Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  The evening darkened, the now strictly working-class crowd at Market and Broad was thinning; yet enough foot traffic remained to prompt an amplified orator to set up below the police surveillance tower. The orator stood before five Fruit-of-Islam-looking protectors, young men so clean-cut as to appear menacing. As the light faded, the orator addressed Latinos in the no-longer-dense crowd:

  You Latinos think you better than the black man because you have light skin.

  You no better.

  You bastards. Bastards of the white man.

  You only closer to our European oppressors.

  Wake up, you Europeanized bastards!

  The orator was preaching black-brown unity through a detour of insult. My Newark didn’t usually seem so hostile to me. Maybe it was the season, the holidays with their impending visit to Oakland. There was Christmas music’s aggravating cheeriness. Even Nat King Cole roasting chestnuts over an open fire sounded futile in globally warmed New Jersey. We hardly had winter anymore, except for catastrophic dumps of twelve inches of snow that shut everything down for days of excavation. Did anyone roast chestnuts or even know what they were?

  Oakland for the holidays just made things worse. My father, bitter in his bed, accused me of doing “nothing” for him, alternating with thanks for reading him Sherwin Nuland’s The Art of Aging. But mostly my father muttered and griped and circled back to renewing his demand to move to New Jersey.

  Move him to New Jersey! What a huge, expensive, impossible undertaking! My stomach ached at the thought. The dressing and undressing. The baggage. The medications. My indentured servitude for the rest of his days.

  After we left he got better. He perked up to tell his friends that moving to New Jersey was my idea, that he was only going along for my sake.

  Okay, I said to him by phone. Are you ready to move?

  I had found the place.

  Are you ready to move to New Jersey?

  Not yet.

  I put my moving-my-father-preparations on hold and went to New Haven for an artist-scholar residency at Yale.

  THE ENTHUSIASM OF my Yale welcome stunned me, even after the warmth of my Newark world of artists and my community at Aferro, for I hadn’t completely overcome my felt identity as the worst painter in the world. Yale people didn’t care. They embraced, even celebrated the genius of the new project I called Odalisque Atlas. Yale people, unlike my recent art-school contingent, applauded its growth out of history and art history and current events. My turning the figure of the odalisque—the beautiful, young, sexually available slave girl at the root of the term “Caucasian” for white people—into visual art seemed absolutely original and positively inspired in New Haven. They didn’t mind at all that the research came out of my book The History of White People. What a productive notion!

  Yale was my Elysian Fields, my hog heaven. I could take books out of the Haas Family Arts Library. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library let me examine pictures and manuscripts on the world’s many slave trades. Teacher Sam in the Yale School of Art invited me to pit crits and a presentation of drawings at the Yale Center for British Art. In Sterling Library I plodded through the details—and I do mean the details—of a multivolume history of Ukraine from Soviet times full of analysis of institutions and categories of objects, all mercifully translated into English. I presented a first draft of my odalisque project to the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition to an appreciative audience of graduate students and faculty. They told me,

  We’re so glad you’re here.

  I luxuriated in Yale’s embrace, ready to render my thoughts as images. I set up in an unused faculty office, tacked paper to the wall, and pulled out my graphite and ink. I had time and space and the encouragement to take advantage of all Yale offered me. Who could ask for anything more?

  MY FATHER CALLED me in tears. Again. It must have been 8:00 a.m. in Oakland, him crying,

  I can’t live alone any longer.

  His call jerked me back from anticipation to my real life, from shining promise to bleak depression. From expectation to responsibility, eagerness to duty, self-centeredness to empathy.

  By now I had heard “can’t live alone” many times before and knew how to interpret it. It meant I should move to Oakland. I should, as family, answer to his needs and care for him full-time. He knew by now this would not happen. That yearning was in vain and totally not to be. It meant his moving to New Jersey, even though he said he wasn’t ready, and even though his concept of moving from Oakland to New Jersey was on the order of traveling up to the Oregon border.

  Okay, was he ready to move right now?

  No, not yet.

