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"The Artist's Life" was a video podcast series presented by NYFA Current, New York Foundation for the Arts’ monthly online arts magazine. These short videos offered glimpses into the everyday lives of NYFA-affiliated artists in their studios and homes as they discussed their work and creative process.
Click on the links below to view individual episodes
All interviews conducted by Suzan Sherman and Daniel Wentworth
All videos shot and edited by Melissa Friedling/Slouch Productions
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Episode 1: Kate Gilmore
Before pressing record and shooting herself in close-up, video artist Kate Gilmore sets up a particular challenge for herself—be it busting out of Sheetrock enclosures, climbing out of pits of dirt, or balancing herself on a tall stack of chairs precariously held together with rope—which she knows, even before the film starts rolling, that she may or may not be able to accomplish. With minimal edits, Gilmore’s formally considered videos feel incredibly intimate, but can also be painful to watch, as the camera unflinchingly documents all of her repeated falls and setbacks. Appearing strong but not invincible, she often dons pumps, pencil skirts, and other incongruously “feminine” attire as she throws herself into these strenuous challenges, suggesting an underlying feminist message about the 21st-century female experience.
Gilmore insists that she is not a masochist—when NYFA Current met with her she said this is the biggest misconception about her work—nor is she an endurance artist following in the footsteps of Marina Abramovic. The exercises she creates for her videos are short-lived, and she maintains that her goals are realistic, though difficult. Soon after welcoming us into her studio, the unassuming and down-to-earth Gilmore admitted that she does not know where her work is going next, though her scale and range are surely expanding. Last summer, as part of the Public Art Fund’s In the Public Realm program, she orchestrated a live performance-sculpture in Bryant Park, Walk the Walk, her first piece to employ performers other than herself.
Kate Gilmore was born in Washington D.C. in 1975 and lives and works in New York. Her work has been exhibited at the 2010 Whitney Biennial; the Brooklyn Museum; The Kitchen; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Bryant Park (Public Art Fund); Locust Projects; White Columns; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Artpace; The J. Paul Getty Museum; The Rose Art Museum; and PS1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center. Gilmore has been the recipient of several international awards and honors, such as the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Award for Artistic Excellence, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance, The LMCC Workspace Residency, New York Foundation for The Arts Fellowship, and The Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Residency. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art; the Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Episode 2: Vito Acconci
A majority of artists spend their lives attempting to master a particular medium—be it painting or sculpture or film—but Vito Acconci, who turned 71 this year, initially began his creative life as a poet in the 1960s. A decade later he switched his attention to installation and performance art, for which he remains best known. In the video, Theme Song (1973), he attempts to seductively coax the viewer into joining him (as if penetrating the video screen were a possibility); in his performance, Seedbed (1971), he masturbated for eight hours a day beneath the floorboards of the Sonnabend Gallery. In another huge creative leap, he founded Acconci Studio in 1988. Though Acconci has no formal architectural training, he works with a group of architects and designers to hone a collective vision of futuristic possibilities of where we might dwell and work, and what we might wear while doing so.
Acconci welcomed us into his studio, dressed head to toe in his standard black. While sipping a mug of Lipton tea, he spent the afternoon reflecting on his vast span of work over the last fifty years. Polite, articulate, forward-thinking, and always verging on the philosophical, his enthusiasm about design, which he defined as art on and around people, was contagious. His goal, he told us, is to design objects and spaces that respond to, rather than dictate, users’ behavior. “I know a lot of people in an art context who think, why would I want to do this? Isn’t art more interesting than design? I guess I don’t think that, because I think design is art in the middle of people, or it’s art that people can have as part of their person.”
Born in Bronx, NY, in 1940, Vito Acconci received a B.A. in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an M.F.A. in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa. Acconci began his career as a poet, co-editing 0 TO 9 with Bernadette Mayer in the late 1960s, then shifted his creative practice to focus on performance, photography, and video. In 1988, Acconci founded the architecture and design firm Acconci Studio, which is responsible for innovative projects around the world, including an artificial island in Graz, Austria; a building in Tokyo; and, closer to home, the West 8th Street-New York Aquarium subway station in Coney Island. Current projects include a portable retractable roof, an interactive tunnel in Indianapolis, a meditation park in The Netherlands, and a plaza in Santiago, Chile.
