Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  MIKE’S WORK ALWAYS elicited much more commentary. His paintings were big, 84" × 48", but always pop art objectifying women and based on the same image derived from an advertisement for panty hose. Over the course of two years the work hardly changed, but it engendered extended commentary in crit, skeptical as well as positive, that sounded like conversations about real art that took the work seriously, even though in every single crit, he would show us versions of the same flat paintings of a woman’s leg. In every single crit, students would decry the images as thoughtlessly sexist. Each time, Mike would protest that his work should only be judged formally, that is, on the basis of the surface appearance of the paint and composition. We’d say you can’t separate the appearance from the meaning, the form from the content. Then he’d make more of the same. In crit, the teachers would discuss the work at length. Teacher David said,

  You seem to be in a reductive frame of mind. You seem to be painting less and less.

  Maybe the paintings were lazy.

  Mike half agreed, saying he was trying to distill the real.

  I asked him to say more about the real. Mike answered,

  They’re about so many things. They’re utterly ridiculous in so many ways, but they’re very telling.

  Keith defended Mike’s paintings as really complex.

  Teacher Holly, skeptical, posed rhetorical questions: What level of thinness are you insisting on, and what are we to do with that?

  Teacher David decided the minimalism of the minimalist paintings worked, that they were engaging, quiet pieces, not wondering what’s not there.

  Teacher Jessica agreed with Teacher Kevin, seeing Mike’s leg paintings as a ’60s pop-art package with a place in art history by virtue of Mike’s use of primary colors.

  Teacher Kevin announced that although Mike had vacated and vacated, his paintings were not emptied out.

  Now there was a substantive crit.

  BETWEEN YOU-CAN’T-DRAW-AND-YOU-CAN’T-PAINT AND evasion, my first year of graduate school ground me down into a pathetic, insecure little stump. I made a three-sided piece in plastic that encapsulated my mood. The gray ground came from architecture software. I stenciled the words in colored acrylic ink from text taken from the book of Revelation, all about the end of the world. More of my art of end of the world.

  Three-sided Woe sculpture, 2009, ink and collage on plastic, each side 12" × 12"

  I should have known better than to succumb, for my mentors had warned me of art graduate school as an experience in humiliation. Artist Emma Amos, for one, had visited me at the Studio School years earlier and described graduate school as one long tearing down. She meant graduate school in general, but in my days at RISD, I felt my wretchedness, my misery, to be uniquely my own. I was wrong. Everyone I’ve talked to about their MFA experience—in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theater, and visual art, north, south, east, and west—recognizes what I went through. It wasn’t just RISD. It was art graduate school.

  During my first year of graduate crits, I couldn’t tell whether my teachers and fellow students were critiquing me, old-black-woman-totally-out-of-place, or critiquing my work, which was not good enough, TOTALLY NOT GOOD ENOUGH, or, as it felt, completely, utterly, stupidly rotten. My self-confidence collapsed.

  I felt perfectly awful and alienated. There was no strength in my alienation, no saving grace. It was abject. I was P A T H E T I C.

  Pathetic was precisely how I felt. Even so, misery was not all there was to me in my first year at RISD. Some of what was much more about me than misery was being an old person with a long history in the world. My much more paid off, and handsomely. With a wide circle of contacts outside my art school, I sought education in my own network of support. That network saved my life as an artist. I piled my paintings into my station wagon and drove down to New Haven, where friends in the art school and art history looked carefully at my work and talked to me about it. They gave me a crit.

  In New Haven, Friends Sarah and Key Jo looked and assessed strong points and weaknesses. I said I didn’t know if the silence indicated that my Sylvia Boone Drawings were too slight—they are just small drawings, after all. No, they said, no, the drawings were nothing at all to apologize for—as I was practically doing. My friends recognized the silence before my drawings as a common reluctance of non-black viewers to engage with black figuration, a silence I shouldn’t take personally or hear as a weakness in my art. What a relief! I liked those drawings immensely and had shown them despite my uncertainty. My friends gave me permission to close my ears to viewers who were working off their own issues. To hell with you-can’t-draw-can’t-paint.

  Friend Sarah, who was teaching at Yale School of Art, recognized my frustrations as a normal part of art graduate education. She also knew from experience that so many of our fellow citizens couldn’t resist the temptation to take us down a peg. Sarah and Key Jo urged me to continue with my Michael Jackson and beauty paintings, which needed work, they definitely needed work. And my friends said so. But my paintings weren’t hopeless. In New Haven I heard what I needed to hear, essential advice every art student needs to hear:

  Keep on.

  Keep making art.

  Keep making your art.

  Nonetheless, I drove back to Providence from New Haven feeling I truly did need to have my head examined for starting down the long road of visual art.

  IN THE SUMMER after my first, wretched year at RISD, I gave a book talk on Martha’s Vineyard and stayed with friends from Paris. My artist host took me to see her friend, the painter Irving Petlin. In a half-underground studio, Irving worked on big pastel drawings inspired by the writing of W. G. Sebald, whose work I also admired—not just the prose, but also the use of images within the prose.

