What colors were these? I couldn’t name them, just a mood—desperate, without clarity to give that mood a name. Those colors were showing up in my paintings, wan, desaturated grays and browns, reds drained of life, blues bereft of light, reflections of my desaturated life. I’m going backward here, for my mother hadn’t yet died, but she was headed only one way. We hadn’t said “die,” but death already overlaid me. Something new was showing up in a shape I couldn’t discern. It felt like limits.
I’d never felt the boundaries of my lifetime before, but now, in a new way, unfocused but definite, my years no longer seemed to stretch out before me. At the same time, I didn’t feel lifetime boundaries as boundaries on my life. This will sound muddled. I was muddled. It wasn’t that I exactly felt hurried, but I absolutely needed to move on. Urgently.
I thrashed about like one of those poor scrawny wild creatures, a wolf, a fox, in a barbed trap whose teeth bit into my ensnared paw. Wolf-me, fox-me, shackled to my fellow undergraduates’ fecklessness, tardiness, incomplete assignments, and whiny foot-dragging.
Jesus H. Christ!
My fellow students were roadblocks in my way, and now, influenced by art school but unaware, I was thinking in a sort of careerist way, as though I were now on a route to somewhere, and they were standing, sprawling, all over my road. What about their colorful brilliance, their zany humor and stupendous overnight productions?
Forgotten.
What about their endlessly detailed narratives of frustration and delight?
Ignored.
Malaise blotted out my pleasure in their youthful bountifulness, for I wanted to bear down, to do, do, do, do more, now, now, now, with time pressing down on me. I sensed their uneasiness with my intensity, for I no longer had the comradeship of ambitious Mason Gross Keith. He abandoned me, dropping out on account of “health issues.” Even my one graduate seminar left me as frustrated as my undergraduate classes. I wanted to work too much and talk too much about my work, their work, other artists’ work, art history, criticism, and society in art and politics. My blah blah blah, endlessly. There must be some means of pushing harder. Approaching his retirement on cruise control, Teacher Tom shushed me.
As my mother sank in my transcontinental parental drama, urgency—that’s how it felt—urgency led me astray. Instead of spending a fourth year honing my skills as a Mason Gross undergraduate, I decided to apply to graduate school. Where was my common sense? What on earth was I thinking?
How could I not have connected my mother’s decline to my irritations with Mason Gross? How did I fail to see the impact of repeated cross-country trips, each time throwing myself up against my mother’s destiny and my father’s misery? These correlations—so glaringly obvious to me now, so clearly recognizable as the very reasons that even internet therapy warns you not to make life-altering decisions in the midst of psychological turmoil—those correlations I failed to make at the time.
Rather than thinking, I felt. I felt irritation at Mason Gross, where my studies and my fellow students had formerly offered so much pleasure. My mother lay dying; I had to get out.
Get out of undergraduate school.
I wondered about graduate school, which I envisioned as a sacred place of intense study and art making. But what did it take to get in? Grades? I had excellent grades, meaning, I assumed, my work was interesting and good. Productivity? I was fuckingly productive. Visual imagination? I had that in abundance, lots of color and line inspired by art history and history history. Hmmmm, maybe the history parts weren’t so positive after all. My fellow students drew their content from a well of right-now popular culture that was not my own. Definitely a weakness on my part. But, on the other hand, I could be a great colorist, even when mired in worry. Discipline? My self-discipline could build an ivory tower. Maybe another weakness.
Nonetheless, what more interesting person, what more unique character than me? Who wouldn’t want a me among their students, with my ability to think and talk and encourage others? My graduate student teachers asked me for pointers and added that the students were lucky to have me in classes. I had a lot to offer, a hell of a lot to offer.
At the same time, a conviction circulated widely about the impossibility of getting into art school, kind of like a religious tenet or an urban legend. This belief discounted all that I had to offer by elevating the portfolio into admission stratosphere. The portfolio had to consist of exciting, skillful art. Was my art exciting and skillful? Eh . . . it depended on who was looking. One thing was clear: my portfolio would not show drawings of renaissance skill or cutting-edge installations. My strong points were curiosity, thoughtfulness, and extraordinary growth during my two-plus years at Mason Gross. Like every other aspirant, I wanted to go to Yale School of Art, for an excellent art school and for a phenomenal university.
That, I recognized, would constitute an astounding leap for me. I knew of ways to bridge the gap between my current portfolio and a portfolio that would get me into graduate school, programs that function like prep schools. I knew that prep school is about more than building skills. Prep school is also a place to make crucial connections with the people who matter, those artists who decide what counts as art and as art that counts as the right kind of art in the right now. Yes, you learn there, and, in addition and just as important, people who can help you get to know you. That latter point may count as heavily for an aspiring professional artist as what you stand to learn. You can be the greatest artist in the world, but if the eyes that matter aren’t on your work, and if the people who count don’t speak up for you, you hardly exist beyond your own local circle. I wanted more than that.
