More Advance Praise for
OLD IN ART SCHOOL
“This is a courageous, intellectually stimulating, and wholly entertaining story of one woman reconciling two worlds and being open to the possibilities and changes life offers.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Old in Art School is Nell Painter’s journey from famous historian to humble art student at age sixty-four. Along the way, she chronicles her own family history, including a mother who reinvented herself at the same age! Painter blows up treasured clichés about what it means to be ‘an artist’ and who fits that role, presenting us with comic scenes of questionable pedagogy. This book should have a corrective impact on art education—it deserves to be widely read and hotly discussed!”
— JOYCE KOZLOFF, artist
“One of our most distinguished scholars of race and racism has written an incisive, surprising, eloquent, and often wry account of what it means to go back to school at sixty-four, the age at which most academics contemplate retiring from it. Along the way, Nell Painter helps us to see the world as art, art as the world, and to understand arduous, creative self-transformation as toil worth the trouble. Old in Art School is as edgy as a contemporary work of art: bold in form, assured in line and shape, unflinching in its textured analysis of the ways race, gender, and age color how we perceive the world and how the world perceives us.”
—CATHY N. DAVIDSON, author of The New Education
“We all dream of starting over, but Nell Painter really did it. This unsparing account of inspiration and the creative process takes on racism, loneliness, self-loathing, the hazards of aging, and bad manners in the art world. Funny, edifying, and always mesmerizing, this book is also about searching for—and finding (most of the time)—happiness.”
—MARTHA HODES, author of Mourning Lincoln
“Memoirs by black women artists are extremely rare, and this one is so beautifully written, so perfectly formed in terms of its storytelling trajectory, with so many delectable details about art techniques and subject matter, the relationship of the work to her previous projects as a celebrated historian, and her life struggles as the daughter of once-perfect parents, now aged and with health difficulties. Old in Art School seems both definitive and unforgettable.”
—MICHELE WALLACE, author of
Dark Designs and Visual Culture
“Old in Art School is brilliantly written. A rare reflection of an artist and scholar who combines her voice and vision in this extraordinary work. Painter masterfully weaves a highly personal story into one that situates her art making with her history making . . . It is a book about belonging and longing; expectations and disappointments; beauty and humor. It is engrossing and heroic.”
—DEBORAH WILLIS, New York University, author of Envisioning Emancipation
“With wisdom, insight, brutal honesty, and flashes of humor, Nell Painter shares her journey to become an artist in this fascinating, original memoir. Old in Art School renders both the insecurity and elation of embarking on this path after a long and distinguished academic career. Her courage, sensitivity, and keen observation offer a rare and needed portrait of an older woman determined to live a creative life on her own terms.”
—FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN, author of Harlem Nocturne
Old in Art School
ALSO BY NELL PAINTER
The History of White People
Creating Black Americans
Southern History Across the Color Line
Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol
Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919
The Narrative of Hosea Hudson
Exodusters
Copyright © 2018 by Nell Painter
First hardcover edition: 2018
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of nonfiction. I have tried to re-create events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them.
In some instances I have changed the names of individuals, indicated initially with an asterisk.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Painter, Nell Irvin, author.
Title: Old in art school : a memoir of starting over / Nell Painter.
Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017055407 | ISBN 9781640090613 | eISBN 9781640090620
Subjects: LCSH: Painter, Nell Irvin. | Artists—United States—Biography. | Adult college students—United States—Biography. | Older artists—United States—Biography. | African American women artists—Biography.
Classification: LCC N6537.P23 A2 2018 | DDC 700.92 [B] —dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055407
Jacket designed by Faceout Studio
Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
www.counterpointpress.com
Printed in the United States of America
Distributed by Publishers Group West
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To the Love of My Life
and the Newark Arts Community
CONTENTS
Prologue: You’ll Never Be an Artist
1: How Old Are You?
2: Leaving My Former Life
3: Getting There
4: So Much to Learn
5: Familiar Artists, New Ways
6: Illustration Versus the Context of Art
7: Transcription
8: Look Like an Artist
9: Drawing
10: I Could Not Draw My Mother Dying
11: A Bad Decision
12: Euphoria
13: Grief
14: Peers
15: Crit
16: Art School + History History
17: You’ll Never Be An Artist
18: Discovery
19: MFA Thesis
20: And Now?
21: Newark Artist
22: Art History by Nell Painter
Coda: Happy Ending
Acknowledgments
List of Images
Old in Art School
Prologue
YOU’LL NEVER BE AN ARTIST
The world of the Rhode Island School of Design and the world of my former academic life rarely overlapped. But some RISD people, like my printmaking Teacher Randa, inhabited both realms and didn’t pretend my book didn’t exist. Chatting with her in Benson Hall one day after our printmaking class, I seized a rare opportunity in art school to brag about my writing, to wit, my Sunday’s morning wonder of wonders, my book reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.