Episode 3: Sigrid Nunez
In 1976 Sigrid Nunez moved in with her boyfriend David Rieff—and his famous mother, Susan Sontag—at 340 Riverside Drive. Nunez was in her 20s at the time and just beginning to make her own fledgling marks as a writer. As she recounts in her newly published book, Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, living with mother and son created some understandable tensions, but at the same time Sontag became a key mentor. Reflecting now, Nunez considers Sontag as her “greatest influence.”
NYFA Current met up with Nunez on a rainy morning at City Bakery, one of the neighborhood cafés she commonly frequents to edit her writing. Nunez, who also teaches at the New School, then brought us to one of the university’s classrooms, covered in murals by the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. Nunez spoke to us about writing Sempre Susan, a very different project than her previous books, all of which are novels; learning discipline—“I spend my days writing and reading…I have a kind of monkish personality”; and the themes of memory and nostalgia that repeatedly recur in her books.
Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag, published March 30, 2011. Among the many journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her honors and awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.
Episode 4: Kalup Linzy
Born in 1977 in Stuckey, Florida, multimedia artist Kalup Linzy first became known for his serialized soap operas, particularly All My Churen, in which he played many of the characters, often in drag, while exploring issues of race, class, and sexuality historically absent from mainstream soaps. His earlier work was characterized by DIY production values, including disjunction between lip movement and speech—a riff on the dialect of his small, Southern hometown—while his newer videos have a decidedly more professional quality. In recent years, Linzy has begun to also work with animation and music, both individually and in collaboration with the actor James Franco.
Linzy invited NYFA Current into his Crown Heights studio and home in April where he sang us a song he’d written the previous night, “Police Rhythm Blue,” inspired by Marvin Gaye and blaxploitation films, while projecting his soap operas on his living room wall. Linzy’s countenance is definitely Southern—charming, hospitable, and slightly slow-paced, despite the urban environment that now surrounds him. His kitchen table filled with paint-filled plastic canisters, his living room walls covered with his paintings, he reflected on the therapeutic power of imagination and art, and the contrast in his life between his often solitary practice, and the glamorous opportunities that keep coming his way.
Kalup Linzy is an American multimedia artist currently living and working in Brooklyn. A graduate from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003, Linzy also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is a recipient of grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, and Art Matters. His work has been included in the exhibitions Frequency, The Studio Museum in Harlem; Prospect.1 New Orleans; 30 Americans, Rubell Family Collection; Greater New York, MoMA PS1; and At Home/Not At Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College. His work is in the public collections at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Modern Art. In 2010 Linzy appeared on the long running ABC soap opera “General Hospital” alongside James Franco in a storyline that incorporated performance art. On May 5, 2011 he will be honored as the University of South Florida College of the Arts Alumni of the Year.
Episode 5: John Yau
As a child growing up outside Boston, John Yau read insatiably, but instead of children's books he preferred biographies and travelogues. He began writing poems at 13 and has since published more than a dozen books of poetry and collaborations with artists. In his twenties, he began writing about visual art as a way, he explained, to pay closer attention to the outside world. Now the Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail, Yau is also the author of the A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns; In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol; and The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry. Yau is a rare breed in many ways, particularly in his ability to bridge the visual and literary arts; over the years he has found that his poetry and criticism have bled into each other, creating a hybrid form all its own.
Yau graciously invited us into his sprawling apartment in the Garment District, packed with books and original artworks by the likes of Philip Guston, Thomas Nozkowski, and Deborah Butterfield. His daughter, Cerise, happened to be off from school that day, and along with Charlie, their wire-haired dachshund, lounged on the sofa beside Yau. In the process, daughter and dog became a part of the interview and video shoot. Refreshingly down to earth, Yau described for us a typical day, which entails an intricate juggling act of balancing writing, editing, and teaching with his being a husband and father.
John Yau is the author of books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has been the recipient of awards and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Creative Capital-Warhol Foundation; National Endowment for the Arts; and the New York Foundation of the Arts. Since 2006, he has been an Arts Editor of the Brooklyn Rail, and has published over one hundred reviews and essays there. He has taught at Emerson College, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts (Bard College), the Maryland Institute College of Art, University of California, Berkeley, and currently teaches in the Visual Arts Department of Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). His next book of poems, My Latest Adventures in Monochrome, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in the spring of 2012.