I investigated three prep programs. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio was a thirty-credit-hour program for building a graduate school admission portfolio. That sounded perfect for me, but it had one terrific drawback: it was in Chicago, too far away from Newark and Oakland. Maybe if I were a more driven artist, I would have set aside my marriage and my parents. But I wasn’t, and I couldn’t do that. Then there was the Yale Summer School at Norfolk, Connecticut. For Norfolk, I would have had to be nominated by Mason Gross while I was a junior, which I kind of was. But I had never heard of anyone going to Norfolk from Mason Gross. Was this information being kept secret from me? Or was Norfolk simply not in the Mason Gross orbit? In any case, no Norfolk for me. Then there was Skowhegan, which I’d known about forever, even in California, without knowing more about it than its storied names—Ben Shahn, Philip Pearlstein, and so on.
I looked more closely into Skowhegan, but its rule of keeping you on site for nine weeks put it out of my reach. Had I ever in recent memory gone nine whole weeks without a trip to Oakland? What if I got homesick for Glenn? Norfolk and Skowhegan, especially, seemed too much like adolescent summer camps for me to endure for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for weeks on end. Exuberant young people creating art intensively, expressively in gigantic gestures and series of all-night wonders of solitary and cooperative imagination. Fantastic art. Never-seen-before art. Tattooed art kids bounding around in shorts and flip-flops, day and night, amazed by what was still news to them, annoyed by misunderstood rules, propelled by hormonal surges, drinking and drugging and fucking in the bushes, throwing up in their studios. Exhilarating, yes, indeed, but exhausting. Okay for ten or twelve hours a day, but probably not for twenty-four, not for three months. Not for me.
Clearly, the art summer camps would have done the trick of shaking my eyes loose from the twentieth century and bringing my portfolio into line with current notions of exciting art. No, wait. There was a further problem—no, there was my further problem—that much of currently exciting art looked to me like random piles of things: RPT. Surely there was some other art beyond RPT, for I saw other art in magazines and museums and galleries in New York City. There were a lot of different kinds of art around, some I might be able to manage. But at what price? Could I pay it? I needed some expert advice.
I TOOK MY questions to Teacher Irma, who was a visiting critic at Yale School of Art and who wrote trenchantly in the art magazines, even writing against the grain of convention. Her essays were substantive, and she wrote about women and non-white artists before they became hot, something not to be taken for granted, something I deeply appreciated. As a critic she was totally fabulous.
I also liked her painting a lot. A special trip to Chinatown in New York City to see her solo show left me in awe. Her blend of abstraction and anthropomorphism reminded me of another awesome artist, the Iraqi painter Ahmed Alsoudani. They both move in and out and between figuration and abstraction with a tumultuous sense of space. He is more drawn (literally) to the chaos of life in our times than she, but they’re both great colorists. His paintings are more turbulent than hers, but I find both psychologically postmodern. My student eye for process examined her ravishing paintings from a distance and up close, searching out clues on her scale and technique, her overlapping shapes to convey distance, her color—her absolutely amazing color, bombastic texture evoking collage through paint—and her imagination. Totally fabulous as a painter.
Here was the person to ask about graduate school. I approached her in the painting studio during a long break when no other students were around. I was feeling sheepish asking about graduate school when my paintings left so much to be desired. But I trusted her to cue me in, to help me parse the various qualities that count in graduate admission. I spoke with trepidation, not taking anything for granted. It was guidance I needed, a conversation about my strengths and weaknesses. That’s not what I got.
When I asked her about my going to graduate school, she immediately launched a tirade:
You don’t need an MFA.
You don’t need professional study.
Uh-oh. My ambition as a problem. That had happened to me before.
From what I could tell, her gut reaction came from a place that people sometimes tap instinctively when faced with me: “you don’t need it,” whatever it is. I’ve heard this oh so many times to say I shouldn’t be wanting to do what I want to do. Whatever it is I want, I can’t have it, because I don’t need it. (You may have heard this, too.) I had blurted out the name Yale to her as my dream graduate school, a second terrible idea. It was bad enough that I wanted to go to graduate school at all, and, now, worse that I wanted to go to Yale. She had not gone to Yale. Not only did I not need graduate school, I, the totally worst possible painter in the whole entire history of art, had no business aspiring to Yale. Ouch, ouch, and ouch. End of this conversation.
But no reason to back down.
I took the matter up with my friend Madeleine, a very good painter, and she talked over my situation with another artist friend, also a much more experienced painter than I. Madeleine and her friend sang me the conventional wisdom of graduate applications: portfolio is all.
Sola fide?
Solo portfolio.
Madeleine cast aspersions on my portfolio: why not take another year to bulk it up? I would have none of it. I would not—I absolutely would not—give up. Even temporarily.
Sitting outside Civic Square Building on a sunny day in the late fall, I told Madeleine why the whole matter of applications burned me so. For years, for decades, discouraging people had been telling me what I couldn’t do. Nay-saying didn’t apply only to art school. Madeleine could have been giving me the soundest advice in the world. No, it was the soundest advice in the world. Only I could not heed her reasoning. I had reasoning of my own that also made good sense.
I told her she was not the person to tell me no.