  Irving sat with my digital portfolio and gave me a crit from his long years’ experience making and teaching art. My work wasn’t randomly scattered, as one RISD teacher had decreed. Irving saw a unifying hand in my work, representational and abstract, and a coherent vision of the world. On my perpetual struggle with the bane of “illustration,” he advised me to speak of “visualizing” rather than “illustrating” the concepts on my mind. Like Sarah, Irving reinforced my habit of working serially, for repetition is how art finds its way. He encouraged my work on the human figure in social context, but reminded me to stay loose. Stay loose. As a tangled-up jangle of wound-up worry, I needed that advice.

  Irving sent me on to his artist friend Joyce Kozloff in New York. Joyce spent good time with me, commending my industry and my self-portraits. I share her attraction to maps, which she has been painting magnificently for decades, maps and the concept of territory, plus the process of collage, place as a fertile concept for art making. Bless her, bless him, for taking good time with my work. Life could go on.

  THE ALTERNATIVE CRITS that saved my life continued with Artist Friend Denyse Thomasos, who had already helped me prepare for graduate school. She examined my work closely, explaining what she found stronger and what she found weaker, and why. Denyse reminded me that visual thinking was a language new to me and different from verbal thinking. After three hours in her New York studio, I was starting to understand what she meant. It was a matter of learning rather than of some mysterious gift of talent or inherent ability. How fortunate I was to have that extraordinarily generous, individual crit, with attention paid to my particular issues.

  I didn’t have any crits at Brown, but friends there offered companionship around a welcoming dinner table. My old friend from Harvard graduate school and Princeton, the earth-shaking intellectual-administrator Ruth Simmons, was president of Brown at the time. Ruth, bless her heart, would invite me to dinners at her presidential residence, where I ate and drank like I did in my good old days. I chatted with other friends like Chinua, Toni, John, and Tricia, people who spoke language familiar to me and shared my concerns.

  Even at RISD, all was not alienation, for I could take refuge with Claudia, Anthony, and Donna, African Am
ericans who recognized the cultural baggage I was carrying in so blinkered an institution. Art historians in RISD’s liberal arts department spoke language I recognized and encouraged me.

  Looking back, I can see there was more to RISD crits for me than silence and niggling fault-finding. Teachers Holly and Donna and David approached my work openly, even though they seemed not to know what to do with it or with me. They tried. Crits everywhere are as much about the person of the artist as about the art. The person I was in art graduate school was a misfit several times over.

  It was my own alternative crits that carried me through. My alternative crits conferred the crucial endowment that only crits can provide—the thoughtful, well-informed focus on your work.

  16

  ART SCHOOL + HISTORY HISTORY

  My historian’s life seemed to recede while I was in art school, disconnected from art as a foreign country with its own native tongue. Values that governed my work as a historian—clarity, coherence, and representativeness—looked all wrong in art. If not wrong, then not very useful, almost as bad as “academic.” The two halves of my brain, one orderly, the other spontaneous, connected only tenuously, the remnants of connecting tissue more hindrance than help. Frowning on historical subject matter, my teachers encouraged the disconnect. Leaving history seemed like what I absolutely had to do, because history was dragging me down. I knew for certain historians’ attachment to scientific truth was cramping my painting hand and misleading my eye.

  Publication of my book The History of White People while I was in graduate school disrupted an already uneasy coexistence, for my tasks as an author competed with art school. Starting with an appearance on The Colbert Report the very week The History of White People was published, book promotion took me away from Providence on a regular basis. In that instance, absence increased my standing, for arm wrestling Stephen Colbert gave me impressive RISD cred. What was that like? Fun, like doing improv. Undergraduate RISD students in my digital tools class watched the video together and applauded my return to Providence. RISD’s hip young president posted my Colbert clip on his blog. My book had been favorably reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review, along with a stunning graphic image of the tangled taxonomy of the idea of white people. That review awed some New York–based RISD faculty—some, hardly all—for reviews of history books didn’t count for much in the art world. I certainly did not feel any increased stature in the MFA painter’s club in Fletcher.

  Between book-promotion talks and interviews, I drew and painted with the purposeful resolve of my inner worker bee, drawing and painting and painting and drawing with the discipline that was ever my forte. Immersion in work always transported me to a better place, a higher plane, a truer zone. I enjoyed every moment, all right, but beyond my studio, I still felt like an alien. While I bore down on my work over solitary hours in the studio, I imagined my fellow painters lolling about together, pleasuring themselves in Matisse-like volupté, drinking, smoking, turning up late, and schmoozing from one studio to another. They were making the work the teachers applauded, painting with knowing hands, seeing with clever eyes. They knew what I didn’t. They could drink and drug without paying a price—or so I thought. They were young enough for exemption, fresh enough not to owe alcohol’s tax in sleeplessness and looking totally rotten in the morning.

