Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

She only asked once.

  I answered, 1942.

  No phone call to Mom this time, but, info secured, an immediate departure, a return to the committee in another studio breathlessly awaiting my birth date. Who won the antiquity wager? I never heard. Why didn’t they invite me into their studio to talk about our generations? Or just figure it out by themselves from the dates on my website? They told me early on they’d looked me up. How to make me feel like a specimen, to remind me I was an outsider! Ich war mit der Gesamtsituation unzufrieden.

  With the exception of Anna and Keith and Mike a little bit, they seemed largely to have felt as detached from me as I from them. I did form a bond with Anna, who, like me, felt significantly older than the others—she was, what, thirty-two, as was Keith, another thirty-something old-timer. Bit by bit through speaking with Anna, I glimpsed another system of art professionalization, one as crucial as crits.

  I learned that Anna and (perhaps) other painters had received multiple studio visits from visiting art stars like Nina Katchadourian.

  Oh . . . ?

  Nina paid studio visits to us painters?

  Anna also had a crit from visiting artist Richard Meyer and from mega-critic David Hickey, though Hickey’s visits turned out to be more sexist insult than critical enlightenment. He had asked Emilia, a favored student in printmaking, her bra size. I further learned quite by chance from Anna and Mike of the existence of independent study classes with various faculty, like Dawn Clements, that I did not even know were available, and of conference calls I had been left out of.

  What I saw as preferential treatment did not necessarily feel good to the colleagues I thought had been favored. One afternoon as I was stretching canvases in my studio, lanky arty Mike—the very image of the New York–Brooklyn artist—came into my studio to talk, ostensibly to thank me for taking his work seriously in my paper on Johanna Drucker for art criticism class. I didn’t kick him out, so he settled down to moan about his paintings’ reception. We students bitched everlastingly about the narrowness of his repertoire and the thoughtless sexism of his images. Which were superficial. In the extreme. Teachers were much less harsh, finding pop art and irony in Mike’s work.

  I was mistaken, it turned out, to see favoritism in Mike’s independent study with Teacher Kevin. Teacher Kevin, exquisitely attuned to appearances as well as practices of up-to-the-minute New York art, seemed totally uninterested in me and my travails. Mike, in contrast, seemed to me to literally embody Kevin’s kind of artist. I assumed Kevin was taking care of Mike as the promising artist he favored, more grooming for success that left out Duhirwe and me.

  I was wrong.

  True, Mike was taking the kind of independent study I had missed. But Kevin wasn’t favoring Mike. Kevin disapproved of Mike’s painting and would only drop by on the fly to hector Mike to do more and better work. In fact, Mike was not Kevin’s pet. I was wrong, and not only in the case of Mike and Teacher Kevin.

  Anna really was the teachers’ pet. They praised her, granted her studio visits from all the hot artists and visiting critics, lined her up with people who could ensure her success. What more could she ask?

  She could ask for meaningful crits that addressed weaknesses as well as strengths of her work in terms she could understand and actually implement. When she and I had dinner together in a small, obscure restaurant on the other side of the river from RISD, she asked me for advice in getting through life—what? The star pupil looking to the class dumbbell. She said I seemed to live life knowingly, parrying RISD’s blows and deflecting its arrows, balancing all the various parts of my life. And she asked me how old I was.

  Was I feeling old? Not so much right then, but orphaned, ending the first whole calendar year without my mother. Bereft. Alone. As in the disconsolate Negro spiritual, like a motherless child.

  LIKE ME IN painting, Duhirwe in printmaking learned of multiple instances of being passed over for opportunities to work with prominent artists like Pat Steir. The system seemed to work like this: each department’s faculty chose its favorites, who got to meet distinguished visitors. Duhirwe and I weren’t on the lists. Emilia was on the printmaking list, Anna on the painting list. They got everything; we got nothing, even though Duhirwe was a presidential fellow, which supposedly opened The Art World to minorities. The Painting Department’s presidential fellowship went to a white male artist who knew how to draw. How it worked was how it actually worked.

