97. Lost Ladies of Art with Sara Woster
AMY: Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another Lost Ladies of Lit mini episode. I’m Amy Helmes.
KIM: And I’m Kim Askew. We don’t usually have guests for our mini episodes, but today is an exception, and one I think our listeners are going to enjoy.
AMY: We’re going to be talking about some lost ladies of the art world, and we have an actual painter as our guest, which is fitting.
KIM: Yes, joining us today is artist and author Sara Woster, whose new book Painting Can Save Your Life is out this month from TarcherPerigee / Penguin Randomhouse. Her literary agent, Nicki Richesin, is one of my very best friends and Nicki and I actually stayed at Sara’s Brooklyn apartment one night, years ago, when we were on a book tour for an anthology called The May Queen. Sara made a lasting impression on me then that carries through to her book, which is as warm, brilliant, soulful, and empathetic as she is. (I’m sure I’m embarrassing you, Sara, but it’s true.) I’m so inspired and impressed that not only are you a talented painter, but you’re a gorgeously talented writer as well. Thank you for joining us today!
SARA: Thank you for that lovely and incredibly flattering introduction. Yeah, it’s so nice to reconnect with you after so many years!
KIM: So, before we get to the lost lady artists, I wanted to talk a little bit more about your new book, Painting Can Save Your Life. It’s part how-to guide and it’s also part memoir. It’s all woven together in this absolutely riveting way. I wrote to you that it made me want to pick up a paintbrush, but it also inspired me to want to write something so beautiful about being a creative person and a wife and mother, and just being alive on this spinning planet. So, thank you for that!
SARA: Oh, that’s so nice. Whenever someone says it makes them want to paint, that’s like the penultimate goal, so thank you I was really excited when you emailed me that.
KIM: Yeah, I just need like a smidgeon more free time and I would absolutely be doing it. Anyway, in your book, you talk about your childhood in South Dakota and how painting saved your life, to a certain extent, because it gave you an outlet for coping with your anxiety and not fitting in. Could you talk a little bit about that and maybe what led you to write this book?
SARA: Yeah, I think most artists I know, most creative people, they feel like a square peg often, and I know that's how I felt a lot of my life. You probably wouldn't have known that from the outside, but I just was kind of (and remain) a kind of unsettled person, an anxious person. And as soon as I realized that a creative outlet is just a trick, you know, almost to like calm yourself, release some of this stuff that we carry around. So yeah, as soon as I could figure out that I could draw and paint, I just felt better and that's remained the case for my entire life.
KIM: I think Amy and I know exactly what you mean.
AMY: Yeah, it’s like you get to go somewhere else besides your own brain for a bit.
KIM: Yeah, turn it all off and lose track of time and all that. So in your book, you write about being an artist who is also a woman, and as the book progresses, a wife and a mother. You have some funny anecdotes related to that--like when you were asked to pose nude by a classmate when you were in art school– and you’re also not shy about sharing those times when you really struggled with your identity as an artist. So I was wondering if you would read some of your book from the section where you’re in Marfa, Texas. It’s just after the birth of your second child.
SARA: Yes, so, this part is when I'm doing a series of paintings in Marfa because my husband was doing a residency, but the residency program gave me my own studio also. And I start doing a series of paintings that's about UFO's and I can't figure out really why am I suddenly doing the UFOs? And then I realized… well, I'll read what I realized that I think the, the actual heart of this series is:
[reads passage]
KIM: That is so relatable, and there’s so manty parts of the book that you’re reading it and you’re like “Oh, yeah, I totally get that.” But you say it so beautifully. So, in addition to telling your personal story, the book also teaches the reader how to paint. I’m curious about what it feels like to teach someone to paint for the first time.
SARA: There is the weirdest global universal insecurity around painting. I think it has to do with our ideas of perfect depictions. Like the Mona Lisa, like the ones we know, they're pretty hard to do, no matter how many years you've been doing it, but that's our ideal, right? And so to introduce to someone to have them do their first painting (and in my class, it's always like very simple objects) to have them complete their first painting and kind of just get over that mental roadblock is so cool. And then to watch the progression where they start having confidence it's so exciting.
AMY: That statement you made about the perfectionism? That really hit home for me because, when I was in my twenties for like a hot minute, I decided I was going to dabble in watercolor painting. And I found that I couldn’t paint actual objects in front of me, but what I could paint was other watercolor picture. And so I've decided that really my artistic talent might lie in forgery.
SARA: That is not a bad talent. I’m into it. And it’s totally valid to do that. I mean, most great artists, historically, that’s what they would do. They would go paint the artwork of other people because you learn so much. Also, side note: watercolor is the hardest medium. You started with the absolute hardest. I would recommend backpedaling to acrylic.