The New York Times Book Review.
Front-page review.
Oh la la la la!
Randa recognized this as every writer’s dream, a Once In A Lifetime, a True-to-Life Coup. She ran me downstairs to share my miracle with her teacher colleague Sharon. Passing the printmaking office on our way to Sharon, we ran into Teacher Henry standing outside the doorway of his faculty office, a distraction from wonder, the reminder of a beef.
Teacher Henry had given me an A-minus (bad graduate school grade) and called me “dogged” (a put-down, not an appreciation of persistence). Recognizing an insult, I had called him out over “dogged.”
Henry’s malevolent magnetic field pulled me off course. Instead of rejoicing over my amazing good fortune
with Sharon and Randa, I resumed my fight with Henry. This was stupid of me, now I know, even though I was right, and he was wrong. Henry did not back down. He doubled down. He insisted he had to say what he believed, what he “knew,” to be true:
You may show your work.
You may have a gallery.
You may sell your work.
You may have collectors.
But you will never be an artist.
Why not? Because I lacked an essential component, some ineffable inner quality necessary to truly be An Artist. I recognized Henry’s logic of “being” as complete, unalloyed bullshit. I said,
Henry, that’s bullshit.
I knew it was totally unprofessional of him, a teacher, to say that to me, a student. I knew that from a career of teaching, from a lifetime of knowing teacher-student relations. I knew. I knew. As surely as I was right and he was wrong, I knew. What I felt was something as different as heart from brain.
What I felt was Henry’s arrow of condemnation piercing my student’s psyche. He hurled an arrow, a dagger, a sharp-pointed weapon into my bull’s-eye of a heart, where it lodged among a thousand insinuations, of doubts that in fact, I was not good enough. That arrow-target, the assault and the wound. The target of my self-doubt shape-shifted into an Escher loop of insecurity and self-pity.
Never be An Artist, not good enough, never be An Artist, not good enough, never be An Artist, not good enough
You may recognize this circuit of torture.
Henry cut me so deeply because part of me—while I was in graduate school, the larger part of me—wanted to be An Artist in just that indescribable way. An An Artist artist finds her identity in art, does nothing but make art, and does it all the time, making work of unimaginable creativity. An An Artist artist makes art 100 percent of the time.
I would have loved to devote all my time to art, to pursue each inspiration to its fabulous ends. But I also didn’t want to leave book promotion or writing tasks or my dear husband in New Jersey. I wished I didn’t always have to cringe when the phone portended parental emergency from the West Coast. But my parents were a part of me I could not even imagine letting down. I could not abandon the rest of me, even when the rest of me overwhelmed my art.
I wanted to be a better artist and make more exciting work with never-before-seen drawings and hitherto unimaginable compositions and color from the ends of the earth. Part of me wanted to be An Artist, without any asterisks. All of me wanted to be An Artist—and yet at the same time to keep my past as thinker and writer. But how could I be An Artist, when “academic” was so poisonous a concept in art and while I had always been academic? The very worst thing in the world you could call someone’s art was “academic,” meaning sterile, humorless, obscure, unattractive, and old-fashioned. Old.
An Artist’s art is ambiguous and ironic, possessing what Teacher Roger called “right nowness.” I was doing my darnedest for ambiguity and irony, with mixed results, but right nowness? I was too old for right nowness.
Teacher Donna faulted me for not being “hungry” enough to be An Artist. I asked myself what on earth is “hungry” if not moving to another state, paying a fortune in tuition, rent, and supplies, working endless hours, and being humiliated on a daily basis? What an art-world fun house of jumbled, upside-down values.
Donna’s condemnation stung because Henry’s resonated, and I was vulnerable to both. Meanwhile, my upbringing, long life’s experience, and scholarship had armored me against thinking of identity—racial or gender identity—as something you are, or as academics would say, as something ontological. Knowing identity as something people performed in various ways, I was armored against racial and gender “essentialism,” as academics would say of something simple and unitary. Yet here I was, falling for essentialism about artists.
Henry’s definition of An Artist was ontological (as in “to be”) rather than epistemological (as in “to learn”) or pedagogical (as in “to teach”) or performative (as in “to act”), or even commercial (as in to have a gallery): he was saying that since anything can find its way into a gallery, and tastes vary so widely that just about anything can find a buyer, an inexpressible something, some inward quality of being, hard to pin down and beyond the market, must, therefore, exist on the exciting side of the line separating An Artist artists from inferior beings, i.e., from me.