  Duhirwe and I were excluded from this patronage system. Lacking crucial contacts, we entered The Art World at a relative disadvantage, for personal contact with senior artists is essential to professional success. The patronage system that bypassed us disturbed Duhirwe more than me, because I had already seen it—though in attenuated form—in my previous life as a historian.

  So it turned out that studio visits and crits were just the visible portion of graduate art education in a system by no means limited to RISD. An entire network of preference, favors, and connections grew up apart from classes, separating out who counted, the sheep from the goats. I figured faculty favoritism cued students into whom to consider a peer and who did not belong. This classification emerged as we eight painters were taking our class photograph. We convened in the second-floor crit room to be photographed. I was present at the appointed time, spoke to people, and set out a plate of Oreos for everyone. Then nothing happened. More nothing was happening. With things to do in my studio, I asked to be fetched when they were ready to take the photograph. I went to my studio for a moment. In that moment, they took the picture. Back downstairs, I expressed my displeasure. Vividly. They took the picture again.

  A few years later I discovered a different version of the class picture on Facebook, one I was not in. My peers, my so-called peers, managed to capture their sense of themselves—without me.

  15

  CRIT

  Crit: the quintessence of art school. In crit your work gets taken seriously by knowledgeable and experienced teachers and thoughtful peers, people with sophisticated eyes who examine your work intently. They relate it to art history and the work of relevant contemporary artists. There might be disagreements, but all the viewers, teachers and fellow students alike, look at your work long and look at it hard. Crits are why you go to art school instead of just asking your mom and your friends how they like your work. At the end of your crit, you emerge knowing more about your art—maybe even more about yourself—with a sense of your work’s strengths and weaknesses and where it belongs within the long, wide world of art. Crit is art school’s sacred space for learning.

  That, at least, is the theory.

  Crits hold a hallowed place in art education, and rightly so. Starting out, I thought of crits as art school’s main event.

  Crits, I learned in practice, could be just about anything. More exactly, they were the visible fraction of artists’ formation. Mason Gross crits had introduced me to the form.

  Mason Gross undergraduate crits took place in the same rooms where we drew and painted. These crits were straightforward, usually with only the one teacher who had taught the class. With only one teacher, the criteria for success and failure were pretty clear.

  Even when undergraduate art was thin or hackneyed or students clammed up on the ground that their art “speaks for itself,” thoughtful teachers like Hanneline, Stephen, and Barb talked about the work’s formal and conceptual qualities, finding ways to insert vocabulary we needed to know. When a drawing looked unfinished, parts remained “unresolved.” When colors lacked nuance, mixing in their complements could “unify the canvas.”

  In undergraduate crits I was one of the hardworking, dedicated students who had grappled with assignments. I wasn’t the only one talking—Joseph talked, and Keith did more than his part, mentioning artists “to look at,” identifying them not only by name and style, but also by their galleries. Wow! I was impressed. I didn’t know the galleries or where they stood on the scale of coolness. I didn’t even understand how im
portant it was in Art World eyes to belong to the right gallery. Showing in an uncool gallery was like wearing stodgy clothes.

  We hard workers filled in for reluctant and silent others. I fulfilled and overfilled my undergraduate assignments, and I talked about them sitting on the floor with the kids (preening myself silently for my suppleness). One time I did a little tap dance to demonstrate my piece for the “mistake” assignment by converting a tape dispenser (one of my favorite objects to draw, with its snail-like curves and negative space) into a tap dance dispenser.

  We used pushpins to attach our work to the wall, but there were never enough pushpins. After too many crits delayed by pushpin searches, I bought a box of one hundred pushpins at the little convenience store on George Street. Seven of us painting students were milling around, amusing ourselves while waiting for Teacher Stephen. With nothing better to do, I started sticking the one hundred pushpins I had bought into the wall, mystifying my fellow students.

  Why are you doing that?

  I continued sticking pushpins into the wall.

  Because we always need pushpins to hang our work.

  The others warned me, But people will walk off with them.