Episode 6: Thomas Nozkowski
Thomas Nozkowski was born in Teaneck, NJ, in 1944, and attended The Cooper Union in the mid-60s where he studied with some of the great Abstract Expressionists of the day, who taught him that spontaneity is key to innovation. Because of this education, he avoids preparatory sketches and instead improvises his colorful, geometric compositions over time, sometimes over the course of several months or even years. Each time he re-approaches a work-in-progress, he scrapes the entire surface clean, putting every part of the composition into question as he works toward a final, resolved image. Nozkowski paints objects, places, and emotions from his personal experience, but his subject matter is rarely identifiable: his decidedly abstract works are all untitled and he is reluctant to offer clues on the "seeds" from which his works arise.
We filmed Nozkowski in his home, roughly 90 miles north of Manhattan, where he has lived and worked with his wife, the sculptor Joyce Robbins, for 30 years. The campus of their two-person artist colony includes two beautiful freestanding studios that were originally barns, and serene flower gardens. Their home, whose original structure dates back from the 1840s, is filled with their own artworks and those of friends. Lunch was served on plates of Tom’s design, commissioned by an esteemed restaurant in Italy. We sat with Nozkowski in his remarkably tidy studio, which contains two imposing, alphabetized libraries—one of CDs, the other, artist monographs. There, amongst paintings in various stages of completion, Tom talked to us about the thrill he finds in investing a single edge with tension and power, and about the kinship he feels with artists across time.
Thomas Nozkowski received a BFA from The Cooper Union in New York City in 1967. He began exhibiting in group shows in 1973, and made his solo debut six years later. To date, Nozkowski’s paintings have been featured in more than 300 museum and gallery exhibitions worldwide, including nearly 70 solo exhibitions. He has received four awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the New York State Creative Artists Public Service Grant, and the National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Grant. In 2010 he was invited to become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nozkowski has been a Professor of Fine Art at the Mason Gross School of the Arts of Rutgers University in New Jersey since 2000 and has lectured at institutions across the United States. He lives and works with his wife, the sculptor Joyce Robins, in High Falls, NY, and New York City.
Episode 7: Polly Apfelbaum
Polly Apfelbaum’s professed love of “visual overload… visual extravaganza” is manifest everywhere in her four-decade body of work. As a young artist in New York in the ’70s, she drew inspiration from diverse styles, blending Pop’s intense colors and cartoonish shapes with Abstract Expressionist modes of pigment application such as dripping and staining as well as Minimalism’s use of serially arranged modular forms. Her primary material is fabric, chosen for its portability, mutability, and softness, as well as its associations with the body and “women’s work.” In the early ’90s she hit upon her signature technique of creating highly complex and labor-intensive installations—termed “fallen paintings” by critics—made up of many pieces of hand-dyed fabric carefully arranged on the floor. Recently, she has introduced what she calls a performative aspect to her installations, creating them on-site by cutting improvised, irregular shapes from sequined stretch fabrics. She has also begun bodies of work in drawing and ceramics, and returned to printmaking, her college major, after a 25-year hiatus.
Polly greeted us in her live-work loft at the South Street Seaport and regaled us with stories of when she and her husband moved into the building 33 years ago, its window casements empty of glass. Back then, packs of wild cats and dogs stalked the area and fishmongers filled the bar across the street after their graveyard shifts. Polly spoke with us about beauty’s deceptive complexity, her continued fascination with the floor as an irreverent and physically engaging site for artwork, and the thoughts behind her playful, pop culture-inspired titles—Powerpuff and The Dwarves without Snow White among them. She showed us some of her earliest works as well as her latest creations, Feely Feeley Feelies, psychedelic compositions of stripes, polka dots, and irregular checkerboards that were mouthwatering despite having been made from small slabs of unfired polymer clay.
Polly Apfelbaum was born in 1955 in Abington, PA, and received her BFA from Tyler School of Art. She has shown her work consistently in the United States and internationally since her first one-person show in 1986. In 2003, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia mounted a major mid-career survey of her work, which was accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue and which traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. Recent solo exhibitions include Haunted House, Atelier Amden, Switzerland; Off Colour, D'Amelio Terras, New York; and Anything Can Happen in a Horse Race, Milton Keynes Gallery, UK. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum, and Dallas Museum of Art among others. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1978.
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