December 20, 2022 • 31 mins
A live audience and curator Patricia Margarita Hernandez join Helen at the A.I.R. gallery in this epilogue to the series. The conversation moves from generational shifts in the artworld to Helen’s own Robin Hood fantasy – and ends with some pushback from an audience member who knew Ana.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Okay, folks, this is our final episode and as you
can tell, we got to venture out of the studio
for this one. It has been wild for me to
have this show out in the world. The response was overwhelming.
Tons of people I didn't know DMed me, and almost
all of them expressed gratitude that we told the story
(00:36):
of Anna Mendieta and Carl Andre so publicly, and so
my producer Luisa and I wanted to bring the conversation
back to where it all started, the art world. We
invited listeners to a gallery in New York for a
discussion in Q and A. It was a cold December night,
and as the sun went down, the gallery filled with people.
(00:58):
There's seats in the front if any one wants to
come up. We have like the classic classroom problem, where
no one wants to be in the front row. We
were at the ai R Gallery, a place that was
an important part of Anna Mendietta's story. Ai R is
the first nonprofit, artist run, cooperative gallery for women artists
in the United States, and in nineteen seventy nine, it
(01:20):
was where Anna Mendieta showed her beautiful silhouette to photographs
and where she met carl Andre for the first time.
For our discussion, we were joined by Patricia Margherita Hernandez,
a curator who previously served as an associate director of
ai R. Patty's a millennial and I'm a classic gen xer,
(01:40):
and even though we're both feminists and both curators, it
was interesting to recognize how much the art world can
change in just one generation. I want to share that
conversation with you, so once more with feeling. Here's that
the music. I'm Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something
(02:05):
Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist,
recorded live at the ai R Gallery. All right, I'm Luisa,
I'm the producer of Death of an Artist and I
want to welcome Helen Molesworth and Patty Margharita Hernandez to
(02:29):
the stage. So I want to start with a question
for Patty about ai R, which was an important part
of Annamandy at this story. Can you say a little
bit about the origins of the gallery and why it
still feels so important to have a space specifically for
(02:49):
women and non binary people. Ai R began in nineteen
seventy two, and it's you know, at that time, especially
the sixties in early seventies, you know, women artists were
experiencing what we're all too familiar with. They just didn't
have an entry point into the art world in general,
and they didn't have places a show, weren't represented by galleries.
(03:10):
Anna Mendieta was a member from nineteen seventy eight to
nineteen eighty two, and she had two exhibitions, solo exhibitions,
and in between those two shows she organized a group
exhibition with the then member Kazigo Miamoto and then the
artists Arena called Dialectics of Isolation, an exhibition of their
(03:31):
world women artists of the United States, and that show,
for me as a curator art student, fundamentally shifted the
way I thought about art in general. Annamandieta and the
group of artists in the show wanted to have a
conversation about the different types of feminisms and the exclusion
(03:52):
of bipoc women because it's emblematic of why a space
like ai R exists, Like that idea that I can
have an exhibition and of difficult conversations. We started the
podcast in the art world of the nineteen seventies, where
certainly there was a lot of art being made about
gender and ethnicity and race, but not a lot of
that work was shown in museums, or certainly wasn't in
(04:15):
art history textbooks. And I think now a lot of
work that's on view in galleries and museums is very
much about identity. So I was curious to hear if
you have any specific anecdotes from art school or from
your work life that illustrates that shift and the growing
pains that come with that shift. I mean, I sort
(04:38):
of entered the New York Art world in eighty eight
eighty nine. One of the things that means is that
I entered it under the umbrella of the AIDS HIV
Crisis and Act UP, which was the AIDS coalition to
unleash powers response to that crisis. And I was twenty one,
(04:58):
which is another way of saying I didn't know anything,
And so I assumed that the art world I was
entering was a radical, progressive place, filled with people who
were prepared to put their bodies on the line to
address a health crisis that had been exacerbated and in
fact created by a government that didn't care about gay people.
(05:20):
That turned out like not to be super true about
the art world. But it was the ship I wrote
in on, so to speak, and so I believed it
for actually a very long time. And I believed it
probably because I was friends mostly with artists, and that
was a moment when museums were trying to change, and
(05:42):
particularly the museum I was most affiliated with at that
period in my life was the Whitney, and it had
hired of a young curator named Thelma Golden. Thelma was
my age. She's currently the director of the Studio Museum
in Harlem. At the time, she was a curator at
the Whitney, and she was a young African American woman
who had just situated from Smith College. She had incredible presence,
(06:03):
she had a dynamic energy, she had a very quick wit,
and she was doing really work that seemed completely radical.
And she and Elizabeth Sussman and another curator at the Whitney,
and Eugenie Ssi and Lisa Phillips, and they were really
fighting to make space for women artists and gay artists
(06:27):
and artists of color. And so again I just thought
this was the world that I was in. I went
to grad school. Grad school certainly started to show me
that perhaps the world I was In was a lot
whider and a lot mailer than what I thought. But
it wasn't really until I got a big museum job
at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the year two
(06:49):
thousand where I realized that museums were like there was
like some carbon half life that I didn't quite understand.
So like, what was happening in the street, what was
happening in galleries, what was happening my friends, and what
was happening in a nascent way at the Whitney was
not happening in big city museums, was not happening in
(07:10):
big institutions. And there, you know, I inherited a collection
where I was literally I think one of the first
questions I was asked was like, what was I going
to do with the Bryce Martin paint? You know, like
nothing in my trajectory got me to that. So I
realized there was like a gallery critical artist cannon, and
(07:31):
then there was a museum cannon, and then there was
an academic cannon, and these cannons didn't align. And I
think that was really the moment when I realized the
degree of non alignment in this thing we call the
art world that we imagine as homogeneous, but in fact
it is not. And so that's when it started, when
I began to realize that some of the things I
(07:52):
took for granted as a young person had just simply
not been metabolized by the more powerful and in trench
institutions that kind of pinned down the little art world
that we all inhabit. We have to take a quick break.
