On artists, privilege, and making and seeing art in New York City
A couple of weeks ago I spent a Thursday gallery hopping with artists, one of whom is a friend1 I met years ago in DUMBO at an art show that she and her husband curated. At the time I was trying to figure out how to meet other artists and how to be an artist. She told me about her project, NYC Crit Club, which has both helped me understand the many ways one can be a working artist (you need to have a job that pays your bills if you are not independently wealthy) and pushed me to keep working at my own art practice while building community in various ways (and working various types of jobs with my own business2). She is a true community builder and champion for artists. She and most of the other artists I met gallery hopping on that recent Thursday no longer live in NYC.
One of the shows we saw was Claudia Bitrán: Titanic, A Deep Emotion, at Cristin Tierney. Bitrán has been recreating the entire movie Titanic over the past 10 years using various (non) actors, handmade sets, rewritten dialogue ,and at various locations. Her show included a full length movie and numerous ephemera that she created for the film, including scripts, drawings, paintings, notes, and set design. It was fascinating and a little bit insane.
I think most great artwork is like that. It blows you away and makes you think damn! The commitment and skill and true obsession!
It is very hard to make that kind of art in late stage capitalism.
Every time I find an artist whose work I love, I do very quick research to find out:
1. Do they have an MFA? (Check their CV.)
2. What is their access to capital? What is their class status? (Who are their parents? Where do they live? What does their partner do? etc.)
3. Do they have kids? Are they caretakers of others? (This is often impossible or hard to figure out for a variety of reasons.)
4. Do they look like they are considered an other in their everyday situations? (Do they present as white? Do they speak English natively?)
5. If they are not independently wealthy, do they disclose how they make money? (Usually they do not disclose this.)
I do this so I can assess how relatable they are to me and what kind of work they may have the capacity to make, and ultimately to make me feel inspired or depressed. Usually it makes me feel a little bit depressed because most artists I discover whose work I love have an MFA, have access to capital, do not have kids or their partner does the majority of the labor around caretaking/management of caretaking, are not considered other beyond maybe being a white-presenting woman, and do not disclose how they make money if they are not independently wealthy. It’s not that I think people with those privileges should not have their work championed, it’s that I want to see more work by artists who do not have those privileges championed. The only way that will happen in the USA is to create a social safety for everyone and push for radical change within the art market.
This was discussed a bit in the article New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art by Josh Kline. I read the 19-page essay on my phone over many days in tiny pockets of time. I also read the article by Aruna D’Souza, Unlike Josh Kline, I Choose New York, in Hyperallergic and I listened to the Unstretched podcast by Gina Beavers and Timothy Hull, The Titanic Real Estate Episode, which was shared by my current mentor3 in Canopy. Before I read the long Kline article, I read this somewhat shorter article by him in N+1, What Are You?, about his identity and how identity is perceived in the art world. I loved how he pointed out things that I have often felt. I share many of his frustrations and experiences of being asked (or told) what are you?
It seems like Kline does not have an MFA (inspiring!), and his access to privilege based on my criteria shared earlier made me more interested in what he had to say because he has had at least some real understanding of privilege as opposed to someone who either has mainly just has a lot of privileges and/or is totally tone deaf.
For most of my 20s and early 30s I lived with other people, renting either a room in an apartment or a room in a house in various cities. I lived more-or-less paycheck to paycheck. It wasn’t until I started my job at Vornado in Washington, DC in 2016, that I realized how real estate ownership truly dictates much of our lives. That was also when I started being able to save money. It was the ultimate sellout moment for me and I loved it. I could stomach working for a very corporate real estate investment trust because my job was working on a very specific area in Northern Virginia, activating half-full office buildings in Crystal City4 and paying artists and cultural workers to do interesting things. I lead a supper club, ping pong events, and bachata dance nights. I helped put up public art and pushed for making office spaces into art studios. It was a dream job and I only quit because they would not give me a serious budget or a team for the work they wanted me to do across a much larger portfolio once they had a spin-merge with JBG Smith. And they wanted me to commute to Bethesda.
Also, I saw how much other women with families had to work to get the same recognition as men and it looked terrible. Scheduling dentist appointments during their lunch hour and rushing home after work to get groceries and then getting passed over for promotions while dads were coasting on the unpaid labor of their wives or partners, seemingly carefree at work. It wasn’t that drastic but it felt like it! I still wanted to make art and I had no time to do so because I really enjoyed my job and spent my free time also networking for my job.
So I saved up, made a plan to move to Berlin, and did a three-month self-led residency in Oaxaca. This is a long way to say I realized Kline’s thesis a long time ago and thought, I will never make it in the USA as an artist and be able to have a family. The ironic thing is that in the process of these plans, and after my little residency, I fell in love with someone who not only has more faith in his ability to make money, but also more skill and privileges than I. We comprised by moving to NYC together (at the time we had no idea if his business would grow, it could have easily been mine that got more lucrative) and fast forward 8 years, we own a house in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, we have two children, and I attempt to make art.
So the Kline article also really stressed me out. Like, Oh My God, I finally have done it, I’ve done it! I have stability and some space to make art, but my brain is mush (I have two small children), and I am making paintings which he has made very clear, is not cool. I dream about making large ground-breaking work, and I will, but this is what I have the capacity for right now. And that is saying something! I (finally) have a lot of privileges and it still often feels impossible.
And while I agree with one of Kline’s assertions, which is basically to move to another cheaper city to make art, not NYC, I also think we can make NYC a lot better and if we are already here, we should.
Another day in the evening, when it was still too cold, I was at the opening of the Whitney Biennial with a group of artists and moms whom I amazingly have met and actually really like. One of the artists said something along the lines of “the art made outside of NYC is so much better than work made here” and I responded with something like “why do you think that? Why are you here then?!”. We talked about space and lack of it. I thought about the social and physical cost of having to drive everywhere and the reality of taking care of a lot of space. I thought about how nice it is to hear so many different languages in a day and how it feels to be in the elements all the time. I thought about how often I run into my neighbors and how we actually stop and chat. I thought about my mortgage.
I always say I would not raise my kids anywhere other than NYC in the USA, but if my parents lived anywhere other than the suburbs of Arizona, I might consider it.
I really liked what Timothy Hull said in the Unstretched podcast, something like ‘you gotta get scrappy!’ and I think that is really good advice. Everyone has started out working with trash or pining for a studio they may never have, and if they have enough resources and drive they attempt to make art anyway. I wish I had realized a lot sooner that you don’t need to pretend like you don’t have to make money doing something else, you don’t need to be technically good at what you are trying to do, you don’t even need to know what you are making, you just have to find a tiny bit of time and space to make something and then repeat until you figure it out. And also, we need federal paid parental leave, single payer healthcare, and a real social safety net, which is all possible if we just stopped letting our government use our money elsewhere.5
Footnotes:
This friend, artist, and mom is Hilary Doyle. She has and continues to inspire me in many ways.
Distill Creative led in-person craft workshops, designed and led corporate creative experiences, and was a contractor for curating and producing various art in public space projects mainly in Washington, DC. I also led Airbnb Experiences.
Catherine Haggarty, artist and mom, who now runs NYC Crit Club and created Canopy.
Now called National Landing, home to Amazon HQ2
The government is using our money on bombs to kill people. This is why I joined DSA years ago, thanks to my husband’s influence. We have a world to win.