Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

I grew up in the 1950s/1960s suburbia in a Republican and Christian nuclear family. I was a tomboy who was attracted to rebel girls and artsy boys. I was a curious student and loved exploring ancient myths and histories. I also spent a fair amount of time by myself drawing in my room and, ironically, that is what I’ve returned to after a very active and accomplished professional life. For most of my adult life, I was a photographer. My photographic projects looked at landscapes as socially constructed spaces (mostly through the lens of official neglect and historical forgetting). After I came out as a lesbian in the mid- 1980s, I started making work that explored erotic memories from childhood (Dream Girls, Being & Riding), as well as continuing my landscape interests. My more recent drawings and paintings, with a few exceptions, construct and are constructed by a very personal artistic genealogy that speaks to my queer memories, desires and feelings.

What are some recent or current projects you are working on?

For the past year I’ve been working on a series of drawings and paintings that bring together two artists, Betty Parsons and Ed Paschke, who lived and worked in very different times, different places, and in almost diametrically opposed styles. Yet I claim both as queer ancestors and make it my challenge to bring them together in my works in an inventive and personal way. Lately these seem to take the form of pseudo-portraits, perhaps of queer hybrids that could be their artistic offspring. The gender of these creatures is completely open and undefined and they probably have a lot of “me” in them.

What is one of the bigger challenges you and/or other artists are struggling with these days and how do you see it developing?

It is a great privilege to be an artist but always a struggle to survive in a society that only understands money/market value as the measure of artistic success. When I started out in my art career, rents were cheap and there was a robust ecosystem of nonprofits, artist-run spaces, local community spaces, educational institutions and cultural centers where one could show work that was experimental and political: performances, installations, conceptual and socially engaged projects, film, photography and video. The backlash came in the 1980s with the Reagan and Bush administrations’ efforts to gut the NEA, thereby removing a major support system for artists and making them more dependent on for-profit galleries. This changed the way works looked (bigger, more costly to produce, small editions) and the ways that young artists were educated to navigate the new reality. Today, the cost of housing in New York and other big cities is out of reach for most artists just graduating from MFA programs. It takes a lot of tenacity and resilience to figure out how to survive economically in the “gig-work” economy and still make time for your art. Art schools themselves are an increasingly endangered species–some esteemed ones have folded in recent years and we may see more go under as the Trump regime cancels visas for students who engage in social protest and international students think twice about coming to the United States to pursue their studies.

How do you see your work evolving in parallel to things that are going on around you right now?

The Trump/Musk juggernaut has certainly cast its long shadow over us all. In response to Trump’s first administration, I made a group of drawings and paintings, the “So-Long Bobby” series, that were my way of mourning the ideals of liberty and justice for all; of empathy and altruism as values to be cherished; of honesty in public life and a reverence for the truth and facts. I happened to see a photograph taken by Paul Fusco from Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train in 1968. As the train rolled by, a small group of bystanders held up a sign that read “So-Long Bobby.” That struck me as a fitting epitaph for the generosity of spirit, optimism and hope for the future that Bobby Kennedy conveyed as a presidential candidate before he was gunned down. I created a retro neon sign-like logo out of those words and made a series of elegiac works that expressed my own despair at what was happening to our country under Trump. Needless to say, Trump 2.0 is even worse but I’m responding by making posters and marching in demonstrations. My studio, for now, is my place of refuge and continuity in the midst of so much external fear and turmoil.

Is there any source material you find extremely important?

I’ve already mentioned the work of other artists like Paul Fusco, Betty Parsons and Ed Paschke that I’ve drawn inspiration from, but the list is much, much longer. Other artists whose images have inspired my work include Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Elizabeth Murray, Yayoi Kusama, Forrest Bess, Frank Stella, Terry Winters, Florine Stettheimer, Mildred Thompson, Thomas Nozkowski — a very eclectic roster! It is one of the gifts of the digital age that we have endless visual source material at our command. While I am a rather diffident social media user, I always enjoy seeing the feeds of artists and art people that I follow on Instagram. As my works evolve, I use source material from various databases to incorporate into my drawings, though in very idiosyncratic contexts. For example, to render sex toys in a series of drawings, I went “shopping” online for those items that would work in my compositions. In another instance, I found a photograph of a ruffled bed skirt to supply the visual information I needed for a detail in the painting I’m currently working on. So, there is no hierarchy of source material, really. It all feeds into my artistic mill and comes out in surprising ways.