AMY: Okay.
KIM: Can I just add that Amy actually teaches art at her son’s school?
AMY: Yes, I’m my son’s class art teacher (or I was this year at least) but confession: I avoided bringing those paints out because of the cleanup involved.
SARA: Yeah, when you get a big group of kids, it’s really messy.
AMY: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, let’s segue into forgotten women artists. [And listeners, if there’s a way for you to Google some of these ladies while we’re talking, you might enjoy actually seeing some of their artwork as you hear about them.] Sara, you brought these women to our attention--and they are fascinating, not just their artwork, but their lives. So let’s start with Gertrude Abercrombie. She was the daughter of itinerant opera singers and walked the streets of Chicago dressed as a witch.
KIM: That definitely caught our attention!
AMY: Yeah, that struck us. And then also jazz songs were written about her. Who doesn’t want to be the subject of a jazz tune, right? So tell us more about Gertrude Abercrombie.
SARA: Yeah, so not only did she walk the world as this kind of is this witch-like character, her artwork. Is a lot of witch symbolism. She does what's called a “noctrunal” palette, which is you don't really light it with daylight, you light it with moonlight. So there's turquoises and grays and stuff that you wouldn't see in the daytime. Um, they called her the Queen of Bohemian Artists. And the way that she became so involved in the Jazz community is this was the era of Jim Crow. And even though she was in Chicago, in the North, still a lot of hotels would not allow black musicians and artists to stay there when they were doing their tours. So her house was the one where black musicians knew they were welcomed. They could stay, they could host their own music events in her home. Uh, I actually found in the Smithsonian archive, you can see her guest book with the list, and it's like Sarah Vaughn, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie (who was actually one of her best friends.) Well she had these jam sessions and these amazing, like, brilliant geniuses would come through. And I always think that her paintings look to me, what I imagined her house was like, because she had artists and music and cats and all these people and her in the hat — I just imagined she was the wildest. I do not know why no one has made a biopic of her or actually any of these women. I think we should open a production company and we just make biopics of these four women. But, um, what she was creating was so out of sync with what was happening in the rest of the contemporary art world, which is probably part of the reason she didn't have massive success. She was just using an entirely different platform and vocabulary. I mean, she was well-known in Chicago, but she wasn't in the art world very well known until in 2018, a very cool New York Lower East Side gallery called Karma, they had a show and I remember it. It was the biggest deal. And now every kind of younger artist I know has been so impacted by her. She's definitely someone who's had a very, very recent resurgence.
AMY: You mentioned the turquoise and when I Googled some of the images of her work that kept coming up, just that bright blue, beautiful… I realized, I don't think I'd ever seen any of her work before, because I would have remembered that blue.
KIM: It’s very striking.
SARA: It's the most amazing palette. And then even like her still lifes are just so moody and not our typical still life. So I imagine getting people to understand her art back then was not easy. They were so ahead of their time that now they're modern, you know? Now they make sense to us, I think.
AMY: We find that with writers too. The ones that were kind of really experimental and pushing the edge are sometimes the ones that get forgotten because people didn't really get it at the time. So let's move on next to talk about Augusta Savage. She was from that same era, but based in Harlem, and she had a hand in shaping the Harlem Renaissance. Can you tell us more about that?
SARA: Yeah, again, biopic somebody. It's amazing. So she was molding things in clay from a very early age, which was highly problematic because she had a minister father who thought these were, you know, a form of worshiping other idols. And she would be punished for making this, but she consistently made it. When she was in high school, I think it was Florida they moved to, and she found somebody who saw her talent for what it was, which is just out of this world kind of talent. And this principal would pay her a dollar a day to teach the other students how to mold clay.
And then she won a county fair contest and that led to her getting a scholarship at Cooper Union. Her reputation began to grow and. W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey were sculpted by her. Um, a lot of just super well-known leaders in New York city. And then she won a scholarship to this very prestigious program in France. But when they learned she was Black, they took away the scholarship. And so she was very vocal about racism back then. She just thought white critics and white artists, their depiction of Black people and their coverage of Black artists was steeped in racist POV. Um, so she was really vocal about that. When she was in Harlem, she, founded the Savage, which is the best name ever for a school the Savage Studio of Arts and Craft. And this was where she taught people like Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight and Norman Lewis — the big, big names in the Harlem Renaissance movement. She was their teacher. I mean, we're talking about some of the greatest American artists of all time. She was going to start a magazine called Fire!! with two exclamation points, which I think is so amazing with Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. So she was in the epicenter of one of the greatest American art movements that we've ever known. So her break came in 1937, there was a world's fair and she did this amazing piece that she called Lift Every Voice and Sing, and of course the organizing committee renamed it The Harp (which, of course they did.) And you really can't believe it was made in 1937, and it's just was so beautiful, but it was, um, 16 foot tall and it was plaster. She did not have the funds to cast it in bronze, which is always like, it's so expensive to cast in bronze. Like today, most artists can't also cast in bronze. It's so expensive. She didn't have the money to do that or to put it in storage. So it was bulldozed at the end of the fair, which this has to be one of the great art tragedies, because this is such a pivotal piece in sculpture. And, and just in her story is such a great American artist. I discovered her when there was, I think it was in a New York Times op/ed talking about, what could we replace all the Confederate statues with? And somebody was like, “Can we please have someone remake?...” I think there was a model of The Harp somewhere, she was like, “Let's remake it.” And I think that is the most brilliant idea
KIM: I love that idea.