  I kept sticking pushpins into the wall.

  That’s okay. They’re here for the taking.

  Mystification. Somehow pushpins seemed more valuable and hoard-worthy than the $1.39 I’d paid for a box of one hundred.

  Joe, looking at my increasingly pushpinned display, noticed a change on the wall. The box that had held the official Notice of Occupancy was empty. Following the artist’s impulse to mark every blank surface, he began handwriting a Notice of Occupancy.

  How do you spell “occupancy”?

  Silence. Nobody could spell occupancy.

  Pushing pins into the wall next to him, I spelled out in his Jersey accent,

  E-C-C-A-P . . .

  There came a pause, as everyone reprocessed the question and recognized the ridiculousness of my answer. We all laughed and laughed. I laughed so hard tears ran down my face. When the hilarity subsided, Joseph wrote, “Occupancy limited to 3.”

  Teacher Stephen ambled in with his coffee cup (eating and drinking expressly prohibited in the studios) and house shoes, Brooklyn fashion for entering the world as an artist. Our crit began.

  Joseph disparaged Diane’s earnest paintings as the pretty pictures in travel magazines. Lesson learned about sophisticated imagery: don’t do pretty; also don’t do glamorous. Jan-Vincent’s dramatic landscapes and beautiful figure paintings, all surface gorgeousness from a how-to book on painting, got thumbs-down. On the other hand, Jason’s faithfully rendered, empty scenes of the Civic Square Building’s interior architecture earned appreciation. Keith led the applause for a “biography of a wall.” Jason’s two realistic stairway paintings succeeded, whereas Jan-Vincent’s lovely woman and detailed street scene failed. JT put up figurative scenes copied from a random selection of photographs from the web, lacking titles, narrative, and concept. JT was advised to work more thoughtfully. My transcriptions of Max Beckmann portraits were duly noted, but their art history origins bored the others. The twentieth century—my twentieth century—was just too long ago to seem relevant (to use a twentieth-century word).

  Undergraduate crits were also tests of basic skills, a main purpose of undergraduate art education. And there were recognizable assignments, usually a given number of drawings or paintings on a theme or technique. No problem for me, because I loved making art and was exceedingly productive. For one painting crit, my work covered a nine-foot wall. Another time I put up eighteen drawings. With that much to look at, some of it was bound to work out. Graduate crits, on the other hand, were more choreographic.

  CRITS AT RISD assembled several teachers and many students in specially designated crit rooms, one on the second floor, one on the fourth floor of the Fletcher Building. A student would put up many weeks’ work and prepare to talk about it. Faculty and students would dribble in and walk around the room, inspecting the pieces with showy intensity. Then everyone would take a doughnut and an orange drink and sit in rows, faculty in front. The teacher running the crit would set a cell phone timer on thirty-five minutes to make sure everyone got the same amount of time, an excellent practice.

  Timer started, the student would present the work, then teachers would talk about the work, then other students would speak up. Though plotted out as theater, the discussion had no firm rules; teachers often conversed among themselves about whatever was on their minds.

  For our first crit in our first semester we first-year painters gathered as for a master class. There was the expectation—an eagerness, really—for wisdom to endure for ages and improve our work for good. Thoughtful little Corydon volunteered to take notes and send them to us afterward, a gesture of solidarity we all greeted with deep appreciation in anticipation of its fruits. As the teachers talked, Corydon typed into her laptop. Afterward she sent us lengthy reports that surely would change the way we made our art.

  Alone in my studio after crit, I looked at what Corydon had sent me. Her notes were comprehensive, truly excellent. I recognized the phrases. Rereading her notes over, my mind blurted out,

  Oh . . .

  Oh, I thought, I just must be too tired to grasp wisdom’s meaning. I set the comments aside for later consultation. Later consultation yielded no more wisdom for the ages. Others must have experienced this disillusion. No more careful crit notes circulating breathlessly.