When we come back, things get a little more personal.
(08:20):
In episode four, we talked about the Guerrilla Girls, the
anonymous group of feminist artists who still when we interviewed them,
did not want to turn on their cameras and would
not give us their real names. They also talk about
how if they do go out in public, they wear
guerrilla masks, which is just funny, but it also protects
their identities. And there was a real fear of retaliation
(08:41):
to speak out against art institutions, galleries, museums. But that's
really different than what happened in twenty fourteen through twenty
seventeen when Carl Andre's retrospective was protested, and those folks
who protested around those years were all of our social
media about it. They were post videos of themselves drowing
(09:02):
blood on the sidewalk and laying down in galleries as
if they were a dead body. So that eighties version
of protesting sexism in this very anonymous way to that
also feels like a big shift. And I wanted to
know from you what you think that means about where
we've come since the eighties. Women did protest on a
(09:26):
Mendieta's exclusion from the Guggenheim Show. There was a show
right after she passed, So there have been other moments
of protests without masks or that, in which people you know,
were making themselves known to others. But I do think
that the doggedness of the wear is on a Mendieta hashtag, folks.
(09:51):
I do think it was part of a generational shift.
I think most of those women as and this is anecdotal,
they looked younger to me, and they looked like people
who had grown up knowing about Anna Mendieta's work already
in school. And so for those of us who didn't
know about the work like my generation, and learn about
(10:11):
the work almost like Sami's dot, which was the thing
that used to happen old Soviet Union, where like xerox,
things would get passed around to people because you had
to stay under the wire of a certain kind of
censorship radar. That was how a lot of us learned
our feminism, particularly those of us who went on to
graduate study. You know, the course work was remarkably overwhelmingly
(10:36):
white and male, and we you know, like when queer
theory came out, there was no one teaching that. We
read that on our own in reading groups after hours,
so to speak, like that was how we did that
work together. And so what younger people had was the
like the generation of my generation who then went to
teach in art schools and you brought that material into
(10:59):
the class room in new ways. But they also had
social media. You guys had social media, and you had
a different starting from Act Up and then to occupy
and then to Black Lives no matter. You had leaderless movements,
right like, you had different ways of approaching this problem.
And you also didn't have They didn't have fear. They
(11:19):
had I think more appropriately, they were disgusted and we're
letting their disgust be seen. And so that was for
me as someone in middle age. You know, there's a
tender period where you're not young and you are not
an elder, so you don't get any of the benefits
(11:41):
of the good positions. You just stuck with this shitty
stuff that you learned and this radical emergent generation nipping
at your heels, and you got to figure out where
you are in that, you know, and that was really
for me very revelatory. You learn about Animandietta Patty when
(12:02):
you were in art school or I did? Do you remember,
like what how she was presented? Was it specifically a
feminist art class or was she part of a larger
you know? Is she part of all of the things
that you learn, part of a larger Yeah. But I
also grew up in Miami. We were all Latinos, I mean,
like from all over the place. So like if you
(12:22):
didn't teach us about animandet that we would lest someone
would be upset. For sure, no doubt I would gladly
vocalize it. Yeah, I think rightly. So what you're pointing
at is like technology makes such a big difference, you know.
And I also think that there's just this understanding. I
understand the art world as an industry, right. I don't
(12:44):
see it as this like thing that sits away from
a market. I see it actually, I see how we
all kind of are implicit in this industry and market
that we exist with. And I think in that sense,
we also know when we're excluded from it and when
we can enter it. And I think those that sit
on the periphery we're never going to get in. So
(13:07):
it's so much easier to just say fuck you. And
you know, all our faces all are in social media anyways,
So what are we hiding from? But can I say
one thing that I think so interesting? When I entered
the art world, I did not think of it as
an industry. I thought of it as a place of opposition.
I wish, yeah, I read about it. Yeah. For me,
(13:27):
it was not an industry. It was not a profession.
I never thought anybody was going to make any money.
I certainly never thought I was going to get a
job in a museum. Girls like me didn't get jobs
in museums, you know what I mean. It was a
friend group, a group of like minded fellow travelers. It
was a place to live your life so that you
(13:48):
didn't have to be in an industry, so you didn't
have to be professionalized. Again, I think all of this
was patently untrue, But it didn't mean we weren't proceeding
as if it were possible. Yeah, it's true though, there's
just different art worlds, right. What I always go back
to is what art can do. I'm interested in that
(14:11):
conversation of how art moves and shifts politics, how it's
able to kind of have a conversation simultaneously with the past,
with the idea of shifting a future. I still really
believe that what happens in this sector, this cultural sector
art world has wild political ramifications. So like the show
(14:35):
that Anna did with Zerina and then the Heresies. Heresies
was a feminist journal and a group of people I
think including Howardina Pidel. They were in the third world
feminisms issue. Anna did the show at ai R. These
are feeds that got planted in the seventies and early eighties.
