I Won’t Envy is a new podcast series by Vivek Shraya co-produced with Buddies in Bad Times. Episode four, featuring photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya, drops April 2, 2025.
Listen to the podcast trailer and episodes here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I Won’t Envy is sponsored by the Queer and Trans Research Lab at the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at University of Toronto.
Read on for excerpts from Vivek and Paul’s conversation. They talk about humanizing artistic idols, demystifying perceptions of creative success, and the challenge of feeling that identity must precede art when you are racialized.
The text below has been edited for brevity.
About Paul Mpagi Sepuya
Vivek: I Won’t Envy is a podcast about professional jealousy in creative fields. In my own career, I’ve had to confront the fact that jealousy is a byproduct of being an artist, and that no amount of repressing or denying it can make it go away. In fact, my most successful strategy to manage my professional jealousy has been to name it.
Today I’m talking to Paul Sepuya.
Paul Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography and associate professor in Visual Arts and MFA program director at UC San Diego. His work is in the collections of the Getty Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, LACMA, MoMA, SFMoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum, Tate Modern, and Victoria and Albert Museum, among others. I wanted to talk to Paul because I was curious how professional jealousy plays out in the context of the visual art world, which tends to be a bit elusive and even elitist.
Admiration, Inspiration, and Jealousy
Paul Sepuya: Even before it’s professional jealousy I think it’s just jealousy that’s admiration or inspiration, and it’s good motivation.
Vivek Shraya: Can you say more about that?
Paul Sepuya: I think about why I wanted to go to New York and study photography. And I don’t know if I wanted… I don’t think I understood what being an artist was, but I was inspired by and like, jealous of, like, David LaChapelle or something, you know?
Paul Sepuya: But it’s like, I don’t think you can say it’s jealousy when there’s such a structural difference between an admiring 15-year-old and someone with an admirable career. I think something can turn into professional jealousy, when suddenly it’s amongst peers. But I think that motivation to kind of catapult us to where we want to be is kind of tied to jealousy, you know?
Vivek Shraya: Yeah. I’ve never thought about it that way.
Demystifying Artistry and Appearances
Paul Sepuya: I graduated from undergrad in 2004, and that moment for those next few years before 2008, where there was like that pre-2008 art bubble where you were, you know, that’s where like the legend of students — especially from like Columbia and Yale — would sell out open studios, and all of these people right out of school getting sellout shows.
[I had] this moment of thinking, oh god… I mean, I loved my arts administration day job life. You kind of have to have that. But I think there was a lot of professional jealousy and like, can I get that break? Like, am I an artist if I’m doing all these other things? Can I sell work?
I think it was through working on the arts nonprofit, like grants and fellowships and the artist support side that I started to see and realize that a lot of the artists whose work I was seeing in galleries or in museums were those artists who were applying for grants and fellowships because they needed money to continue making their work, and it just demystified some of it.
And that really helped in understanding the difference between appearances and the reality of that like, oh, we’re all in this together.
Naming Jealousy and Self-Starting
Vivek Shraya: Yeah. And would you say that when you felt — whether it’s David LaChapelle or these other artists, you know, later in your 20s — were you able to name jealousy to yourself? Were you able to say, I’m feeling jealous?
Or was it something that you were like, you know, hands off. You didn’t want to touch it, you didn’t want to know it kind of thing.
Paul Sepuya: I think if I’m honest with myself, I would have recognized jealousy. But I don’t know if you talked about it so much. You know, I think it also becomes complicated when you start to become more of a community of artists.
And I think about the network of folks in the queer zine world, and related artists who I both looked up to, but I think was also jealous of.
But I would like to hope — I think — that it was never destructive or… like I’ve seen that play out, when jealousy is paired with an idea that, like, in order for me to get ahead, someone else has to be pushed down. [It was] more like, let’s just create opportunities for everyone. I channeled that into doing self initiated opportunities.
That’s why I started making zines. I was jealous of seeing all these amazing group shows of young artists and other people that I admired. And I was like, I don’t want to wait for someone to give me an opportunity. Let me just use the copy machine at my job and go and just make some zines and get stuff out there.
