Painter - Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

More Advanc e Praise for

OLD IN AR T SCHOOL

This is a courageous, intellectually stimulating, and wholly entertaining story of one woman reconciling two worlds and being open to the possibilities and changes life offers.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Old in Art School is Nell Painters journey from famous historian to humble art student at age sixty-four. Along the way, she chronicles her own family history, including a mother who reinvented herself at the same age! Painter blows up treasured clichs about what it means to be an artist and who fits that role, presenting us with comic scenes of questionable pedagogy. This book should have a corrective impact on art educationit deserves to be widely read and hotly discussed!

JOYCE KOZLOFF , artist

One of our most distinguished scholars of race and racism has written an incisive, surprising, eloquent, and often wry account of what it means to go back to school at sixty-four, the age at which most academics contemplate retiring from it. Along the way, Nell Painter helps us to see the world as art, art as the world, and to understand arduous, creative self-transformation as toil worth the trouble. Old in Art School is as edgy as a contemporary work of art: bold in form, assured in line and shape, unflinching in its textured analysis of the ways race, gender, and age color how we perceive the world and how the world perceives us.

CATHY N. DAVIDSON , author of The New Education

We all dream of starting over, but Nell Painter really did it. This unsparing account of inspiration and the creative process takes on racism, loneliness, self-loathing, the hazards of aging, and bad manners in the art world. Funny, edifying, and always mesmerizing, this book is also about searching forand finding (most of the time)happiness.

MARTHA HODES , author of Mourning Lincoln

Memoirs by black women artists are extremely rare, and this one is so beautifully written, so perfectly formed in terms of its storytelling trajectory, with so many delectable details about art techniques and subject matter, the relationship of the work to her previous projects as a celebrated historian, and her life struggles as the daughter of once-perfect parents, now aged and with health difficulties. Old in Art School seems both definitive and unforgettable.

MICHELE WALLACE , author of

Dark Designs and Visual Culture

Old in Art School is brilliantly written. A rare reflection of an artist and scholar who combines her voice and vision in this extraordinary work. Painter masterfully weaves a highly personal story into one that situates her art making with her history making... It is a book about belonging and longing; expectations and disappointments; beauty and humor. It is engrossing and heroic.

DEBORAH WILLIS , New York University, author of Envisioning Emancipation

With wisdom, insight, brutal honesty, and flashes of humor, Nell Painter shares her journey to become an artist in this fascinating, original memoir. Old in Art School renders both the insecurity and elation of embarking on this path after a long and distinguished academic career. Her courage, sensitivity, and keen observation offer a rare and needed portrait of an older woman determined to live a creative life on her own terms.

FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN , author of Harlem Nocturne

Old in Art School

ALSO BY NELL PAINTER

The History of White People

Creating Black Americans

Southern History Across the Color Line

Sojourner Truth, A Life, A Symbol

Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 18771919

The Narrative of Hosea Hudson

Exodusters

Copyright 2018 by Nell Painter
First hardcover edition: 2018

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of nonfiction. I have tried to re-create events, locales, and conversations from my memories of them.
In some instances I have changed the names of individuals, indicated initially with an asterisk.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Painter, Nell Irvin, author.

Title: Old in art school : a memoir of starting over / Nell Painter.

Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017055407 | ISBN 9781640090613 | eISBN 9781640090620

Subjects: LCSH: Painter, Nell Irvin. | ArtistsUnited StatesBiography. | Adult college studentsUnited StatesBiography. | Older artistsUnited StatesBiography. | African American women artistsBiography.

Classification: LCC N6537.P23 A2 2018 | DDC 700.92 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055407

Jacket designed by Faceout Studio

Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To the Love of My Life
and the Newark Arts Community

Acknowledgments

Old in Art School

T he world of the Rhode Island School of Design and the world of my former academic life rarely overlapped. But some RISD people, like my printmaking Teacher Randa, inhabited both realms and didnt pretend my book didnt exist. Chatting with her in Benson Hall one day after our printmaking class, I seized a rare opportunity in art school to brag about my writing, to wit, my Sundays morning wonder of wonders, my book reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review .

The New York Times Book Review .

Front-page review.

Oh la la la la!

Randa recognized this as every writers dream, a Once In A Lifetime, a True-to-Life Coup. She ran me downstairs to share my miracle with her teacher colleague Sharon. Passing the printmaking office on our way to Sharon, we ran into Teacher Henry standing outside the doorway of his faculty office, a distraction from wonder, the reminder of a beef.

Teacher Henry had given me an A-minus (bad graduate school grade) and called me dogged (a put-down, not an appreciation of persistence). Recognizing an insult, I had called him out over dogged.

Henrys malevolent magnetic field pulled me off course. Instead of rejoicing over my amazing good fortune with Sharon and Randa, I resumed my fight with Henry. This was stupid of me, now I know, even though I was right, and he was wrong. Henry did not back down. He doubled down. He insisted he had to say what he believed, what he knew, to be true:

You may show your work.

You may have a gallery.

You may sell your work.

You may have collectors.

But you will never be an artist.

Why not? Because I lacked an essential component, some ineffable inner quality necessary to truly be An Artist. I recognized Henrys logic of being as complete, unalloyed bullshit. I said,

Henry, thats bullshit.

I knew it was totally unprofessional of him, a teacher, to say that to me, a student. I knew that from a career of teaching, from a lifetime of knowing teacher-student relations. I knew. I knew. As surely as I was right and he was wrong, I knew. What I felt was something as different as heart from brain.