I told her that telling me no was up to the graduate schools I applied to. If they all turned me down the first time I applied, I’d apply again the next year. I had heard from my graduate student teachers that they had applied twice or thrice before getting in. But I wouldn’t close off my chances without even a try.
I was emphatic.
I told her about the Colby College senior I’d met who hadn’t applied to a prestigious PhD program because he didn’t think he could get in. Well, that’s a sure route to not getting in.
I told her with more certainty than I really had that I knew the portfolio must reach a certain threshold, but after that, I insisted, the applicant’s personal qualities must kick in, qualities I had in abundance. I doubt I really convinced her. But I did give her pause, and she let up on discouragement.
Recognizing “you don’t need . . .” when applied to me, I was still struck by the pervasiveness of the art-school-is-so-hard-to-get-into mantra. I—who as a student applicant got into the University of California–Berkeley, University of California–Los Angeles, Harvard, and Yale and got tenured jobs at Penn, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Princeton, and served as president of THE association of American historians the world over—had never heard such nay-saying applied to admissions. I was taking the argument all too personally, yet I knew it wasn’t aimed only at me. The notion circulates as fact, and it ramped up the significance of application and acceptance.
How did they tell a strong portfolio from a weak one, especially when there’s artwork in galleries every day that would not make the first cut in graduate admissions? For one thing, art doesn’t appear wholesale in galleries, as in portfolio reviews. At Mason Gross I saw hundreds, literally hundreds of graduate school application portfolios. Seen by the hundreds, expertly rendered model studies reduced skill to banality. Which sank my expert fellow Mason Gross painter Jan-Vincent. For another thing, it actually is harder, I learned, to get into an MFA program in painting than to get into Princeton for a PhD in history, because MFA painting programs are smaller, but similar numbers apply.
I was hurling myself, my old, academic, black self, against the stone wall of graduate-art-school-admission impossibility with a conviction born of defiance. No longer a mere step along the way into painting seriously, graduate school loomed before me like a wall, a mountain, an obstacle test of my personal worth.
This is no way to make a decision, oh, jeez, no.
But I knew enough about the difference institutions can make in evaluating personal worth, and that my personal worth in art, again, my old, academic, black self, would need all the institutional support it could gather. And there was the matter of mortality’s corruption of my judgment.
Between trips to Oakland for my failing mother and distraught father, I somehow applied to four graduate art schools with a portfolio that included two paintings inspired by a photographic archive in the Brooklyn Historical Society, a multipanel drawing of the unveiling of the Harriet Tubman monument in Harlem, and a quilt collage I had made out of a drawn self-portrait.
All three drawings were figurative. The two inspired by the Brooklyn photographs were acrylic on paper, 22" × 30", both with multiple figures, both in subdued colors—one using orange and a triangle of yellow with raw umber and sepia, one with diluted pink and viridian. Though they are edited in composition, their origin in photographs is evident, and the figures do not interact. The third, clearly figurative image in charcoal on 12" × 12" paper belongs to a narrative series I had drawn of the dedication of Alison Saar’s large sculpture in Harlem commemorating Harriet Tubman. In this drawing, erasures delineated space—the windows of a building, the roof of a tent—around a figure in motion that turns its back to me, the viewer.
The fourth drawing, 19" × 24", took the form of a quilt. It was figurative, but not straightforwardly. You had to look closely to make out the human form. I collaged pieces of a skeletal self-portrait in sepia and black conté crayon onto a burnt-umber ground. Again color, again subdued. The self-portrait fragments extended beyond the ground on the right side and the bottom.
UPPER LEFT: Brooklyn Beach People, 2008, ink on paper, 22 ½" × 30"
UPPER RIGHT: Paper Readers, 2008, ink on paper, 22 ½" × 30"
LOWER LEFT: Tubman Memorial, New York City, 2008, graphite on paper, 12" × 13 ¾"
My Mason Gross teachers supported my decision and wrote letters of recommendation. My non–Mason Gross mentors helped me curate my portfolio. Columbia was a very long shot that Artist Stanley and Teacher Hanneline encouraged. I didn’t get in there. No loss. My Mason Gross lithography Teacher Barb wanted me at Mason Gross, which wait-listed me, begging me not to come. Crazy, I know. Maybe as an undergraduate I had already sucked all the juice I could from Mason Gross’s painting faculty. My boosters all expected Yale, my first choice, to accept me. But Yale’s fiery art school, in a real university that had offered me a chaired professorship in history years earlier and given me an honorary doctorate, turned me down flat. Now, that hurt. And it measured the miles separating the world of art from the world of history. Or was it universe from universe?
I had a solid second choice, the Rhode Island School of Design, with its appealing reputation for intensity and unremitting hard work. What could be more right for me? Perfect, except for the lack of a university attached—but Brown was right up the hill. RISD accepted me, and I was then and am once again deeply grateful for that. RISD’s where I went. After three years of undergraduate study at Mason Gross and more personal-intellectual than painterly bona fides, I entered a world of serious art making, full-time art making. I would not be held back by undergraduate farting around. I surely was headed to art paradise. I really did think and feel that. I really did.