Tribes In Conversation:
DREW PISARRA
Pisarra, Drew. Unmask Ice. 2025. 4" x 6". Watercolor, marker, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Private collection.
Tribes’ Executive Director Regie Cabico sits down with poet and visual artist Drew Pisarra to talk about life, love, haigas, and his current body of work, Ice Collages. Other collages outside this series will be on view via two group shows this fall: Curiosities, curated by Hans Gallas at Art Haus SF in San Francisco, and Parallel Cosmologies, curated by Helen Kauder for Ursa Gallery in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In the interview below, Cabico and Pisarra discuss poetic influences, the evolution from page to visual art, and the political and emotional provocations that shape his practice.
REGIE: Your poetry influences include pop culture, cinema, science, and poetic forms: most notably haiku & sonnets, especially sonnets, as your first two poetry books: Infinity Standing Up & Periodic Boyfriends, published by Capturing Fire Press, are rooted in the 14-line strict Shakespearean structure, and your myriad romantic foibles and escapades. These works are not inherently political, but your visual art has opened the door to resistance to the current regime’s immigration policy. Can you tell us how the themes of provocation and witness evolved?
DREW: As a gay man, I would say my very existence is a provocation. It’s no mere coincidence that I found my groove as a writer decades ago when I got involved in a statewide political campaign to combat anti-queer legislation in Oregon. Simultaneously I was a few years out of college and eager to return to my theater roots but the only auditions that went anywhere would’ve had me playing a serial killer in Lee Blessing’s Down the Road or the female lead in As You Like It. Talk about a gay trope! Anyway, I wasn’t cast. So I started writing my own material. And my first solo show Queer Notions was very much influenced by the aforementioned political climate and built around gay identity, around detailing the insidious ubiquity of homophobia, about being out and shameless at a time when they were trying to shut us down, out, and up. The gay-bashing, the public shaming, the ridicule… I wanted to take all that shit and turn it into gold. Or at least a monologue with punch lines and sight gags. It was like making a public confession when I was not the one who had actually sinned.
REGIE: When we co-curated the fall Segue Series last year, you demonstrated some of your visual art genius by creating three-dimensional “gifts” for our featured poets, week after week, for 8 weeks. Can you share how collage and these unique offerings intersect by describing one of your creations and your collage-making process?
DREW: First off, I’d like to publicly thank you for letting me make all those quirky objet d’arts, eight weeks running. Visual artmaking for me has always been a small-time exchange. By which I mean, I tend to make art for a single, solitary person: collage postcards for friends. That’s it. That this “mail art” has recently drawn attention outside my inner circle is frankly a complete surprise. I would guess the miniature art objects I made for the Segue Series poets were a subconscious extension of this impulse. Personal offerings… only this time to writers I didn’t really know and who I feverishly researched for a week at Yale’s Beinecke Library. One of my favorite creations was the piece I made for Xavier Cavazos. Inspired by his chronicle of addiction, The Devil’s Workshop – specifically, the poem “Harrowing of Hell,” I reskinned a mini liquor bottle. The poem’s title became the label; the first stanzas, its ingredients; the rest of the poem, a long thin scroll inside – like a literary tequila worm.
Pisarra, Drew. Lack Warmth. 2025. 4" x 6". Watercolor, marker, gel pen, stickers, packing tape, Scotch tape, on BFK Rives paper. Private collection.
REGIE: Certainly, to be an OUT writer, you’ve got to be ready to fight the queer phobia. Have you faced any personal challenges at work related to censorship?
DREW: I used to always out myself in the job interview process because I simply didn’t want to work at a place where being queer was a major issue. I didn’t have the energy to be under attack from nine to five. The current culture at large is bad enough. My current job is at a bookstore so I get to celebrate queer representation with my own staff picks shelf where I’ve spotlit queer authors like Angela Davis, Tom Pyun, Jean Genet, Kazim Ali, Tommy Pico… I need to get some Gertrude Stein on that shelf soon. So I’m lucky to have a job that actively counters censorship. The company even gave us copies of James Larue’s On Censorship as a gift last holiday season.