A lot of your recent paintings and drawings derive from portraiture. Do you draw from life or a photograph? Or is the reference conceived within?

That the current work suggests a series of portraits evolved quite organically from my process. I’ve never considered myself a portraitist in the conventional sense and have drawn myself only a couple of times in my life. As I mentioned before, these hybrid pseudo-portraits that I’m making draw inspiration from imagined queer ancestors, in this case Ed Paschke and Betty Parsons. Most of Ed Paschke’s works depict the kinds of subjects one would have seen from the 1940s to 1960s on television or in popular media: advertisements, press photographs, publicity shots of movie stars, boxers and circus people, rendered in the artist’s uniquely pop decorative manner. Parsons, on the other hand, was a non- representational painter and assemblagist who used gestural abstraction as her visual language. So borrowing references from such disparate sources is part of the challenge for me conceptually. How do I get them to play together in my head and on my canvas? Whether viewers understand what the referents are is not necessary to the enjoyment of the work that results.

Is there a quote you’ve been thinking about a lot or one that you remind yourself of frequently?

I have several quotes that I keep posted in my studio and that I like to re-read as they have particular resonance for me. One is from Doris Lessing: “Whatever you’re meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.” Another one is by John Cage: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas…But as you continue working, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

Do you think your works have a strong relationship with sculpture? How do you think they might act/play together?

Except for a series of multimedia photographic installations that I made from the mid-1980s through the 1990s, I’ve always worked two-dimensionally. I think of my works as “pictures” in the most basic sense, as worlds represented on a flat surface. That said, I wouldn’t shy away from moving into 3d object-making if my ideas led me in that direction.

What was the last show you saw that stuck out to you?

I really enjoyed the LA-based, trans multimedia artist Young Joon Kwak’s current solo show at the Leslie- Lohman Museum here in NY. Titled “Resisterhood,” and curated by Stamatina Gregory, it features molds and imprints of torsos, body parts (the artist’s own and those of friends, lovers and collaborators) — some sporting fetish-fashion and chest bindings. These casts are suspended in space on transparent test line and are bedazzled on their outer surfaces with rhinestones and crystals, while their inner surfaces show the detailed imprints of the original subjects’ bodies. To me, they really speak to a yearned-for partnership between human embodiment as a joyful and festive celebration and as a magical suit of armor to ward off threats to the queer body from an ignorant and hostile world. In a way, they share a kinship with Nick Cave’s Soundsuits.

What is your process like in terms of conceptualizing?

I begin by making drawings as a way to test my ideas and if they look promising, I develop a series of colored pencil or watercolor pencil drawings that carries out the theme in a more finished way. From there I move into making paintings based on ideas fleshed out in the drawings. But oil painting is its own medium and issues of scale become very important. Do I want to create an intimate and private viewing experience or am I going for more public monumentality? I work very slowly, building up the compositions layer by layer–I can easily spend two months on one modest-sized painting. I enjoy the depth of color that oil paint produces and it gives me a great deal of latitude in rendering a range of textures and tones.

What are you really excited about right now?

Always the painting I’m working on!

In regards to your making, what is something that you’ve always wanted to do and are working towards achieving it?

At this stage in my life, I am keenly aware of how time is so precious. When I was younger, in my 20s and 30s, time felt limitless, open to all possibilities. I wanted to do everything – make photographs, teach, write. And I did all that pretty successfully. But when I reached my early 60s, my life turned upside down: a long-term relationship ended; I moved to another city and took a new, demanding job; and I became disenchanted with photography. All of my anchors were gone. I floated for two years, trying to figure out what I wanted for the rest of my life. Finally, one day I sat at my table and started to draw. And I just kept drawing and it felt so full of possibility; it was like coming home to myself after a long journey. So my way of answering your question is that I am just where I need and want to be: grateful for every day that I no longer have to work for a living and that I can spend in the studio doing what I love.

Can you share one of the best or worst reactions you have gotten as a result of your work?

The best reaction to my work is when viewers appreciate the humor in it. I have always thought that humor/wit is one of the most underappreciated attributes in art and this is why I enjoy artists like Phillip Guston, Kara Walker, Tom Friedman, Nicole Eisenmann, Hannah Barrett and Keith Boadwee.

 

Interview conducted and edited by Liam Owings