Working in my studio expanded time and space: the space, one of the large second-year painting studios, the time, limitless. The studio had windows on the south and west—bright and good for seeing colors, but hot, not good for so sweaty a person as me. Fix that, and soon, even though the remedy proved strenuous. Glenn bought me long curtains and climbed high on a ladder, up, down, up, down, to install brackets and hang curtains. Thank you, Dear Glenn, for perilous labor that turned my studio into a work site for the duration. Big walls for painting and for hanging. I installed my work from the summer, work that passed muster in fall crits.
Not just my summer’s work, but I also passed muster, bolstered by conversations with artists far from Providence who noted my productivity and called productivity a strength, not a quality beneath notice. They told me productivity was a crucial ability—a talent even, as precious a talent as the talent considered inborn for An Artist artists. Yes, productivity was a skill for the long haul, not some dun-colored, dogged clotting. In my outside crits, my ambition, even when falling short in execution, merited acknowledgment as a unifying vision binding the many kinds of work I was trying out. My outside crits of the summer said what I needed most to hear:
Keep going.
Keep on making your work.
I had acquired defenses against silence and too-hasty turnings away.
No, this is not fair to my RISD teachers and student colleagues who were now trying to find words for my work, even to sound encouraging. Too late. We were on different wavelengths, maybe even on different spectra, distanced not only in measurement but also in meaning. In any case, I was now less susceptible to the discrepancy between what I was trying to do—to say something about the state of the world and about history, not striving for the aesthetic of uninhabited objects without further meaning. My paintings were inhabited reflections of my mental world.
This second fall, now, I disengaged, not completely, not successfully, not definitively, but sufficiently to figure out that this was not my place, and these were not my people. To say I was transcending RISD sounds too lofty and way too resolved. I still fell prey to painful bouts of self-doubt and visual thrashings. Even so, I established distance from my milieu. I didn’t know exactly where I was, but I was searching for my work, my work, on a map or in a place apart from theirs.
Part of my problem was wanting to engage issues that came up in class at greater length and depth than my fellow students considered seemly. Part was plain old disagreement. For example. Visiting Critic Bob lectured us on conceptual artists, taking as a case in point Adrian Piper, who in the streets of New York City in the 1970s and 1980s challenged people to examine their assumptions about race and gender. I’m not sure my colleagues had known of Piper, and I was glad Critic Bob talked about her work. (I should have been more grateful to him for mentioning a black artist, for I didn’t give sufficient thanks.) In any case, I couldn’t let pass his assertion that Piper was the first artist to address issues of black identity.
What the hell!
I could not let pass that lump of sheer, complete, glaring, even insulting unadulterated ignorance. I mentioned the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, the very least of what needed to be said at a moment when my time for lecturing was circumscribed. No one picked up on my comments, whether what I had said seemed like TMI or simple irrelevance. I hadn’t said much, but it felt like too much. It was as though the Black Arts Movement belonged to another world—a world away from here, a world foreign to The Art World as I was encountering it. Luckily for me, other experiences weren’t so frustrating.
I was taking an art criticism class with Teacher Debra that I looked forward to every week. Teacher Debra was a Canadian, an eerily white-skinned blonde dressed in art-world black and vivid crimson lipstick that accentuated her whiteness. No matter. In her chairs-everywhere, obstructed-view-of-the-screen, windowless classroom with the temperamental projector, we read and discussed not just Clement Greenberg, but also Harold Rosenberg and Arthur Danto, and we turned over perennial questions of what constitutes good art and who decides. One painting student expressed blithe confidence in the market as an efficient arbitrator of the good and the bad. Others of us stayed after class to keep talking. I loved that class and was coming to adore Teacher Debra.
If you enlarge your definition to suit art-school demography, I wasn’t the only old person in Debra’s class. Within the usual RISD range of ages, people in their thirties felt old. My fellow old people in Debra’s class were two photographers, one from South Korea, the other from Portugal, both in their forties. I could practically be their mother. Still, we shared a kind of we’ve-seen-this-before firmness beside the inexperience of our younger peers. We old folks sat around after class with Teacher Debra (herself between the photographers and me in age), free to turn over our reading and our lives at greater length. We discovered one another’s art practice, paying one another studio visits, beers in hand. Talk about a balm, Debra’s class was Gilead balm, a salve for my hurt. Well, come now. Let’s not exaggerate. My RISD world beyond Debra’s class wasn’t all cruelty. It just felt like that a lot of the time. Her class, with its occasions for fruitful, friendly conversation and studio visits, was downright enjoyable.