  We weren’t supposed to eat or drink in our studios, but what the hell. Eno Fine Wines and Spirits, a combination wine bar–corner liquor store on Westminster Street, facilitated our drinking. Its sophisticated decor, expensive liquors, and wine tastings gave it upscale cachet, while its long hours and stock of cheap beers made it an all-hours convenience store. I wouldn’t know about all hours, but I wasn’t the only one fueling my art with alcohol. Well, I ate, too. Tazza, a self-consciously cool art-school hangout on the corner of Eddy and Westminster Streets, projected obscure European movies on ceiling monitors with music the cognoscenti recognized. Tazza served pretty good food as well as drink. Food and drink nearby, I worked steadily in my pitiful isolation. By the time of my crit with Teacher Irma, I had too many drawings to fit on my studio walls.

  For her studio visit, I had put up a score of new drawings inspired by Ingres’s Grand Odalisque, Michael Jackson, and Apollo Belvedere, with two large paintings and some etchings. A lot was just regular drawing, regular painting, not objects of great beauty. But some was ambitious. I was trying to make paintings that exceeded my skill, drawing on art history and history history and trying to cram too much into my images. I might have been away from Providence a great deal, but I made up for it with a lot of work. No one, not even Teacher Irma, could accuse me of slackness. She did not accuse me of slackness. Quality, not quantity, was my defect.

  She walked in as usual, reminding me,

  You can’t draw, and you can’t paint.

  I fell for it every time: she had plumbed the truth of the matter; she knew the real deal; I couldn’t draw, and I couldn’t paint. It didn’t occur to me that she might be saying exactly the same thing to other students, that other students might be torturing themselves as I tortured myself. I should have grasped the possibility that it was all psychological-warfare poppycock. She was probably one of those diabolical people who can sniff out each person’s particular insecurity. I had a history colleague at Penn who could do that. He’d pass on a comment impugning the teaching of one who was insecure in the classroom and whisper a critique of his book to one worried about publication. It’s a gift some people have. Maybe she had it. She tortured me, and she knew it. She did it on purpose, I just know. In my pathetic insecurity, I felt her judgment applied to me alone and feared she was right. Some of it was just for me, because I was the one juggling so many lives. Teacher Irma hastily looked around my studio, pausing over nothing. She dismissed all but one small, light-colored print as,

  The only interesting thing in here.

  She wasn’t there to talk about my work; she was there to complain: Why did you choose to go to graduate school when the biggest book of your career was coming out?

  That’s what she said.

  I heard, You stupid fart! You never should have gone to art school!

  The terrible painter in me flinched.

  The nincompoop that I was struggled to answer.

  During undergraduate art school, I managed more than one thing. I finished my book . . .

  Actually, I thought I had finished my book. I really hadn’t.

  My plan had been to finish The History of White People before starting art school. I had made tremendous progress the year before, then Glenn broke my writing rhythm by dragging poor little me to Paris for the month of May, where I griped about how hard it was to work there. A chapter that had practically been writing itself in April bogged down in June. No one, not one single friend of mine, empathized. Oh, jeez! I’d been finishing this book for what felt like forever; it had, in fact, gone on for years and years. I wrote steadily all summer, but I started at Mason Gross with my book still in pieces and an intention to finish the following summer. My historical organization presidency disrupted my writing for an entire year.

  Teacher Irma saw THWP as an obstacle, a fatal distraction from art school, and she was right. But she didn’t know about the obstruction that had truly disrupted my plan to complete my book before graduate school. I tended also to sublimate the obstruction, because it was so ridiculously, agonizingly, enragingly time-consuming. My book was a screen memory repressing the real distraction in my second year at Mason Gross, the real absurd drain of time and energy that dragged me down. I was president of the Organization of American Historians—OAH, the international professional organization of scholars of American history—a test in the guise of an honor.

  I had belonged to the OAH for thirty years before being elected president, as I had belonged to the Southern Historical Association, of which I was also elected president, the American Studies Association, of which I was defeated in an election for president, th
e Association of Black Women Historians, of which I served as director, the American Historical Association, which gave me an award for distinguished graduate teaching, the Southern Association of Women Historians, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and organizations you had to be elected to, such as the Society of American Historians, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I felt it was important to be active in the historical profession, so for thirty years I faithfully attended annual meetings, served on committees, and wrote my share of reports. I did not mind taking part in professional organizations, not at all. It was the right thing to do. I was a good citizen of my profession. You get the idea.

  Along with my History Department and programs in African American Studies and Women’s Studies, professional organizations had comprised my intellectual community, where I was known and respected. Some colleagues became close friends. We became leaders in our fields, and our students grew up to write important scholarship. The history profession, history history, was my intellectual home. This home opened the door, the jaws of a trap.

  Only now do I recall the year when my book fell off schedule, for my memory had thrown out the endless conference calls, the wrangling, the verbal struggles, the hand-to-hand combat with only the dull bayonet of my presidency to fend off my adversary, the executive director, a man whom the sweetest of historians called “a sleazy son of a bitch.” The saving grace of that time was the comradeship of struggle forged between me and the presidents before and after, solid historians with a sense of humor, stick-to-itiveness, and guts. We proclaimed ourselves a Gang of Three forged in combat. Thank heaven for my dear presidential comrades.