And that was helpful in transforming jealousy into conversations that then led to opportunities that then could turn into collaboration. And I like to think of those ways in which everyone made space together.
Vivek Shraya: Cool. Yeah. That’s beautiful.
Jealousy as a Constructive Force
Vivek Shraya: I don’t think we talk about the ways in which jealousy can be turned into something constructive. And I mean, that was actually my next question for you.
So I don’t know if you have more you want to say on that point. It’s like when you felt jealous, you know, how have you navigated it? And one of the examples you gave, which is so lovely, is that it mobilized you to create zines. Do you remember anything else? And there’s no positive or negative here.
Paul Sepuya: I think sometimes there is just venting. Those moments of sitting around the kitchen table having beers before going out, like talking about shows that you’ve seen that you’re like, oh, I could have done better. Or there are those ways in which I think, but I bring it up because I think that is maybe part of what’s necessary to kind of like move through.
Sometimes you just have to be vulnerable in that situation.
Vivek Shraya: Totally.
Paul Sepuya: And then maybe like, regret it. [Laughs]. But you kind of at least had to say it, you know, in front of friends that you can trust.
Paul Sepuya on Jealousy and Proximity
Paul Sepuya: I do remember a Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at MoMA PS1, and maybe it was around 2005 or six.
It was like a quite large show. And, as an artist who I always looked up to and I can think at that moment going this exhibition at PS1 being like, I’m so jealous, I want this, I want to be able to make work like this. Our work is very different, but I think jealousy comes up more clearly when there’s proximity? Like I couldn’t say I was ever jealous of an artist who made just abstraction, or an artist who did, like really beautiful landscapes or something.
It would be those artists who were coming from a place of making work in a queer community that centered on portraiture, where experimentation builds off of that. I think that’s something that’s also important for every young artist to realize is that sometimes when you see these exhibitions that just feel so effortless, it’s because there’s so much work behind it.
And what we’re seeing is like, it’s really easy for like any of us to take like, a picture that looks like Tillmans, but to sustain the practice of that is so much more. And so it’s like that jealousy really has to be confronted with like, okay, are we talking about like a one-off or are we talking about building a life with this?
You know, there’s a whole practice and rigour behind it.
Vivek Shraya: And do you feel like you knew that then or you know that now because of where you are as an artist now?
Paul Sepuya: I’ve learned it along the way.
How Can Jealousy Move With You Over Time?
Vivek Shraya: One of the things I find interesting so far in this conversation is a lot of what we’ve talked about in our short period of time is that when you talk about jealousy, it’s sort of rooted in the past.
And I’m actually really curious how it plays out now for you. And for somebody who comes to your show and potentially sees your work and feels those things, but also you as a contemporary, current artist and academic, like, how does jealousy play out in your current world?
Paul Sepuya: Yeah. I mean, it just moves with you [laughs].
It like, it changes zip codes with you. It moves apartments with you. And I think about relationships to galleries like the opacity of visibility versus let’s say, sales, versus what kinds of galleries that people work with. On the one hand, there was a moment where, you know, a few friends started working with places like Hauser and Wirth and Zwirner, and Kordansky, it’s like, am I jealous?
And then I’m like, actually, no, that’s not what I like. But there is still a kind of jealousy that I think is about the perception of resources and support and stability, which might actually not be the case. Many galleries and many artists are experiencing a market slowdown, the kind of delayed correction that really, honestly should have happened during Covid but didn’t happen.
Vivek Shraya: Yes, we’re seeing that here too.
Creating Narratives for Jealousy
Paul Sepuya: Yeah. And it was really actually nice to talk to two friends who are artists who I feel like we’re on similar levels, but I still sometimes feel jealous of. And we just all were like, oh yeah, we’re having to cut back in all these ways. And just being able to share that honestly with each other, we were like, okay, “yeah, you’re all downsizing? I’m downsizing.”
I think it’s just really healthy. And I feel fortunate to be able to have honest conversations like that.
