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