SARA: Yeah. I mean, so far, we've talked about two people that were at the center of these massive creative movements and that we really didn't hear of them until the past five years. But we can name all the men around them!
KIM: Absolutely.
SARA: The men in their orbit.
KIM: Yeah. It's the same with the writers. And that's so tragic about her piece getting destroyed. That kills me. Um, so I was really intrigued in the list of women, you suggested Florine Stettheimer’s work, which you described as jubilant, and that’s such a perfect word for her paintings. They’re so joyful and gorgeous. The Stettheimers were a trio of sisters, actually. They were all artists and art lovers. They wore pants, smoked cigarettes, disdained marriage, romance and children, and were constantly surrounded by artists. And I bet they threw the best parties.
SARA: I know!
KIM: What else can you tell us about Florine in particular?
SARA: I mean, I think there's a lot to be said for growing up in that matriarchal world with her mom and her sisters. There was a big show at the Jewish Museum, I don't know, five years ago or something, maybe it was even more recent, of her artwork and a lot of that focused on the gender fluidity. The shapes of the figures, they're just like these fluid, curvy, not-of-this-world kind of shapes. Um, and, she kind of populated her world with a lot of ambiguity which I think again, super modern, way ahead of its time. The paintings often look like a stage design or, you know, they look like some amazing Broadway show or something. And they're just people all over and lights and flowers and surrealist moments. She went to see, the Russian ballet and was totally moved by that and came home and began kind of sketching and making little maquettes of like her own idea for ballet. And then that kind of segued into the paintings. Gertrude Stein did an opera and Florine did the set designs for it. You can actually watch it on YouTube. You can see some of that opera; It's very cool. But yeah, she was really good friends with Duchamp. She painted him a lot. She is credited as possibly doing the first female self portrait nude. And so in an era, when there was still a strict kind of boundaries, she just wasn't beholden to them at all. Marsden Hartley, he called her disparagingly, ultra feminine. Her artwork was ultra feminine and like she would glue beads on it and fabric and all these things that I remember in art school being told to avoid doing, because it was too feminine. Don't paint flowers.
KIM: Bedazzle…
SARA: Don’t bedazzle. I know! Now I wish I’d done a Bedazzler series! But I mean, I think she was so, again, in this world that didn't have the same rules and boundaries and she was like, “I'm going to do that.” And again, the work was so not of its time that it didn't really get prominence until real recently.
KIM: That makes me wonder if you had known about these artists when you were first starting out, how do you think they would have impacted you had you known about them?
SARA: I didn't know about any of these artists. So yeah, this would have changed the game because this is actually the pallet I use now. So I probably would've stolen it earlier. And I think text in art was a big deal.
I mean, there wasn't a lot of people doing text in art. That's something that's often mocked by the serious, you know, East Coast, white male critic. And her topics, like she called them the Four Cathedrals, which was like Broadway, Wall Street, Fifth Avenue, and then art galleries. Like, what man would probably have put Fifth Avenue shopping mecca as a cathedral? So I think even, we see new topics being covered by all these artists, it would have impacted me, not just the approach to painting, but just the idea that I could do a party, that it was a valid thing to paint would have been unheard of, impossible for me back in school.
AMY: Obviously a lot of men during the same time period were pushing boundaries with art and doing new things. But I wonder if the women sort of knowing always in the back of their mind, like “I'm never going to be really accepted by the Establishment, kind of liberated them?”
KIM: Like, “I can do whatever the heck I want because….”
SARA: Yes… if you’re going to lose anyway, you might as well do what you want to do.
AMY: Get that Bedazzling gun!
KIM: I love it. Yeah. So our fourth artists that we want to talk about is ed Edmonia Lewis, and she's a 19th century black and native artist. Can you tell us more about her Sara?