REGIE: There is a staggering amount of civil rights violations with censorship and artistic freedom. As someone witnessing these atrocities, which also go to education, historical erasure, autocracy, and economic disparity, how do you still find time to write?
DREW: Social media is not my friend. ChatGPT is not my friend. AI is not my friend. Even Netflix is not my friend. And Pornhub is not my lover. Doom-scrolling is not becoming informed. When I keep those things in mind, I have more than enough time to write and that includes contacting my senators and congresspeople. Which I do. Because the atrocities and inequities are real and require our attention and action. People who say they don’t know what to do are lying. They know. They just need to do it.
REGIE: Your collages are made on postcard-size paper, and there is a kind of William Blake retrospective feeling to some of your earlier collages with the lettering and images. Describe what images attract you as you collect and snip material, and could you share advice and/or inspirations you have for some writers who are novice collage makers, by way of process, and invaluable materials and tools you like to use?
DREW: Of course, I’m delighted you brought up William Blake since we recently saw his current exhibition together at the Yale Center for British Art. Talk about a guy who marched to the beat of his own drum! I wish the gallery had printed promotional postcards of a few of his engravings, though. They’d make such great backgrounds for collages. Just like Chinese fortune cookie texts make great captions. Lately, more than Blake, however, I’ve been trying to channel my inner Barbara Kruger, the woman who designed the politically savvy billboards of my adolescence. I’m being as clever as I can with phrasing while employing ransom note letters to create collages expressing my horror at what ICE is doing. To be honest, I didn’t know how to shape my anger, sadness, and disgust in a poem. So I turned to the scissors and tape.
Pisarra, Drew. Icebreaker. 2025. 4" x 6". Watercolor, marker, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Regie Cabico.
REGIE: How often do words drive your visual arts-making, or is it the image materials or a feeling that gets you in the arts-making zone?
DREW: There was something about making all the miniatures for the Segue Series that really opened my mind anew to words as inspiration. I don’t know if you remember but the first week I brought in a facsimile of a broadsheet of a Joan Larkin poem, a kind of poster designed by Roni Gross with a drawing by Michael Aboody. The piece was handstitched and printed at the Center for Book Arts in NYC and showed such care, such weirdness. The mixed media aspect of that piece invited me to be freer, to be more sculptural, to think in three dimensions that went beyond the bas relief. And the poets themselves were so inspiring. I made a doll-sized discography for Cheryl Boyce Taylor’s bibliography; a pop-up book for Joey De Jesus; a cootie-catcher for Thaddeus Rutkowski; and a tea sampler for Jee Leong-Koh.
REGIE: Congratulations with your forthcoming exhibits. Your artwork offers durability and portability since it will be mailed to the recipient. What works will we see, and can you tell us about the show themes?
DREW: My friend Resa Alboher – who I’ve known since college – has been co-editing the substack Haiku Pause with Mariya Gusev. Over the last few months, they’ve focused on summer-themed haiga, a literary art form combining haiku with visuals. And so I’ve been making collages that layer haiku into the image. A series of these are now going to be displayed in an exhibition curated by Hans Gallas: Curiosities at Art Haus SF. While another one will be part of the group show, Parallel Cosmologies curated by Helen Kauder for Ursa Gallery. (The first opens Oct. 7; the second, Nov. 7th.) Both of these are sweet but seeing my anti-ICE collages get a second life at A Gathering of the Tribes is truly the icing on the cake.
6. Pisarra, Drew. Fire Ice. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Angie Morrill.
Pisarra, Drew. Stop Ice. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, marker, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Linda K. Johnson.
4. Pisarra, Drew. Colder. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, stickers, gel pen, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Darcy Buck.
Pisarra, Drew. Malice. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, marker, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Zoe McClellan.
9. Pisarra, Drew. No More Ice. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, marker, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Private collection.
Pisarra, Drew. Evil Ice. 2025. 6" x 4". Watercolor, stickers, packing tape on BFK Rives paper. Collection of Nicholas Ealy.