink kimono pants, told me that was very much by design.

“I have really strong opinions about alcohol at gallery shows,” she said. “People tend to not leave the area where the alcohol is. I wanted to make sure people were interacting with the show, seeing the show.”

Also hard to miss was Gabrielle Drew, a young woman who had enclosed herself in a circle of sand in the middle of Haw’s main room and set about cleaning crystals in a basin. “She grew up in a church in North Carolina — her dad was a pastor or priest,” Riehl said. “She’s a sophomore at the Art Institute now, and she’s kind of moving from this moment of spirituality to looking more at spas and suburban aesthetics and those views of femininity. So her performance was a closing of that spiritual realm she created around herself to do this final cleanse.”

Lining the walls of that room was the majority of what Riehl had chosen for That Used To Be Us. Perhaps most striking: three rich portraits by Dutch photographer Sarah Wong, whose documentations of the lives of transgender children have recently drawn notice from BuzzFeed and The New York Times. In a darkened adjacent room, videos such as Sara Abu Abdallah’s “The Salad Zone” — about a day in the life of a Saudi woman — looped on a few screens. Taken as a whole, the event called to mind a Tumblr page come to life.

A few days after the opening — the exhibit runs through July 14 — Riehl posted an Instagram photo of herself kneeling on a bed, nude save for a towel wrapped around her head. The post was flagged and deleted by Instagram. A few hours later, she posted a shot of her naked lower half, with a bright-pink vibrator shielding her vagina. For now, that one is still up. It’s got a lot of likes.