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Songs, essays, and objects from the interior life — rooted in West Texas, made for anyone carrying something they can't quite name.
About BB
BB Carter is an artist and researcher of interior life — though she'd be the first to tell you that's a fancy way of saying she makes work about the stuff nobody talks about at dinner.
Her practice is called artistic anthropology: taking the social concepts so woven into daily life we've stopped seeing them and turns them into songs, essays, objects, and performances.
The fieldwork is ongoing. You're welcome to follow along.
My Story Starts in West Texas
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Inheritance of Misanthropy
The unique tone of my voice comes from the countryside — the West Texas plains, the harshness, the wind. It is the same southern cheery dialect of my aunts. Their voices are buoyant and animated and refined by decades of singing a capella harmonies in country churches.
But the sadness in me… Read More
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Post
I can feel my stomach as I pull into Post. The car is beginning to smell of stale french fries and cold coffee. Up ahead there's a small haboob. The windmills are turning fast. The sun is hot and it shines through, foggy with sand but the wind is chilled. Orange dust scratches againstthe white hood of my truck.
I’ve made it through … Read More
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Hermleigh
I am standing under the windmills in Hermleigh, wind in my hair. I’m longing to get back to Dallas but dreading it just the same.
Yesterday my mother said my singing voice sounds like maybe I have sadness inside. “I’ve always had sadness inside.” I told her.
The windmills are magnificent. They … Read More
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The Long Undefined Middle
“What’s the point in doing this?”
The voice rings out in the car on the drive from Dallas to Lubbock. My Raleigh show is in 4 days and I’m standing in a dust storm agitated over bones in the salmon and preservatives in the food my mom’s husband bought to feed my kids.
My dad comes in. He’s got an … Read More
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Step into the Fire
The first time I stepped into the fire, so to speak, of my inner world was like deciding to stop and allow a drunk driver to run me over. I had just learned of the terrible gossip my friends had been sharing about me.
I chose this moment to face my pain. I thought I could transmute it. Could I follow it to completion? Whatever that is?
Another friend, Lauren, kindly offered that the gossip had been… Read More
For Music, Visit My Listening Room.
The Listening Room is where my voice lives — solo work, collaborations, and the long arc of how my sound has changed. Songs sit next to the stories that go with them.
My Interests
I am fascinated by all things human — the depths of our sorrow, the heights of our joy. I work on ideas related to our human struggles through a lens I call artistic anthropology. This framework allows me to put words to common struggles, habits, and ideas that we so often seem to deal with in isolation.
It is different from the Anthropology of Art because I am not situating art within society. I am instead using art to portray anthropological concepts and the invisible forces that make us who we are.
Each of us is a pinpoint within our family and lineage, within a community, a cityscape, a state, a country — and these spheres of influence greatly inform our thoughts, our struggles, our beliefs, and our identity.
Each of us is a unique tapestry of concepts, ideas, and social forces. The intersections that make us who we are are multifaceted and can be hard to trace — and yet so much of that is shared between all of us, only in different configurations.
To get a grasp on this vastness, I use myself and my own interior world as a starting point — a kind of self-study — to find where parts of me bleed into the social. I use my own self, my own lineage, and the spheres of influence in my life as a starting point for referencing the connections between us all.
My Work
In true anthropological fieldwork, one typically moves from the general to the particular. What seems unimportant or too vague in the beginning might later prove to be a deep thread running through a particular group, process, or system. Because of this, my work can sometimes feel unwieldy or disjointed — and that's okay. That's the nature of fieldwork.
For example, my work starts by exploring broadly how humans are part of nature and yet so different from it. I try to find that event horizon where we are no longer simply animal but something more — something we call human. I do this with my Human | Nature series, which juxtaposes things like seed pods opening easily and naturally alongside the shame of a woman or the pain of childbirth.
I also work in very specific concepts with my Little Confessional. With my confession box, I collect anonymous confessions and file them away for others to read. Only time will tell — but so far, the most specific and painful things humans endure are still not experienced in isolation, except for in our own minds.
In my music and live performances, I explore the theme of taboo. In my salons and shows I tell stories about how universal concepts — shame, inherited social ideas, oppression, what some might call "daddy issues" — have played out in my own life, even as a white woman who grew up in the Bible Belt. I have a very specific and yet universal female experience. I am deeply curious about where the line falls between myself and the other.
Human | Nature
Documentation Coming Soon
Little Confessional
Follow the thread of my identity in The Long Story of my Voice, a collection of personal essays about growing up in West Texas.
Personal Essays
This work is in the planning stages and will be an artistic representation of the very real anthropology that accompanied my lineage across Texas.
Linguistic Migration