(14:59):
They're doing that work at the same time Audrey Lord
is coming up with the idea of identity politics. They're
doing that work at the same time that there's a
group of black female academics putting together, you know, edited
volumes of black feminism. These seeds literally sprung into oak
(15:21):
trees by the time we get to Ferguson, Like the
women at the core of Black Lives Matter had read
all that material right like a tiny, tiny group of
people did in these alternative spaces, and under these kinds
of umbrellas took real root and become now foundational texts
(15:43):
for one of the most important political movements of our
moment that has changed the way we talk to one
another and interact with one another. So I, like, I
have like incredible belief still in this thing that we're
doing called the art world, no matter how mark getized
and horrific it can be, and it can be very bad,
(16:05):
but it has a force that we are maybe not
even even in the moment aware of, a lot of
what we talked about in the podcast has to do
with gatekeepers and how as we're talking about, gatekeeping has
historically left a lot of people out. I would like
you to tell us a little bit about how your life,
(16:26):
experience and identity informs what you want to show and
what you are not interested in showing. Well, I mean,
the personal is political. Most of what I learned I
learned through the people that I was going to school with,
and we were all Latinos from immigrants number one or
(16:46):
exiles or like from all sorts of countries in Central
South America and the Caribbean, and we were not white,
you know in that sense like I'm spicy white, thank
you very much. That's how how I identify, if you
really want to know. And in that sense, yeah, I
think my experience does inform, like what I'm invested in.
(17:08):
Especially when I came to the Northeast, the art world
that I understood was very different than the art world
that I came to understand here, Like it was not
one that pointed to the US. It was one that
pointed out and then the other thing that it did
was it was very collective versus like clawing at each other.
So like my experience of the art world is one
(17:29):
that's very committed to people and to history and futures,
equitable futures to be exact. But from that experience, I,
you know, felt very conflicted, and I think I still do.
It's like, you know, in order to survive an industry, right,
(17:51):
you have to be really selfish and have to be
about yourself strongly and understand yourself strongly and put yourself forward.
Where as like I go back to ai R, you know,
versus a collective. When I think about my thoughts of gatekeeping, Yes,
I guess I could say and acknowledge that I could
(18:12):
be a gatekeeper, but I just don't think I've ever
been so hardly in those positions. I'm trying to do
the opposite of that, you know, trying to think of
like how how does the we learn with versus? You know,
like who can I show versus Nacho? So you want
to be a gate opener? Yeah, yeah, I am, Well
(18:33):
how would you tell us how you feel about your
role as a gatekeeper? Great? Fucking awesome. I didn't even
know I was a gatekeeper for a long time, to
be honest, which is this something I shamefully associate with
my whiteness, a kind of invisibility. I think one of
the great treacheries of whiteness, and of which we know
(18:56):
there are many, is one is invisible to oneself. So
we find ourselves in positions of power and don't even
understand where in them. And I absolutely understood that I
was in a position of power. But I had confected
so much onto my own class jumping this way, that
I had hurdled over boundaries that were everywhere there for
me to trip over, that I had jumped over them,
(19:18):
that I hadn't really come to an understanding of myself
as someone who was a gate keeper in the keeping
people out model. In my work life, I was often
in rooms in which I was the only person who
had gone to public school. I was the only person
who shared a room with their sibling. I was the
only person who had people in their family who hadn't
(19:42):
gone to college. Like I was that person in those rooms,
and I had chippage around it. And that also prevented
me from seeing a certain kind of authority that I
really did have. I had a fantasy about myself that
was only part true, that I was Robin Hood. Once
I started seeing all these rich people in museums, I
(20:02):
was like, I was just gonna take these people's money
and do the other ships. I thought it was Robin
Hood that was my jam, and under that jam I did.
I do still believe a lot of good, but that fantasy,
and it is a fantasy, blinded me to some of
the other things that were going on in the structural
(20:23):
nature of my role. I did not grow up in Miami.
I grew up here. I grew up in the capitol
of the twentieth century. I'm a born and bred New Yorker,
and every year at PS two nineteen and Flushing Queens,
some nice school teacher lady took us to the met
and I grew up thinking that museum belonged to me.
(20:46):
I grew up very proud. I never paid, you know,
I had all that like New Yorker kind of like
you can't fool me. I know this is on cityland,
you know, all that kind of like hunk Bravado. But
then I know. My first job was in Baltimore. Was
the first time I had lived in a city below
(21:08):
the Mason Dixon line. It was the first time I
had lived in a majority black city. The racism of
Baltimore blew me away. And the museum on a hill
with a statue of Roberty Lee in front of it,
its relationship to the black populace of the city was
(21:32):
to say that every fourth grader in Baltimore got to
come and visit the museum. And I thought, oh, I
don't know what good that's going to do. And I
started to figure some stuff out. Like I realized I
didn't know anything about African American art history. So I
got all the books out and I started buying work
(21:55):
by African American artists for the collection because I was
still very much in a mindset about representation. If we
put these pictures up and they're pictures of black people,
by black people, then we have someplace to even start
to have a conversation in the museum with these fourth
grade kids, because I did not know how to stand
in front of a group of young black children and
(22:17):
explain to them why Bryce Martin was something they needed
to think about. And so that started me on a
path that has been, you know, wildly rewarding, and I
hope has some legacy of efficacy because there's certainly a
trail of acquisitions behind me. But I know those were
(22:37):
the terms I was operating under then. I think the
terms are very different today. We have to take another break.