  I returned to my project at Yale, met my friends, ate and drank and talked. I made drawings inspired by Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, whose Penguin Classics edition I had edited a decade earlier. Jacobs’s observation on beauty in slave girls had stayed with me over the years:

  If God has bestowed beauty upon her [the slave girl], it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.

  Jacobs was writing about her North Carolina, but she knew she shared a condition with thousands of others. She was from the American South, but her words applied to Georgia in the Caucasus, the home of the odalisque.

  I included Jacobs’s words in my Odalisque Atlas, even though enslaved black girls weren’t ordinarily considered odalisques. I wanted to make connections, to emphasize the kindredness of women’s experiences, of women’s vulnerability despite color-line habits of thought that would separate them. Youth, beauty, plus subjugation imperil a girl, no matter where she lives and no matter who enslaves her.

  If God Has Bestowed Beauty, 2012, conté crayon and graphite on paper, 24" × 18"

  I rewrote Jacobs’s words in graphite exactly as they appeared on page 46. Then I scanned my writing. Using Photoshop, I re-scaled and recomposed the image, superimposing layers of different sizes. I projected my new composition and redrew it in conté crayon and powdered graphite on paper.

  In a technique I repeated later in images I made using projection, my Harriet Jacobs drawing depicted the icons at the bottom of the projected frame: “Rotate,” “Slideshow,” “Return.” Unlike sneaky Gerhard Richter, I was candid about projection as one step in my process and a feature of my sense of composition.

  In addition to my drawings from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, I was envisioning an Odalisque Atlas of imaginary maps to pull together many slave trades, starting with the Caucasus and Georgia and Ukraine, the sources of the millennia-old Black Sea slave trade that was already so old that Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, couldn’t trace its origins, a slave trade into the eastern Mediterranean that didn’t end until about 1900. There was also Thailand, with its present-day sex slavery, and western and central Africa, of the Atlantic slave trade to the Western Hemisphere’s islands of the Caribbean Sea and the U.S. American South.

  I would invent a new geography of submission, taking apart and reassembling the lands of the odalisque around a reconfigured Black Sea. I couldn’t wait to start drawing, to get back to painting.

  Another phone call.

  A family friend in Oakland was in a drugstore buying the ACE bandage my father wanted for his wrist, sore and swollen after a fall. I called my father, who offered an explanation. He had fallen, he said, walking outside by the railroad tracks in Texas. Railroad tracks in his hometown in Texas. Yes, he had been a boy beside the railroad tracks in his Texas hometown. In the 1920s.

  Now add the railroad tracks in Texas to the territory my family life needed to administer:

  Newark. New Haven. Oakland. Texas.

  While I ricocheted between my places, the New York Times asked me to write an op-ed column on poor white people, who were becoming a hot topic. In succeeding years they got even hotter, and as the author of The History o
f White People, I became an expert on white people. My Times op-ed appeared while I ran between my places, now adding West Orange, New Jersey, where we were preparing to move my father with his constant need for my presence. Oakland, Texas, Newark, West Orange.

  New Haven?

  New Haven was ceding place to my father. His mind had moved on from walking and falling along the railroad in Texas to a series of lurid, pitiful, enraged fantasies about his wife, my mother, who had died three years earlier. She had had a baby by another man. The baby was white. She was riding on a bicycle holding the white baby. She was riding on a bicycle down Piedmont Avenue with the white baby from the Key System’s bus terminal at 40th Street. The baby was female. The baby was dead. I tried not to encounter myself in his fantasies.

  Worried for my father’s life and, given his imagination, for my own, I went to Oakland. A move to New Jersey would have to come now, not later, or I would have to return to Oakland every single week.

  Goodbye, New Haven. Farewell, Elysian Fields. Au revoir, hog heaven.

  It seemed like forever that my father had been emotionally impaired. For the last seven years or more, never-ending scenes of tears, accusations, anger, and self-pity, but interspersed with returns to the sweet generosity of spirit, of openness, of attention to others that had made my father universally beloved.

