Amanda Ba, whose painting Bitch and Bull (2023) appears on the cover of Art in America’s Fall 2024 “New Talent” issue, is the subject of a profile in the magazine. From her studio in Brooklyn, New York, Ba told A.i.A. the backstory of the cover image, a detail of a larger work shown here in full.

This painting is part of a series from 2021, a galvanizing moment in my career that I’ve developed from since. I graduated the year before, into Covid. There wasn’t much opportunity, but there also wasn’t much pressure. Since nobody was doing anything anyway, you could just take the stimulus money and use it for enrichment. I decided I wanted to focus on one color and really understand it. Red is an intense color. It’s lustful, angry, and passionate. It’s a symbol of revolution and war. It’s also very classic.

For the dog I used the American Bully, which is the name of the breed. The name is evocative of imperialism, and it’s a really American type of dog. The culture of ownership around it is super-macho and breeding-heavy. It’s meant to be a designer guard dog that people like to make extremely muscular. There are all sorts of crazy feeding routines to put them on. It’s the macho owner’s ideal of a dog.

The relationship between the woman and the dog is nonhierarchical. The point of the series the painting belongs to is [to consider] nonhierarchical relationships with other forms of life and nonlife. I’m interested in animacy, animacy being the degree to which something is anthropomorphic and therefore relatable. We assign more value to bigger and more relatable animals, like elephants or dolphins or dogs, that we think are intelligent in ways that align with human values.

I was reading a lot of theory about what it would mean to center human-based ideas of worth and extend them to nonliving things like granite or other things that are part of organic, geologic, and biological processes. Then we would probably be more conscientious about stripping resources and things like that. It’s an abstract, at times poetic, way of thinking about environmentalism.

The reason I chose dogs is because they’re companions for us. Donna J. Haraway has a great book called The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2023) that is a playful history of our relationship with dogs. We think of humans having essentially invented dogs by breeding them from wolves. But she says that early dogs were crucial to the development of civilization and agriculture, because having livestock dogs and guardian dogs allowed us to develop and expand the number of people that a community can sustain. Nowadays, dogs have become a sort of kin; we’ve morphed them out of an industrial, progress-oriented role into a family role. But it’s nice to think about relationships with animals that are not just about cuteness or coming from a place of coddling and infantilization.

Because it’s nonhierarchical, I painted the woman in an animal-like position. The frontal view makes it confrontational. The window open to the outside is a general metaphor for alternatives to normative, domestic space. I wasn’t approaching it from a particularly feminist perspective, like, “we’re all stuck in the house—now we should go outside!” But interiors tend to be psychological spaces, whereas exteriors can be outward projections of vastness and freedom.