  CRITS CONTAINED ESSENTIAL elements. There should be at least a pretense of actually looking at the work, from a distance to get a sense of its overall composition and up close for paint handling and texture. In addition to some formal analysis, there should be commentary on the work’s content and meaning and how the various pieces work together as an ensemble. It helped to mention relevant art history resonances, which usually led to the comment “You should look at . . .” followed by the name of an artist, preferably one in the art history canon or with work currently on show at a cool gallery, but in any case, not so well known as to be hackneyed.

  I remembered “You should look at . . .” from Mason Gross, though I hadn’t recognized its talismanic power. I knew so little back then that just hearing about artists new to me opened up my world of visual art. Teacher Hanneline suggested I look at Velásquez as a means of improving my composition. I went and looked at Velásquez, barely grasping the connection between his compositions and mine, but enjoying the exhibition at the Met.

  In RISD crits, “You should look at . . .” served multiple functions: adding to the critee’s “influences,” the store of images to draw on and techniques to adopt; demonstrating the speaker’s knowledge of art history, especially obscure art history; prolonging discussions, even competitions, with other faculty or student colleagues on hot and/or esoteric artists and galleries; and advertising exhibitions and shows currently running in New York (elsewhere didn’t count so much unless it was in Berlin, and any show in New Jersey remained beneath notice).

  Early on at RISD, my own ignorance appeared in a You-should-look-at . . . lesson on how to talk and whose work to heed. Looking at a piece I had made with text, someone suggested I look at the work of Ed Ruscha. I heard the student say “Roo-SHAY.” I didn’t recognize a name I knew only from reading, pronouncing it in my mind’s ear as “ROO-shah.” Chagrin. How could I not know so important a contemporary artist?! I went to the library and looked at Ruscha’s work, which, yes, did suggest techniques I definitely could use. See, crit worked when my paintings interested my audience.

  In one crit I showed a set of drawings that I really wanted to hear people discuss, as I was using photographs prominently for the second time. Were these drawings too slight to count as interesting? As so often in my work, there was a back story as well as surface appearance. Did the back story outweigh the work?

  The drawings took off from a photograph in a book by a pioneering black art historian, Sylvia Boone, the first
black PhD in art history and the first black woman to be tenured at Yale. Boone specialized in concepts of beauty in African art and published Radiance from the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art in 1986. Boone and I did not overlap in Ghana in the 1960s, for she departed just before I arrived. But I followed her career and sent a copy of her book to my best friend, the Wisconsin literary scholar Nellie McKay. After Nellie’s death, her daughter, a banker, dispersed her library. A Harvard colleague with whom Nellie had collaborated bought the very copy I had inscribed to Nellie. Once she had the book in hand, the colleague recognized my inscription and generously sent me the book in Providence. I made several drawings from one of the book’s photographs as a gesture of thanks.

  Sylvia Boone Drawings, 2009, ink on paper, each panel 10" × 8"

  I selected nine of my twelve Sylvia Boone Drawings to show in crit. Fearing they might be too close to their photographic origin, at the same time, I liked them immensely. In crit, people found the back story interesting. But that was it. No one said anything about the images.

  There was nothing said about the Boone drawings as artwork, not that they were visually appealing or that they were slight, not that they were intriguing, not that they might be improved if they were bigger or brighter or more or less saturated in color. Was bright color the problem?

  Silence.

  Silence before my Sylvia Boone Drawings took me by surprise, because they were figurative and colorful, united in imagery but separated by palette, touch, and support. Still untrusting of my eye, I couldn’t tell whether my Boone drawings were bad or boring. Maybe there just was not enough to them to be interesting. Certainly silence conveys a negative reaction, and without explanation, it discouraged me from continuing with them. I should have been stronger, because pushing on with a series holds the key to development, to moving past where you begin.

  I cheated myself as an artist by being discouraged by silence in crit. For a long time, not knowing whether those Sylvia Boone Drawings were good art, only that I liked them, I cherished them as a kind of secret indulgence, as images that I alone cared for. I ultimately concluded that what happened in crit had nothing to do with anything when it came to my Sylvia Boone Drawings.