  Now depression enfeebled his physical body. He no longer walked Salem’s grounds, didn’t even go down to the dining room to eat with the tablemates he had cherished. His physical appearance degraded. His hands looked dead, doughy-colored and scrawny, with all the veins standing out over the bones, the deadly colorlessness a defect of light-colored skin. My mother’s dark-skinned hands never looked lifeless in that way, even in her mortal illness. It was as though my father’s hands had been butchered and all the blood drained away.

  In Oakland with my father about to move, I was tired tired tired to death, emotionally wrung out and flattened by his complaints. The generous soul he remained glimpsed my fatigue intermittently and tried to do his part toward his move. There was so little he could manage to do that his gestures saddened me further. How to recover from his move to New Jersey? I was already so tired, and so many tasks remained. No way could I reconnect with my project in New Haven.

  My spring semester’s project was moving my father, not my Odalisque Atlas. Arrangements, money, arrangements, more money, more and more and more money, starting with a check for $8,000 to my father’s New Jersey assisted-living facility. The money coursed out a Mississippi River through countless delta channels.

  Saintly Husband Glenn was to fly overnight with my father from San Francisco to Newark. On our drive from Oakland across the Bay Bridge to SFO, Glenn remarked to my father that he was leaving the Bay Area after seventy years. My concentration on details had blocked that ending from my mind. Sure enough, I realized, crossing the Bay, my father was leaving the Bay Area to die in New Jersey. He knew that. The point—half the point of his move—was not to die alone. The other half was having me close at hand for trips to the ER, though Glenn, too, did major ER duty in New Jersey.

  Glenn’s comment on my father’s departure from his adopted home after seventy years meant I was doing something of the same thing. For decades after my move east for graduate school and faculty appointments, my parents had anchored me in the Bay Area for at least two visits a year, more, for increasingly frequent emergencies. I’d see my parents’ old friends, my old friends, and my new Bay Area artist friends like Mildred and Anna. This was a goodbye for me as well, a kind of an ending.

  After Glenn and my father left for New Jersey, I returned to his apartment. In my father’s definitive absence, a decision I had made years earlier came back to me. I was with my mother at Salem as my father was undergoing electroconvulsive therapy. In the course of ECT, his heart stopped. My father had a do-not-resuscitate order, but the doctors called my mother to ask whether they should honor it or restart my father’s heart. My mother froze and handed the phone to me. Was she afraid of what she might answer? Phone in hand, I hesitated a moment, figuring he was healthy except for having a heart that had stopped beating. I didn’t figure in his depression, which had sent him to ECT in the first place. I said, Restart his heart.

  Which they did. But the heart stopping set out-of-bounds the only therapy that fixed my father’s depression, even temporarily. He was alive. He was still depressed.

  That was years ago.

  It was my mother who died.

  Now she was dead, and he was alive and on his way to New Jersey. I made the wrong wrong wrong decision, I said to myself in his empty room. If only I could take it back and spare my father this misery. My mother, after grieving, would be a happy widow, emancipated from her husband’s depressed negativity, free to pursue her writing and play bingo in the Salem living room as often and as long as she wanted. When I had that phone in my hand, I should have taken another moment to think what “healthy” meant for someone so severely depressed. Would that I had thought more before making that wrong wrong wrong decision. The wrong parent was living, I thought now. The wrong parent had died.

  EMPTYING MY FATHER’S apartment at Salem, I acted on his permission to give away cherished possessions he had held on to for years. He still had friends, good and old friends in Oakland who could share his belongings. One friend brought her teenage granddaughter, who delighted in my father’s fountain pens and a notebook whose wooden cover he had carved. Her pleasure gave me pleasure, though my pleasure was burnt-umber sadness in the darkness of earth tones.

  Still, delight in a young person’s discovery of the unknown: fountain pens drawing ink from a bottle! Woodworking made by someone right there in Oakland! The pens had been instruments of my father’s pride in calligraphy and the notebook a product of his art before glaucoma compromised his eyesight and depression drained his creative spirit.