When we come back. Audience members who knew Anna, push
back on how we told her story, stay with us, well,
I want to start opening us up some questions. I
(23:01):
know a lot of you are here from the art
world that you are you work in this industry or community,
whatever it is, and I am very curious about art
world reactions to this because I know that telling this
story of Anna Mendieta and Carl Andre in this very
public way through true crime lens is maybe a strange
(23:22):
and uncomfortable thing to have done for a lot of
people who work inside that world. I am Susan b
and I'm a member of this gallery for twenty five years,
and I was actually present at several of the events
that you describe, so that was very peculiar to hear
I was at her Anna's memorial, I knew her. I'm
(23:42):
a very uncomfortable thinking of Anna as a victim because
she was such a lively and strong presence. I think
her presence is a strong Latina feminist, was very present
in the feminist circles that I wasn't experiencing, and she
was very you know, beloved by the other members of
(24:05):
the gallery. Although I believe she was also a difficult woman.
I don't think you can be an intelligent woman under
the terms of patriarchy and not be difficult. I really
struggle around Anna as a victim. I think it's bigger
than just Anna as so much as with Anna right,
because she's someone who has become symbolic, and people who
(24:28):
become symbolic bear an extra burden. They carry things for
all of us. When I was an undergraduate in college,
there was a take Back the Night rally, and I
didn't want to go. I was such a bad, brash ferrell. Ah,
I've got street smarts. Nobody's going to rape me, justum
eighteen year old kidship. But as I got older, I
(24:50):
realized I didn't want to go because I didn't want
to identify with being a victim. I didn't want to
give voice to my own fear. Didn't wanna have to
deal and I still don't with how scared I am
to get my car from the goddamn parking lot, or
(25:12):
how scared I am when my wife isn't at home
at night. And one of the things I thought a
lot when we encountered resistance, but people who knew Anna
and loved her and didn't want to talk about her
in this podcast, and they often said exactly what we said,
like cannot abide seeing her as a victim. I try
to think about almost everything I think about now also
(25:33):
through the lens of whiteness. And one of the things
I think about whiteness, particularly the white women, is that
we have access to power through our adjacency to white men,
and we are keenly aware of the limitations of our
power because of white men. We are always in this
double position, and I think we have also trouble with
(25:53):
acknowledging that we can be victims, that we are not
in control, that we can be her. We do not
want to admit this. So I hear you, and I
hear what you say. I really want to honor it.
I think she was a fierce, difficult, badass, and it's
(26:14):
really hard to keep all of that alive. At the
same time, I just want to say I really appreciate
your answer, because I think that is why a lot
of people did not want to talk to you, because
they're trying to keep the memory alive of her beyond
this fact of her death. Another question came from someone
(26:35):
who remains angry at two women, Paula Cooper and Angela Westwater.
Paula is carl Andre's gallerist, and she stood by him
during the trial and continues to show his work at
her gallery. Angela Westwater is an art dealer who had
a romantic relationship with carl Andre before he got together
with Anna. Both Paula and Angela declined to be interviewed
(26:58):
for the podcast The Elephant in the Room, though in
terms of listening to the episodes, was Paula Cooper and
maybe more importantly, Angelo Westwater, who were both women that
went on to have powerful careers and galleries. I was
a teenager back then, Downtown grew up around this scene.
(27:19):
So what about Angelo Westwater, who was instrumental in providing
credibility from a powerful woman dealer that helped get him off?
What about Paula Cooper? Doesn't she have a responsibility to
address this? Louisa and I had a running argument, disagreement
about loyalty and whether or not it was a value. Louisa,
(27:42):
I don't want to speak for you. I thank you.
I think loyalties of value. Paula was loyal to her artist.
My whole territorial life, I fought from my artist and
some of them were really assholes, and I went to
bat for him anyway because I thought that was my job.
(28:03):
It's one of those situations where there is really no button,
only an end for me, and the end means that
there's a kind of aporia in the mix for me.
And aporia is that one of my favorite words. It
means the ability to hold in one's mind too thoughts
that contradict one another. And that's how I feel about
(28:24):
Paula and Angela, like I am in an oporia, a
place where I find it very hard to proceed with
my own thought. And part of that is something that
it produces another aporia in me, which is I can't
get to the end of a thing about Animandieta and
(28:44):
carl Andre and end up being mad at those two women,
like when it comes right down to it, the misogyny
that is in all of us. We are all capable
of blaming a woman before we a whole lot of
men in the art world starting and Frank Stella from
(29:09):
writing a check and Larry Weener for being in the car.
They didn't lose any sleep, So I really do hear you,
and I can't my angry place. I can't stay there.
They disagree with you about women in middle age. Between
the two poles, I think, in fact, you have all
the power and none of the dementia or lack of
(29:35):
lack of power, shall we say in your youth. So
carry on. Now that the podcast is out in the world,
with the questions asked and answered to the best of
our current ability, I hope this will be a stepping
stone to telling honest story in a way which foregrounds
(29:57):
her incredible body of work, along with the question that
her work asked us from the start, how will we
respond when we see evidence of harm and injustice? My
hope is that we can proceed with clear eyes and
full hearts to quote Friday Night Lights, and know that
as we toggle between her life and her art, that
(30:18):
the brilliance of her work cannot be dimmed by the
tragedy and travesty of her death. All Right, folks, that's
it for Death of an Artist once again, thank you
so very much for listening. Death of an Artist is
a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive
(30:42):
producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kanegg Leetel Malaude, Jacob Weisberg
and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Louisa Tucker, Editing by
Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Our associate
producer is Eloise Linton, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and mastering
by Sam Baer. Our theme song is by pood Rue.
(31:04):
Special thanks to Patricia Margherita Hernandez, the ai R Gallery,
Elizabeth Wyatt David Glover and Mark Minnig, and to our
listeners for asking such great questions. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus to listen early, add free,
(31:25):
and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the Pushkin Plus
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. Find
more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at Sony music
dot com slash Podcasts
Okay, folks, this is our final episode and as you
can tell, we got to venture out of the studio
for this one. It has been wild for me to
have this show out in the world. The response was overwhelming.