Vivek Shraya: We invent a narrative, right? We’re like, oh, this person is so supported. They have this and this, and look at their talent, and we create this story. But then when you actually talk to the artist and you hear that they were up till 3 a.m. putting up the pieces on their own, and that so-and-so dropped out last minute and you’re like, oh, like, that’s totally not how it looks, right? One of the things I’ve been wondering in these conversations is like, how do we become less siloed from each other?
Jealousy and Whiteness
Vivek Shraya: I’m curious if you think that there is a relationship between race/sexuality and jealousy. And I just for more context, I’ll be honest that when I track the artists I’ve been jealous of, one of the things that comes up for me is often whiteness, and I find myself having to do a lot of work thinking about, am I jealous of privilege?
Like, am I jealous of the power and the privilege that comes with whiteness? Am I, you know, jealous of the access? Am I, you know, like, is this about an aspiration to be white? I find myself getting a little bit lost there.
Paul Sepuya: I do think that we’re just, all colonized. And I think there is an aspiration to, like, the kind of freedom to do whatever the fuck whiteness implies.
But where I’ve actually found that happening is being jealous of the work not having to be about race, or it being sort of like reduced to that. Because I have a very ambivalent relationship to representation. I’m very much like this is my position as like all of my intersectional identities, you know, I’m a cisgender gay, Black, half-American, half-African person in a queer social space that is attempting to broaden beyond my own position.
Making Art Within and Beyond Identity
But being honest about where that’s at and also acknowledging that, like, from a position of a kind of complicated Blackness that is always, I feel like kind of misread, I’m just going to make the work that I want and that all of it’s going to be driven through a kind of like a homoerotic desire, contextualized by a queer political position and like, mediated through Blackness and just how that’s perceived.
But then sometimes I’m like, I wish sometimes I didn’t always have to put that biographical information in order for the work to enter into the room.
Vivek Shraya: Yes, I think that’s something I really relate to. And I felt so strongly about seven or eight years ago. But I will say that what that did for me in that moment is as an artist. I said, well, what would it mean to give myself permission? I mean, I’m someone who believes that, like, my identities will always be part of my work, whether you know, whether they’re at the forefront or not, you know, it is who I am. But what would it mean for it to not be at the forefront? What would it mean if to make work that’s not an agenda to educate?
Or do you know, to break barriers, any of that stuff? And I will say, you know, especially like you know, coming into my 40s as an artist, it’s been quite liberating to give myself that permission.
You know, I did a children’s book about raccoons, and it was like, how joyful! And, you know, I didn’t have to, like, extract anything from myself.
And when I was touring the book, I didn’t have to talk about “how do we solve racism,” you know what I mean? It was just a very joyful experience. And I was like, I want to give myself that more. And I also want, you know, younger, marginalized artists, however they identify, to also have that freedom. And so I think, for me, that’s the one of the ways in which it’s been generative to name that jealousy.
What Can We Learn From Jealousy?
Vivek Shraya: So my closing questions for you are just, what have you learned from your jealousy or what can jealousy teach us?
Paul Sepuya: I’ve learned to maybe be a little kinder to myself. I think the jealousy has been the worst when I’ve been the least secure or been the most, you know, like, whether it’s just been creatively stuck or, in times when I was insecure in terms of employment and being underemployed or unemployed or housing insecurity. So it’s kind of like you gotta just be kind to yourself. But also jealousy, like revulsion, if you can transform it can be really, really helpful. You know, it can be like — it’s an intense feeling.
So [jealousy] shouldn’t be shunned away. It should be looked at. And I can say, why am I jealous? Am I jealous because I have assumptions or prejudices about another person’s position? I don’t know where they’re coming from. Am I jealous because I just haven’t done the work and I’m being a little bit lazy?
I think about it in the same way as, sometimes there’s like artworks that I remember seeing that just really upset me. But I just have to kind of go back and think about them and be like, why was that upsetting? And then, sometimes I’ve thought, oh, this work is amazing.
And then sometimes I’ve been like, yeah, that’s really bad. But at least I learn something from it. You know, I think of, so I guess, yeah, that jealousy, because it’s a strong feeling, just like love or adoration or when you see artwork that’s just like, “oh my god, I love this thing” — I think both of them are kind of equal in needing to be sort of like lived with.