GLENN AND I were soon on our way to Oakland to spend the holidays with my father, who hardly got out of his pajamas or his apartment. While we were there, he managed to get up to talk to his visitors, but mainly he complained of being all alone, despite helpers and friends. His complaint conveyed a new message, no longer that I should leave New Jersey and move to Oakland to care for him. Now he was saying he wanted to move to New Jersey to be with family. That was, to be with me.
What about all his friends here in Oakland? All the experts say friends are crucial to successful aging. What about his Kaiser Permanente doctors in one of the best health care systems in the country? Everybody knows good health care is essential. Apart from one former College of Chemistry graduate student from the 1960s, my father lacked friends in New Jersey. And Kaiser Permanente doesn’t operate there. But my father would have family in New Jersey, that is, he would have me. I spent my winter break scouring northern New Jersey for assisted-living facilities.
My investigation revealed contradictions of race and class that had not appeared so starkly in the Bay Area. In Oakland, my father, a well-educated and moderately prosperous man, lived in Salem Lutheran Home among other well-educated and moderately prosperous people, a quorum of whom were also black, two of whom he had known for many decades. A perfect place.
Was the likes of Salem Lutheran Home in Oakland to be found in northern New Jersey? Not that I could see, at least not at that time. The well-educated, moderately prosperous places were way too white for a man who grew up in the segregated South and who still, after all these years and despite individual white friends, regarded large masses of strange white people as a condition to be avoided. Certainly not something to pay for in the tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the same time, the places with enough black residents weren’t comfortable enough and didn’t have well-enough educated people. My father, no longer always agile in his chatting, couldn’t just start a lunchtime conversation asking what his tablemate did at the university.
My father was already wavering. First he was feeling better, getting out of his apartment and once again walking Salem’s grounds. He was going to be okay in Oakland. My weeks of research seemed wasted, but better he remain in Oakland. The prospect of moving my father and his medications and his incontinence across the continent made my head ache. Fingers crossed for his staying on the up and up.
My father stayed up.
I returned to Providence for my last semester.
I FACED MY MFA thesis with a confidence as sublime as it was unmerited. The sublime: having already located the photographic archive that was inspiring my paintings, I had pinned the photo archive on my studio wall and gone to work manually + digitally.
Studio Postcard, digital media, 4 ¼" × 6"
At first my images came along slowly, but the process was its own reward. I used Photoshop to reimagine Lucille Fornasieri-Gold’s photos of Brooklyn in the 1970s and 1980s, figurative images that I edited in composition and turned from black and white into color according to my own inspiration. I was getting ready to paint when my father called, weeping, moaning, wailing that he was losing his eyesight. He couldn’t see. His sight failing, whatever would become of him when he could no longer see?! Sob, sob.
My father’s eyesight had been failing for years—for decades—from glaucoma. His first ophthalmologist had told him when she diagnosed his glaucoma he would be blind in fifteen years. That was in the 1960s. Over the decades and into the new century, he took his drops faithfully and preserved sufficient sight to drive (until recent years), read, and walk. He lived with his disability in the recognition that it had a psychological as well as a physical dimension.
Once as I was driving him to his bank in San Leandro, we talked about glaucoma, which I am likely to inherit. My father could still see a stop sign and surveil my driving. Every now and then he felt the need to remind me of who was the father and who the daughter. Between overseeing my driving—totally unnecessary as I am an excellent driver, I want you to know—he related an encounter with a man who was completely blind. My father said he had asked this blind man how he could enjoy life even though he couldn’t see.
The blind man said,
It’s all in the spirit of the thing, not in the physical disability.
It’s all mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
My father, a great positive thinker back in the day and even later in San Leandro, resolved to face his “challenges,” as my parents termed disasters, in a positive frame of mind.
That was then. Now, in his bed in his room, he lay at the edge of perdition, crying his eyes out, so to speak. His sight, he cried, really was failing, for his current ophthalmologist had now declared him legally blind. At the same time, the ophthalmologist assured my father that he could preserve what little sight remained if he continued his drops—which he did thanks to the aides at Salem—went outside, and exercised regularly. Which my father only did for a while. He walked around the Salem grounds and could read the time from the clock on the far wall of his apartment. For a time that was his objective situation. Then depression knocked him back into his bed, his vale, of tears.
He wept for two weeks in the season that coincided with the anniversary of my mother’s death. Angry and wretched, he cried and complained. My thoughts were not generous in his regard. I cursed the fate that had taken away my plucky little mother and left me with him. She, with so much to live for. He, a disconsolate, self-pitying mess taking me down with him, his depression a contagion infecting me through the phone. Somehow, from a source that may also have been him, I found my way to paint and broach my written thesis.