Tons of people I didn't know DMed me, and almost
all of them expressed gratitude that we told the story
(00:36):
of Anna Mendieta and Carl Andre so publicly, and so
my producer Luisa and I wanted to bring the conversation
back to where it all started, the art world. We
invited listeners to a gallery in New York for a
discussion in Q and A. It was a cold December night,
and as the sun went down, the gallery filled with people.
(00:58):
There's seats in the front if any one wants to
come up. We have like the classic classroom problem, where
no one wants to be in the front row. We
were at the ai R Gallery, a place that was
an important part of Anna Mendietta's story. Ai R is
the first nonprofit, artist run, cooperative gallery for women artists
in the United States, and in nineteen seventy nine, it
(01:20):
was where Anna Mendieta showed her beautiful silhouette to photographs
and where she met carl Andre for the first time.
For our discussion, we were joined by Patricia Margherita Hernandez,
a curator who previously served as an associate director of
ai R. Patty's a millennial and I'm a classic gen xer,
(01:40):
and even though we're both feminists and both curators, it
was interesting to recognize how much the art world can
change in just one generation. I want to share that
conversation with you, so once more with feeling. Here's that
the music. I'm Helen Molesworth and from Pushkin Industries, Something
(02:05):
Else and Sony Music Entertainment. This is Death of an Artist,
recorded live at the ai R Gallery. All right, I'm Luisa,
I'm the producer of Death of an Artist and I
want to welcome Helen Molesworth and Patty Margharita Hernandez to
(02:29):
the stage. So I want to start with a question
for Patty about ai R, which was an important part
of Annamandy at this story. Can you say a little
bit about the origins of the gallery and why it
still feels so important to have a space specifically for
(02:49):
women and non binary people. Ai R began in nineteen
seventy two, and it's you know, at that time, especially
the sixties in early seventies, you know, women artists were
experiencing what we're all too familiar with. They just didn't
have an entry point into the art world in general,
and they didn't have places a show, weren't represented by galleries.
(03:10):
Anna Mendieta was a member from nineteen seventy eight to
nineteen eighty two, and she had two exhibitions, solo exhibitions,
and in between those two shows she organized a group
exhibition with the then member Kazigo Miamoto and then the
artists Arena called Dialectics of Isolation, an exhibition of their
(03:31):
world women artists of the United States, and that show,
for me as a curator art student, fundamentally shifted the
way I thought about art in general. Annamandieta and the
group of artists in the show wanted to have a
conversation about the different types of feminisms and the exclusion
(03:52):
of bipoc women because it's emblematic of why a space
like ai R exists, Like that idea that I can
have an exhibition and of difficult conversations. We started the
podcast in the art world of the nineteen seventies, where
certainly there was a lot of art being made about
gender and ethnicity and race, but not a lot of
that work was shown in museums, or certainly wasn't in
(04:15):
art history textbooks. And I think now a lot of
work that's on view in galleries and museums is very
much about identity. So I was curious to hear if
you have any specific anecdotes from art school or from
your work life that illustrates that shift and the growing
pains that come with that shift. I mean, I sort
(04:38):
of entered the New York Art world in eighty eight
eighty nine. One of the things that means is that
I entered it under the umbrella of the AIDS HIV
Crisis and Act UP, which was the AIDS coalition to
unleash powers response to that crisis. And I was twenty one,
(04:58):
which is another way of saying I didn't know anything,
And so I assumed that the art world I was
entering was a radical, progressive place, filled with people who
were prepared to put their bodies on the line to
address a health crisis that had been exacerbated and in
fact created by a government that didn't care about gay people.
(05:20):
That turned out like not to be super true about
the art world. But it was the ship I wrote
in on, so to speak, and so I believed it
for actually a very long time. And I believed it
probably because I was friends mostly with artists, and that
was a moment when museums were trying to change, and
(05:42):
particularly the museum I was most affiliated with at that
period in my life was the Whitney, and it had
hired of a young curator named Thelma Golden. Thelma was
my age. She's currently the director of the Studio Museum
in Harlem. At the time, she was a curator at
the Whitney, and she was a young African American woman
who had just situated from Smith College. She had incredible presence,
(06:03):
she had a dynamic energy, she had a very quick wit,
and she was doing really work that seemed completely radical.
And she and Elizabeth Sussman and another curator at the Whitney,
and Eugenie Ssi and Lisa Phillips, and they were really
fighting to make space for women artists and gay artists
(06:27):
and artists of color. And so again I just thought
this was the world that I was in. I went
to grad school. Grad school certainly started to show me
that perhaps the world I was In was a lot
whider and a lot mailer than what I thought. But
it wasn't really until I got a big museum job
at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the year two
(06:49):
thousand where I realized that museums were like there was
like some carbon half life that I didn't quite understand.
So like, what was happening in the street, what was
happening in galleries, what was happening my friends, and what
was happening in a nascent way at the Whitney was
not happening in big city museums, was not happening in
(07:10):
big institutions. And there, you know, I inherited a collection
where I was literally I think one of the first
questions I was asked was like, what was I going
to do with the Bryce Martin paint? You know, like
nothing in my trajectory got me to that. So I
realized there was like a gallery critical artist cannon, and
(07:31):
then there was a museum cannon, and then there was
an academic cannon, and these cannons didn't align. And I
think that was really the moment when I realized the
degree of non alignment in this thing we call the
art world that we imagine as homogeneous, but in fact
it is not. And so that's when it started, when
I began to realize that some of the things I
(07:52):
took for granted as a young person had just simply
not been metabolized by the more powerful and in trench
institutions that kind of pinned down the little art world
that we all inhabit. We have to take a quick break.