To be An Artist was to be a certain kind of person that you could not become through education or practice. It was a toggle switch between either you were or you weren’t. If I was never going to be An Artist, my last few years were a terrible mistake, a waste of time and a great deal of money. If I lacked the essential quality of being An Artist, I was condemned to failure.
My defect was my seriousness, my persistence, my discipline, my goddam hard work. In other realms, these are the foundations of resilience, a positive quality in life, essential for survival. Survival, however, does not figure among the qualities of An Artist. How much more attractive to go down in flames at a young age, like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Arshile Gorky. I remembered skinny white Matt, my skateboarder classmate at Mason Gross, who made awesomely huge, extraordinary imaginative pieces by staying up the night before the piece was due. Totally amazing work, but hardly a routine for the decades. All the better to die young.
Too late for me.
1
HOW OLD ARE YOU?
How old are you?” she asked from a small face, a small body, a little dress, and Uggs; neutral words. It took a moment for me to detach her from the mass of Rutgers students. Me sweltering at the bus stop on George Street in New Brunswick, anxiously scanning the herd of buses arriving, loading up, and departing, systematically and, to me, confusingly. Had she not spoken, I wouldn’t have noticed her, not yet remarking students’ individual differences. They in private earbud worlds, historicizing into their or friends’ tiny phones, grinning over Tweets or minuscule videos. They roared over towering dramas and hysterically funny incidents. Every experience just born brand-new.
She carried a cell phone, too, but something pulled her out of it and into seeing me. She turned to me to query,
How old are you?
She took a step toward me as if there were simply something she needed to know. She was upholding art-school sartorial drama in bright yellow hair and piercings, art-school fashion statements I was seeing for the first time.
My fashion statement said “comfort.” Plain white T-shirt, black pants (I was the only one in long pants), sturdy white New Balance walking shoes, and a baseball cap. Today’s cap said New York Sheep and Wool Festival. I may not have been the only knitter in that crowd, but I was the only one wearing it, on this, my second day as a BFA student at Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
How old are you? interrupted the befuddlement of my first encounter with the herds of Rutgers students and buses, red, white, and black. She blurted out her question, no euphemism, no beating around the bush, no aggression, just naked curiosity before telling me her name was Tina:
How old are you?
Sixty-four, I answered.
I’ve never lied about my age, but I’d never been confronted with so bald a need to know.
Tina gasped, mouth open—actually taking a step backward away from me, eyes all amazed, not hostile, just stunned. Sixty-four had turned me into a phantasm, a creature from another planet. Her gleeful next act documented her sighting from the planet of the old:
I’ve gotta tell my mom about this!
And she did so right then.
It’s a wonder she didn’t take a selfie with me.
Here was my first experience as an exotic in art school, an exotic on account of age, the exotic old person.
This kid, this girl, made me see myself through her eyes. She had recognized me from the previous day’s Mason Gross orientation. Me, then, in the little auditorium among two hundred or more new freshmen, all but two straight out of high school.
At Rutgers I stuck out more on account of age than race or quality of attention or personal apparel. Other students were black and brown; they wore T-shirts, shorts, tiny little skirts, the hijab, or preprofessional uniforms. Rutgers isn’t like those lame midwestern universities that need Photoshop to multiculturalize their image. Rutgers in its multifariousness is lovable, multicultural New Jersey. Rutgers is in New Jersey, with everyone from everywhere.
The next day I met the other older student from orientation, a man in his forties from South Jersey with tattoos smaller than the kids’ and jeans not so skinny. He came out to smoke a cigarette among all the other smokers—every single person but me was smoking—and joined me on the patio in front of the Civic Square Building. We sat to the side of Alice Aycock’s The Tuning Fork Oracle, a giant steel sculpture—a tipped-up, floating metal table covered with a white marble tablecloth (whitish, actually, on account of New Jersey rain stain), several smoked glass spheres and arrows, a tuning fork in the middle. It’s stood there safely since 1997, but you don’t feel safe under it so huge and crazily angled. We chatted Jersey talk: Where are you from? What roads do you take to get here, what exit? And he asked,
How old are you?
The question still took me by surprise.
Once again, sixty-four.
He said, I hope I look that good when I’m that old.
THE CRUCIAL FACT of my age emerged, not as an incidental, but as my defining characteristic, of how others saw me as a demand to see myself through their eyes. It was as though being old summed me up, not all the things I had done to become a historian—a goddam distinguished historian—not the singular family I come from, not even my fascinating, beleaguered city of Newark in my eternally dissed state of New Jersey. Being seen as an old woman added a new way of seeing myself as reflected in the eyes of others.
I was used to juggling my self-perception and other people’s views of me as a black person and as a woman, from within and without. But now what I took as me seemed almost inconsequential as my essence shriveled to my age. This was something new.
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