FROM THE PHOTOGRAPHS on my studio wall, I picked one to start with, a black-and-white dogfight, for its action. My two paintings added color and stuttered the original image, adding a horizon line for distance, and, from another photograph, graffiti and a partial figure. In recognition of my images’ digital origins, I painted the pixels. I made two versions of my image, one in warm, saturated colors, the other desaturated.
In both these paintings the dogfight photo origins are clearly discernible. Years later on, after leaving RISD, I kept painting from the Brooklyn photographs, returning to the dogfight image. After several alternations between hand-painted works and digital manipulation, the dogs slipped into abstraction, as in New Dogs Symmetrical.
LEFT: Nature of Life April, 2010, acrylic on canvas on panel, 30" × 36"
RIGHT: Nature of Life, 2010, acrylic on canvas on panel, 36" × 36"
New Dogs Symmetrical, 2015, digital collage on paper, 48" × 96"
LEFT: Second Man Walled and Windowed, 2011, acrylic on canvas on panel, 40" × 40"
RIGHT: Second Man Drawn, 2011, acrylic on canvas on panel, 40" × 40"
In my RISD studio, I reviewed Lucille’s photos one after another, trying to resist her strong sense of narrative, seeking out her multiracial scenes, and trying to reconfigure them as my own, not wanting merely to repeat a play Lucille had already staged. From a photo with strong interaction between three men and a little dog, a piece contrasting figures from conflicting classes and generations, the little dog’s aggression enacting social conflict, I extracted just one figure I called “2nd man.” Leaving out the other two men and the little dog, but working with 2nd man, I experimented with his image in my 2nd Man paintings.
I recombined motifs freely, painting in series in order to try different ways of making images and applying paint. A pair of lifeguards showed through a window over 2nd man. What a joy, this time for experimentation and imagination.
And so it went, day after day, in the luxury graduate school grants its fortunate inhabitants: the gift of time. The gift of time to concentrate on your own work, to try out new approaches, new techniques, new visual moods as unhurriedly as possible in American life. I painted steadily, not wanting to stop at the end of the day or the end of my evening. Just a touch of acrylic here, of varnish there, painting no longer a test I was constantly failing.
Once I had made fourteen paintings, I had extinguished RISD Painting’s dragon’s breath. My last manual + digital painting combined imagery from three of Lucille’s photographs, plus collage of a little bootlegged text. The colors, chemical rather than organic, declared their departure from nature. I titled this 40" × 40" painting, with the lifeguards I had used in a 2nd Man painting, Back Man 1. It was Back Man because I extracted this figure with his back to the viewer from the far background of one of Lucille’s photographs. Back Man spoke to me as a gesture as well as an image, for in his fuck-you little hat, he turned his back to you, to graduate school, to all its pathetic groping bewilderment. Later on, Back Man would reappear several times in my paintings, but no longer as a mood, simply as a motif, an arresting figure wearing a hat.
Back Man 1 was 1 because I expected to paint others inspired by the motif. In my studio I addressed it familiarly as My Last RISD Painting, or MLRP: my emblem of survival. It was, in fact, the last painting I made at RISD, and I showed it in the MFA Thesis Show.
Back Man 1, 2011, acrylic, oil stick, and collage on canvas, 40" × 40"
In the event, the painting side of my MFA thesis unrolled straightforwardly, even though initially it was the more intimidating. The written thesis was another thing. The concept came easily as the elaboration of my transit from historian to painter by comparing how I used archives as historian and as visual artist. I titled it “Archive to Brush.” Surely a snap for me, the author of seven books. I wasn’t afraid of words. I knew I could write. I loved to write. The only problem I envisioned would be stanching a flood of words.
A Skype with Teacher Roger in charge of our written theses envisioned fifteen hundred to two thousand words. Fifteen hundred to two thousand words! I could write that in a weekend! I had written more words than that for Teacher Debra’s term paper. I made a start on my thesis, quickly up to 525 words, and I was only warming up.
Please, Roger, give me at least twenty-five hundred words.
Was word limit my major obstacle?
NO NO NO NO NO
Two huge boulders, one discursive, one emotional. The discursive seemed easier to overcome, a matter of approach, of style. I had to write at length about how things looked, not what they meant. What they were made of—medium, composition, palette—and how they were made, meaning process. This entailed a refocusing, and that I could manage.