When we come back, things get a little more personal.
(08:20):
In episode four, we talked about the Guerrilla Girls, the
anonymous group of feminist artists who still when we interviewed them,
did not want to turn on their cameras and would
not give us their real names. They also talk about
how if they do go out in public, they wear
guerrilla masks, which is just funny, but it also protects
their identities. And there was a real fear of retaliation
(08:41):
to speak out against art institutions, galleries, museums. But that's
really different than what happened in twenty fourteen through twenty
seventeen when Carl Andre's retrospective was protested, and those folks
who protested around those years were all of our social
media about it. They were post videos of themselves drowing
(09:02):
blood on the sidewalk and laying down in galleries as
if they were a dead body. So that eighties version
of protesting sexism in this very anonymous way to that
also feels like a big shift. And I wanted to
know from you what you think that means about where
we've come since the eighties. Women did protest on a
(09:26):
Mendieta's exclusion from the Guggenheim Show. There was a show
right after she passed, So there have been other moments
of protests without masks or that, in which people you know,
were making themselves known to others. But I do think
that the doggedness of the wear is on a Mendieta hashtag, folks.
(09:51):
I do think it was part of a generational shift.
I think most of those women as and this is anecdotal,
they looked younger to me, and they looked like people
who had grown up knowing about Anna Mendieta's work already
in school. And so for those of us who didn't
know about the work like my generation, and learn about
(10:11):
the work almost like Sami's dot, which was the thing
that used to happen old Soviet Union, where like xerox,
things would get passed around to people because you had
to stay under the wire of a certain kind of
censorship radar. That was how a lot of us learned
our feminism, particularly those of us who went on to
graduate study. You know, the course work was remarkably overwhelmingly
(10:36):
white and male, and we you know, like when queer
theory came out, there was no one teaching that. We
read that on our own in reading groups after hours,
so to speak, like that was how we did that
work together. And so what younger people had was the
like the generation of my generation who then went to
teach in art schools and you brought that material into
(10:59):
the class room in new ways. But they also had
social media. You guys had social media, and you had
a different starting from Act Up and then to occupy
and then to Black Lives no matter. You had leaderless movements,
right like, you had different ways of approaching this problem.
And you also didn't have They didn't have fear. They
(11:19):
had I think more appropriately, they were disgusted and we're
letting their disgust be seen. And so that was for
me as someone in middle age. You know, there's a
tender period where you're not young and you are not
an elder, so you don't get any of the benefits
(11:41):
of the good positions. You just stuck with this shitty
stuff that you learned and this radical emergent generation nipping
at your heels, and you got to figure out where
you are in that, you know, and that was really
for me very revelatory. You learn about Animandietta Patty when
(12:02):
you were in art school or I did? Do you remember,
like what how she was presented? Was it specifically a
feminist art class or was she part of a larger
you know? Is she part of all of the things
that you learn, part of a larger Yeah. But I
also grew up in Miami. We were all Latinos, I mean,
like from all over the place. So like if you
(12:22):
didn't teach us about animandet that we would lest someone
would be upset. For sure, no doubt I would gladly
vocalize it. Yeah, I think rightly. So what you're pointing
at is like technology makes such a big difference, you know.
And I also think that there's just this understanding. I
understand the art world as an industry, right. I don't
(12:44):
see it as this like thing that sits away from
a market. I see it actually, I see how we
all kind of are implicit in this industry and market
that we exist with. And I think in that sense,
we also know when we're excluded from it and when
we can enter it. And I think those that sit
on the periphery we're never going to get in. So
(13:07):
it's so much easier to just say fuck you. And
you know, all our faces all are in social media anyways,
So what are we hiding from? But can I say
one thing that I think so interesting? When I entered
the art world, I did not think of it as
an industry. I thought of it as a place of opposition.
I wish, yeah, I read about it. Yeah. For me,
(13:27):
it was not an industry. It was not a profession.
I never thought anybody was going to make any money.
I certainly never thought I was going to get a
job in a museum. Girls like me didn't get jobs
in museums, you know what I mean. It was a
friend group, a group of like minded fellow travelers. It
was a place to live your life so that you
(13:48):
didn't have to be in an industry, so you didn't
have to be professionalized. Again, I think all of this
was patently untrue, But it didn't mean we weren't proceeding
as if it were possible. Yeah, it's true though, there's
just different art worlds, right. What I always go back
to is what art can do. I'm interested in that
(14:11):
conversation of how art moves and shifts politics, how it's
able to kind of have a conversation simultaneously with the past,
with the idea of shifting a future. I still really
believe that what happens in this sector, this cultural sector
art world has wild political ramifications. So like the show
(14:35):
that Anna did with Zerina and then the Heresies. Heresies
was a feminist journal and a group of people I
think including Howardina Pidel. They were in the third world
feminisms issue. Anna did the show at ai R. These
are feeds that got planted in the seventies and early eighties.