  Departure changed my father’s feelings toward money. Although he had always been generous financially as well as helpful to family and friends, he had always hedged his generosity with judgments as to his recipients’ ability to use his gifts wisely. He always preferred a thrifty receiver to a spendthrift, educational expenses to consumption. And he let his preferences be known.

  Now he judged less, gave more, musing on the irony of having saved more money than he could spend in the time remaining to him. That irony proved vain, for his life in New Jersey cost money by the fistfuls, even for non-Alzheimer’s care. He had probably expected lower expenses—his notions of what things cost aligned with 1970s and 1980s prices. In his mid-nineties, he was living longer than any of us expected, himself included. He had enough money for assisted living in New Jersey, but there would hardly be leftover fortunes for him ruefully to enjoy giving away.

  YALE OVER. AFERRO ended. What to do now? In Newark’s Ironbound district, I rented a studio of my own whose outfitting brought back my father as he used to be, before depression, before frailty. He offered—dear old man—to help me cart a flat file weighing five hundred pounds from Frenchtown on the Delaware River to my Newark studio. That offer was my father’s old impulse speaking, his love of pitching in. By now he was too weak to manage even the few steps down to my basement studio. Back when he was only eighty-five, he could actually have helped me; he actually had helped move us to the Adirondacks from Vermont. No longer. Still, in his nineties, a sweet recall of how he used to be.

  21

  NEWARK ARTIST

  Okay. My father settled but unhappy in West Orange, New Jersey. Me moving into my own studio in the Ironbound. Newark artist. From home in North Newark, I took my 27 bus to Market Street and walked the opposite direction on Market Street from Aferro, a few blocks east toward and through Newark Penn Station to my studio. I wore work clothes like what I was wearing six years earlier at Mason Gross on that day at Rutgers when I first heard the refrain of my art education, How old are you?

  Same clothes, but no question.

  On the 27 bus I sat amon
g my fellow Newarkers, but just now seeing Artist Jerry coming on board. As Jerry walked down the bus’s center aisle, I spoke to him from my seat. My greeting brought him into awareness.

  I didn’t know that was you, he said.

  You blend right in, he added.

  And I did blend right in, something I love about Newark. I blend right in. No need to explain my presence or answer questions or present my credentials to prove who I am or justify my being there. I’m not a curiosity or a presence to be appreciated or avoided. I blend right in.

  I blend right in. That’s what I said back to Jerry, who gave me a high five right there on the 27 bus on my way to my studio.

  Art in Newark is a nonprofit undertaking dependent on auctions to raise money for worthy causes. One sign you’re a Newark artist is requests to donate your art for auction. I donated a History Does Not print to Aferro for auction, a small black-and-white lithograph inspired by an antebellum photograph of an enslaved young musician with vacant eyes and my comment on the absence of his name. Only the name of his owner, Robert E. Lee, is known. This very plain lithograph worked better as an image than a concept in undergraduate crit, because the students thought the musician’s name must be Robert E. Lee. The Newark Public Library’s Dane Fine Print Collection bought this piece. My first public collection.

  History Does Not, 2008, lithograph on BFK Rives paper, 8" × 8"

  An artist’s residency in the Newark Public Library let me investigate a little-known, unexpectedly rich visual collection, browsing at leisure as I had in Yale’s repositories. The Newark Public Library can’t match Yale’s libraries, the latter engorged by gifts from the wealthy over centuries. But characteristic of Newark’s institutions, the Newark Public Library has more than you might assume. And the 27 bus stops right there.

  There came an emergency call—not about my father, thank heaven—but from the Friends of the Newark Public Library. Glenn and I belonged to the Friends of the Newark Public Library, having joined on moving to Newark from Princeton. I had presented book talks on the Friends’ behalf. This call wasn’t about my books. This was an emergency need to resolve a crisis caused by what would seem great good fortune. Great good fortune complicated by the history of American politics of visual representation. A wealthy New York collector had lent the Newark Public Library a very large drawing by Kara Walker, the famous, legendary, superstar international artist Kara Walker, which the Newark Public Library director had installed, wisely, far from the rooms frequented by children. Indeed, it is a drawing for grown-up eyes.