In May 1987, I graduated from the College of Charleston and, three weeks later, moved to New York City to attend the Master of Fine Arts Program at the School of Visual Arts. I was twenty-one years old and had never lived in a big city. To me, crack was something you did to an egg, rush hour was getting to the beach by high tide to go fishing, and a power lunch was grilled cheese on the hood of a car. I took a yellow taxi to 133 W. Twenty-First Street with two large black Samsonite suitcases, one full of brushes and the other my clothes, which included an emergency envelope containing $500 cash and a one-way plane ticket back to Myrtle Beach on Piedmont Airlines in case things didn’t work out. Those suitcases have followed me to every studio since and serve a symbolic as well as practical purpose. Because of my height, my worktable needs to be higher than the standard tables found in office supply stores. Laying the suitcases on their sides and resting the table legs on top brings my eight-foot-long work surface to an ideal waist level. The present is supported by the past, literally. One of those suitcases remains unopened. The emergency envelope and plane ticket within are unused. Piedmont doesn’t even exist anymore. I guess things worked out.
My first New York residence was the Sloane House YMCA on Thirty-Fourth Street and Ninth Avenue, near Madison Square Garden. Now luxury condominiums, “Slime House” in the late 1980s was a cheap, dimly lit lodging residence teeming with hookers and the semihomeless. My tenth-floor “suite” was so small that I could lie in bed and open the door with my toes. The fluorescent-lit communal men’s bathroom featured yellow shower curtains with dick-sized holes cut at waist level, hair-clogged sinks, and shelves littered with bottles of Gas-X and lube; one morning, I saw a dead body under a white sheet on a gurney being rolled out of the kitchen, heads of lettuce keeping the sheet from blowing off in the wind; pour one out for the poor bastards who ordered salad that night. I was never happier.
Every morning, I’d grab a black coffee at the corner deli and walk thirteen blocks downtown to my TwentyFirst Street studio. For the next two years, I never deviated from that routine, not even once. Something uncanny happens when you repeat the same behavior thousands of times: the familiar becomes unrecognizable. I noticed perfectly bound bundles of cardboard that migrated from basements up to the curb for sanitation pickup in the predawn darkness. Like soft caramels stamped with Chinese logos in dark green ink, those cubes enticed me so much that I dragged them into my studio and created multi-paneled cardboard paintings on which I drew with electrical tape, wire, polyurethane, charcoal, and oil paint. They were organic and open-ended environments that swelled into every part of the room, incorporating the radiator, windows, and fire escape. At the suggestion of the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard, I decided to limit my palette to mars black and buff white; all other color had to come from found materials. Cardboard is the color of cubism. I had been studying the analytic cubist paintings of Georges Braque and noted how their limited palette drew attention to line and structure.
My studio brimmed with so many cardboard pieces that I would leave them on the steps of random brownstones in Chelsea on my walk back to the dorm late each night. The following morning, I’d spot them on the curb with the morning trash; however, more than once, I saw them through the window hanging on a wall. Either way, it didn’t matter, because my goal was to make something from the street and return it there. My teachers were delighted because they had an entirely new body of work to talk about every two weeks, after which I would destroy everything and start over. Nothing was precious. I was making work, not art.
The School of Visual Arts, or SVA, was fabulous. David Shirey and his administrator, Kathy Schnapper, were kind to me. They still are. The program was intellectually stimulating, and I was challenged to question and reinvent myself. There was decent studio space, twenty-four-hour access, and no limits. In addition, the school operated its own art gallery on Prince Street in SoHo, which was the center of the New York art world in those days. I was fortunate to have been included in several faculty-curated group exhibitions, which gave students hands-on experience in how to construct a gallery show from concept to transportation, installation, promotion, and opening reception. I even made sales and gained some useful contacts. At SVA, I studied closely with well-known artists and critics like Darby Bannard, Robert Mangold, Judy Pfaff, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Jackie Winsor, Joe Zucker, Loren Madsen, Clement Greenberg, and Vito Acconci. However, one teacher towered over the others like the Empire State Building. His name was Gregory Amenoff.