(14:59):
They're doing that work at the same time Audrey Lord
is coming up with the idea of identity politics. They're
doing that work at the same time that there's a
group of black female academics putting together, you know, edited
volumes of black feminism. These seeds literally sprung into oak
(15:21):
trees by the time we get to Ferguson, Like the
women at the core of Black Lives Matter had read
all that material right like a tiny, tiny group of
people did in these alternative spaces, and under these kinds
of umbrellas took real root and become now foundational texts
(15:43):
for one of the most important political movements of our
moment that has changed the way we talk to one
another and interact with one another. So I, like, I
have like incredible belief still in this thing that we're
doing called the art world, no matter how mark getized
and horrific it can be, and it can be very bad,
(16:05):
but it has a force that we are maybe not
even even in the moment aware of, a lot of
what we talked about in the podcast has to do
with gatekeepers and how as we're talking about, gatekeeping has
historically left a lot of people out. I would like
you to tell us a little bit about how your life,
(16:26):
experience and identity informs what you want to show and
what you are not interested in showing. Well, I mean,
the personal is political. Most of what I learned I
learned through the people that I was going to school with,
and we were all Latinos from immigrants number one or
(16:46):
exiles or like from all sorts of countries in Central
South America and the Caribbean, and we were not white,
you know in that sense like I'm spicy white, thank
you very much. That's how how I identify, if you
really want to know. And in that sense, yeah, I
think my experience does inform, like what I'm invested in.
(17:08):
Especially when I came to the Northeast, the art world
that I understood was very different than the art world
that I came to understand here, Like it was not
one that pointed to the US. It was one that
pointed out and then the other thing that it did
was it was very collective versus like clawing at each other.
So like my experience of the art world is one
(17:29):
that's very committed to people and to history and futures,
equitable futures to be exact. But from that experience, I,
you know, felt very conflicted, and I think I still do.
It's like, you know, in order to survive an industry, right,
(17:51):
you have to be really selfish and have to be
about yourself strongly and understand yourself strongly and put yourself forward.
Where as like I go back to ai R, you know,
versus a collective. When I think about my thoughts of gatekeeping, Yes,
I guess I could say and acknowledge that I could
(18:12):
be a gatekeeper, but I just don't think I've ever
been so hardly in those positions. I'm trying to do
the opposite of that, you know, trying to think of
like how how does the we learn with versus? You know,
like who can I show versus Nacho? So you want
to be a gate opener? Yeah, yeah, I am, Well
(18:33):
how would you tell us how you feel about your
role as a gatekeeper? Great? Fucking awesome. I didn't even
know I was a gatekeeper for a long time, to
be honest, which is this something I shamefully associate with
my whiteness, a kind of invisibility. I think one of
the great treacheries of whiteness, and of which we know
(18:56):
there are many, is one is invisible to oneself. So
we find ourselves in positions of power and don't even
understand where in them. And I absolutely understood that I
was in a position of power. But I had confected
so much onto my own class jumping this way, that
I had hurdled over boundaries that were everywhere there for
me to trip over, that I had jumped over them,
(19:18):
that I hadn't really come to an understanding of myself
as someone who was a gate keeper in the keeping
people out model. In my work life, I was often
in rooms in which I was the only person who
had gone to public school. I was the only person
who shared a room with their sibling. I was the
only person who had people in their family who hadn't
(19:42):
gone to college. Like I was that person in those rooms,
and I had chippage around it. And that also prevented
me from seeing a certain kind of authority that I
really did have. I had a fantasy about myself that
was only part true, that I was Robin Hood. Once
I started seeing all these rich people in museums, I
(20:02):
was like, I was just gonna take these people's money
and do the other ships. I thought it was Robin
Hood that was my jam, and under that jam I did.
I do still believe a lot of good, but that fantasy,
and it is a fantasy, blinded me to some of
the other things that were going on in the structural
(20:23):
nature of my role. I did not grow up in Miami.
I grew up here. I grew up in the capitol
of the twentieth century. I'm a born and bred New Yorker,
and every year at PS two nineteen and Flushing Queens,
some nice school teacher lady took us to the met
and I grew up thinking that museum belonged to me.
(20:46):
I grew up very proud. I never paid, you know,
I had all that like New Yorker kind of like
you can't fool me. I know this is on cityland,
you know, all that kind of like hunk Bravado. But
then I know. My first job was in Baltimore. Was
the first time I had lived in a city below
(21:08):
the Mason Dixon line. It was the first time I
had lived in a majority black city. The racism of
Baltimore blew me away. And the museum on a hill
with a statue of Roberty Lee in front of it,
its relationship to the black populace of the city was
(21:32):
to say that every fourth grader in Baltimore got to
come and visit the museum. And I thought, oh, I
don't know what good that's going to do. And I
started to figure some stuff out. Like I realized I
didn't know anything about African American art history. So I
got all the books out and I started buying work
(21:55):
by African American artists for the collection because I was
still very much in a mindset about representation. If we
put these pictures up and they're pictures of black people,
by black people, then we have someplace to even start
to have a conversation in the museum with these fourth
grade kids, because I did not know how to stand
in front of a group of young black children and
(22:17):
explain to them why Bryce Martin was something they needed
to think about. And so that started me on a
path that has been, you know, wildly rewarding, and I
hope has some legacy of efficacy because there's certainly a
trail of acquisitions behind me. But I know those were
(22:37):
the terms I was operating under then. I think the
terms are very different today. We have to take another break.
When we come back. Audience members who knew Anna, push
back on how we told her story, stay with us, well,
I want to start opening us up some questions. I
(23:01):
know a lot of you are here from the art
world that you are you work in this industry or community,
whatever it is, and I am very curious about art
world reactions to this because I know that telling this
story of Anna Mendieta and Carl Andre in this very
public way through true crime lens is maybe a strange
(23:22):
and uncomfortable thing to have done for a lot of
people who work inside that world. I am Susan b
and I'm a member of this gallery for twenty five years,
and I was actually present at several of the events
that you describe, so that was very peculiar to hear
I was at her Anna's memorial, I knew her. I'm
(23:42):
a very uncomfortable thinking of Anna as a victim because
she was such a lively and strong presence. I think
her presence is a strong Latina feminist, was very present
in the feminist circles that I wasn't experiencing, and she
was very you know, beloved by the other members of
(24:05):
the gallery. Although I believe she was also a difficult woman.