The emotional obstacle was much bigger and harder to finagle, for I began by expressing my conviction, which I still hold today, that the art world—rather, The Art World—had no firm criteria beyond the market for deciding what is good art. Scholarship isn’t innocent of bias, but it has peer review and the expectation of respect for the archive. The market, in contrast, relates to social constructs of race and gender and to who can be an interesting artist according to society’s values. I knew from Critic Rob and Artist Stanley that social exchange—who wants to spend time with whom, who feels comfortable in the studio with whom, which studios curators visit, which artist is young and cute enough to create buzz—all that influenced gallery representation, sales, and collecting. Yes, yes, there is definitely such a thing as the quality of the work. But there’s too much good work in the world to explain in terms of quality alone who counts as an artist worth noting and who gets ignored. I could see that who counted had to do with race and gender and class and place (New York, yes; New Jersey, no). What I considered discrimination pissed me off, still pisses me off, this art-historical-canon-making a reflection of fashion, not some free-floating quality of intrinsic worth or artistic genius, all the while pretending that objective criteria exist.
I knew from my own book Creating Black Americans that there existed entire bodies of work, entire worlds of interesting art that were not visible in the art history I studied at Rutgers and that RISD took for granted. My Artist Mentors Mildred Howard and Camille Billops said it plainly and right out loud:
The Art World is racist as hell and unashamed of it.
This was why Romare Bearden, the avatar of collage, did not even appear in a book on collage and why Robert Colescott, my patron saint of painting, only came up if I mentioned him.
Experienced women painters I knew, Pat Steir and Faith Ringgold, told me stories of disregard, of keeping on with their work out of “sheer spite.” Howardena Pindell stated much the same thing. I knew the visual art world I was writing about and entering was rigged and rigged against me, even before factoring in my own personal fatal flaw of age. These things pissed me off, and I wrote as with ten tiny penises pissing through my fingers.
There was piss all over the draft I read to my colleagues, the part about art’s lack of standards. They were aghast. How could I be so self-righteous about scholarship and dismissive of visual art?
NO NO NO NO NO
How could I be so sanctimonious about scholarship’s weighing of evidence and application of professional standards? Whose side was I on, anyway? What was I? Princeton historian or RISD painter? I had to choose.
Here’s how it came down: I wasn’t qualified to write a thesis in visual art. Gotta get expert help. I took my draft to the writing center. Yes, I went for help in writing. I sat down with Teacher Jen; I ate humble pie. I went home. I revised. I consulted with Teacher Jen some more. More humility. I revised. I consulted. I revised. I purged the anger from my written thesis, deleted self-righteousness and wrung out the piss—tried to, at least.
My thesis as well as my paintings met their deadlines, ready for visits from our two outside readers, Mira and Helen. I met productively with Reader Mira, who noted my citation of her work. She liked Back Man 1 and urged me to paint more like that and not be diverted into books, even artist’s books. But when Reader Helen was scheduled to come to Providence, I could not be there.
I could not be in Providence when Reader Helen came because the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was giving me a Centennial Medal at commencement that very day. An honor of a lifetime. What about the scheduling conflict? There was no way in hell or in heaven or purgatory that I would skip Harvard commencement and my Centennial Medal to meet Reader Helen in Providence. Not even a teensy twinge of divided loyalties between my second reader and my Centennial Medal. I would have to see her some other time, and I was willing to come to Boston in order to see her. I emailed Reader Helen to explain my predicament and to ask please please to let me bring JPGs of my paintings to her at her convenience.
Reader Helen did not reply. I waited another week before resending my message, figuring my email might have gotten buried or accidentally deleted. Making the enormous request for half an hour of her eyes on my painting and my written thesis, now down to only twenty-eight hundred words, I was exceedingly humble in tone. Would she please please let me know when would be convenient for her to let me come to Boston, just not at the same time as Harvard commencement?
Reader Helen never responded. I don’t know why, can’t even begin to guess what happened on her end, for I know what it’s like to be overwhelmed and to fall behind in my email. In Reader Helen’s unbroken silence, Teacher Duane scolded me for harassment. His accusation spewed out of my email, as though I had mugged Reader Helen and run off with her things. In Reader Helen’s absence, a young visiting artist signed on as my second reader so I could graduate alongside my colleagues.
NOW THAT WAS a very good day! My Dear Friend Thad came from Philadelphia, and my former Princeton student Crystal and her family came from New Haven. Duhirwe and I graduated. In a mass of black robes, I wore my bright (though faded) crimson Harvard PhD robe, unable to resist that final gesture of personal vanity. I patted myself on the back for perseverance. For survival. For simply getting through.
Everything was copacetic, even after the program revealed that all seven other MFA painters, including Mike, whose painting had hardly progressed in two years, that all seven of them had graduated with honors. Only one painter of the eight lacked honors.