SARA: Yeah. She was earlier in history than the other three women, and 20 years before the end of slavery. Um, so her success is even more astounding. She grew up with an Ojibwe name that translated in English as Wildfire, uh, in Niagara Falls, which must be one of the coolest places to ever to grow up. She sometimes traces her desire to be an artist to her mother, who was an artisan making moccasins and crafts. And she sometimes did that with her. She was orphaned very young, but she had a super supportive brother who was very wealthy. So he was supportive of her, and believed in her art and helped her make things happen. And so she showed success early on, and wound up in Oberlin College, which was a total nightmare situation for her. She was accused of attempting to poison a classmate (very unfairly) and was beaten almost to death and ended up leaving school and going to Boston. And then she ran into a problem that is very common for women for much of art history. In sculpture, especially, you kind of need an apprenticeship, like you can go to school, but it's really hard to get to the high level without apprenticing with someone. And of course nobody wanted to apprentice her. So that was kind of the thing she would run into, um, as both a woman and a person of color. But she finally found someone, and at one point she made her own sculpting tools. I feel like these women, like, were so desperate to make this art that they just constantly had to find their way around everything. Like every barrier it's like, “Oh, I'll make my own tools. Or I'll find my own apprentice,” you know? She made a ton of money in two years selling portrait medallions, because it was right after the Civil War. So she made a fortune and got really wealthy in two years and then was able to go to Rome, which was obviously the ultimate place you wanted to go to learn sculpture.
She told The New York Times in 1878 that she was, and this is a quote “practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The Land of Liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.” Um, she did bust of many famous Americans, including Ulysses S. Grant, who actually sat for his portrait with her, which would have been a huge deal. Um, but then when she came back in 1876, she showed one of the coolest sculptures I've ever seen: The Death of Cleopatra. And so it's based on the Shakespeare moment where someone's coming to get her to drag her through the streets and she instead takes a cobra, an asp, and poisons herself and dies. And so there's all these great articles about why her depiction is so amazing. We're given in this sculpture this proud woman who almost has this look of like she was in power at the end. She took away the last thing that this guy was going to do. And so it was shown to great, great acclaim at the Centennial. But, not long after that it disappeared. Again, there was nowhere to really put it. It reappeared in a Chicago saloon, and then, uh, somebody who owned a racetrack bought it and brought it to the racetrack to mark where his horse had died. Um, and then it reappeared in a salvage yard and then a bunch of Boy Scouts found it, and they, first of all, I think they repainted it with white paint. So she was missing like her nose and I think a chin and I think they just painted over it with white. So the Boy Scouts rallied the community to save it. And they are responsible, I guess, for taking this out of the salvage yard. It's now in its rightful place in American art history at the Smithsonian and is considered one of the great works ever of American sculpture. Um, but yeah, the whole story behind it, it just breaks my heart on so many levels because of her, you know, gender and biography and race. To have it gone to obscurity for all those years is just heartbreaking. Just absolutely heartbreaking. Um, so yeah, I mean, another one of these stories that you can't believe what all these women, how much they had to ignore about public opinion and pressure and everyone's thoughts about their right to make art.
KIM: I mean her story in itself and the timing of when she was able to do this is incredible. And then I just want to underline what you said about when you look at her art, she's taking these subjects that other people were doing, but she was doing them from the perspective of character or whatever that she is sculpting.And that is huge to see art from her perspective and from a woman's perspective is incredible.
SARA: Yes.
KIM: Amazing.
SARA: One hundred percent. Yeah. We didn’t even start talking about the male/female gaze.
KIM: Yeah, which is a whole other thing. Exactly. Yeah. And then Cleopatra really made me think about it, because everybody's like doing Cleopatra. The men are doing her and what are they doing with her versus what this artist is doing with her is just completely different. So yeah. Sara, thank you so much for coming on. We learned so much. I'm so excited to explore some more of these women artists and other artists that I may not have heard of.
SARA: Well, thank you for having me. I loved it. And I hope to see you guys in person someday.
AMY: Yeah. And listeners, you've got to pick up this book. Even if you think you don't want to try painting because you're too scared, get Sara's book and it's going to walk you through it. Baby steps, I mean, she really holds your hand going through this. And Kim, if you have a painting party, I'll come.
KIM: Okay. I'd love that. Um, and then also listeners, even if you're like just, I'm never going to be an artist, I'm not going to pick up a paint brush, read the book because it's worthy of being read just as a memoir.
SARA: Thank you so much, you guys!
KIM: So that’s all for today’s podcast. Join us back here next week when we’ll be welcoming historian Joanna Scutts back to the show to discuss an early 20th century “hotbed” of feminism… the secret Greenwich Village club known as Heterodoxy.
AMY: We hope you’ll tune in for that, and also, if you could take a minute to leave us a five-star review where you listen to this podcast, we’d really appreciate it.
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AMY: Bye, everybody! Our theme song was written and performed by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Kim Askew and Amy Helmes.