I don't think you can be an intelligent woman under
the terms of patriarchy and not be difficult. I really
struggle around Anna as a victim. I think it's bigger
than just Anna as so much as with Anna right,
because she's someone who has become symbolic, and people who
(24:28):
become symbolic bear an extra burden. They carry things for
all of us. When I was an undergraduate in college,
there was a take Back the Night rally, and I
didn't want to go. I was such a bad, brash ferrell. Ah,
I've got street smarts. Nobody's going to rape me, justum
eighteen year old kidship. But as I got older, I
(24:50):
realized I didn't want to go because I didn't want
to identify with being a victim. I didn't want to
give voice to my own fear. Didn't wanna have to
deal and I still don't with how scared I am
to get my car from the goddamn parking lot, or
(25:12):
how scared I am when my wife isn't at home
at night. And one of the things I thought a
lot when we encountered resistance, but people who knew Anna
and loved her and didn't want to talk about her
in this podcast, and they often said exactly what we said,
like cannot abide seeing her as a victim. I try
to think about almost everything I think about now also
(25:33):
through the lens of whiteness. And one of the things
I think about whiteness, particularly the white women, is that
we have access to power through our adjacency to white men,
and we are keenly aware of the limitations of our
power because of white men. We are always in this
double position, and I think we have also trouble with
(25:53):
acknowledging that we can be victims, that we are not
in control, that we can be her. We do not
want to admit this. So I hear you, and I
hear what you say. I really want to honor it.
I think she was a fierce, difficult, badass, and it's
(26:14):
really hard to keep all of that alive. At the
same time, I just want to say I really appreciate
your answer, because I think that is why a lot
of people did not want to talk to you, because
they're trying to keep the memory alive of her beyond
this fact of her death. Another question came from someone
(26:35):
who remains angry at two women, Paula Cooper and Angela Westwater.
Paula is carl Andre's gallerist, and she stood by him
during the trial and continues to show his work at
her gallery. Angela Westwater is an art dealer who had
a romantic relationship with carl Andre before he got together
with Anna. Both Paula and Angela declined to be interviewed
(26:58):
for the podcast The Elephant in the Room, though in
terms of listening to the episodes, was Paula Cooper and
maybe more importantly, Angelo Westwater, who were both women that
went on to have powerful careers and galleries. I was
a teenager back then, Downtown grew up around this scene.
(27:19):
So what about Angelo Westwater, who was instrumental in providing
credibility from a powerful woman dealer that helped get him off?
What about Paula Cooper? Doesn't she have a responsibility to
address this? Louisa and I had a running argument, disagreement
about loyalty and whether or not it was a value. Louisa,
(27:42):
I don't want to speak for you. I thank you.
I think loyalties of value. Paula was loyal to her artist.
My whole territorial life, I fought from my artist and
some of them were really assholes, and I went to
bat for him anyway because I thought that was my job.
(28:03):
It's one of those situations where there is really no button,
only an end for me, and the end means that
there's a kind of aporia in the mix for me.
And aporia is that one of my favorite words. It
means the ability to hold in one's mind too thoughts
that contradict one another. And that's how I feel about
(28:24):
Paula and Angela, like I am in an oporia, a
place where I find it very hard to proceed with
my own thought. And part of that is something that
it produces another aporia in me, which is I can't
get to the end of a thing about Animandieta and
(28:44):
carl Andre and end up being mad at those two women,
like when it comes right down to it, the misogyny
that is in all of us. We are all capable
of blaming a woman before we a whole lot of
men in the art world starting and Frank Stella from
(29:09):
writing a check and Larry Weener for being in the car.
They didn't lose any sleep, So I really do hear you,
and I can't my angry place. I can't stay there.
They disagree with you about women in middle age. Between
the two poles, I think, in fact, you have all
the power and none of the dementia or lack of
(29:35):
lack of power, shall we say in your youth. So
carry on. Now that the podcast is out in the world,
with the questions asked and answered to the best of
our current ability, I hope this will be a stepping
stone to telling honest story in a way which foregrounds
(29:57):
her incredible body of work, along with the question that
her work asked us from the start, how will we
respond when we see evidence of harm and injustice? My
hope is that we can proceed with clear eyes and
full hearts to quote Friday Night Lights, and know that
as we toggle between her life and her art, that
(30:18):
the brilliance of her work cannot be dimmed by the
tragedy and travesty of her death. All Right, folks, that's
it for Death of an Artist once again, thank you
so very much for listening. Death of an Artist is
a co production between Pushkin Industries, Something Else and Sony
Music Entertainment, Written and hosted by me Helen Mouldsworth. Executive
(30:42):
producers are Lizzie Jacobs, Tom kanegg Leetel Malaude, Jacob Weisberg
and Lucas Werner. Produced by Maria Louisa Tucker, Editing by
Lizzie Jacobs. Our managing producer is Jacob Smith. Our associate
producer is Eloise Linton, Engineering by Jason Gambrell and mastering
by Sam Baer. Our theme song is by pood Rue.
(31:04):
Special thanks to Patricia Margherita Hernandez, the ai R Gallery,
Elizabeth Wyatt David Glover and Mark Minnig, and to our
listeners for asking such great questions. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus to listen early, add free,
(31:25):
and get exclusive bonus content. Look for the Pushkin Plus
channel on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. Find
more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at Sony music
dot com slash Podcasts
Host
Helen Molesworth
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