Author: Nicole Bray

An Interview With Kathy Battista and Bryan Faller

NB: What are creative legacies and why is this field of expertise so important to study? 

KB: A creative legacy is the sum total of what is left behind in any creative practitioner’s life and career.  Most people think about work.  Like when Rothko died, you think of all of the paintings that are left.  It’s much more than just work, it’s things like an archive. So perhaps receipts, which tell us what kind of paints he bouhth would help with restoration.  Or receipts that tell us who his framer was or who built the stretchers. This also includes letters from people.  Bryan and I have worked with an artist for example who was quite close with Calder, but he’s much less known.  So, letters between him and Calder or experiences like an oral history recorded with his children detailing Calder’s influence on him is part of understanding that artists’ work.  It’s also things like real estate and money.  Those things are also part of creative legacies because you have the tier of successful artists where they have more than one or more houses or apartments but then also some unsuccessful artists who were able to obtain real estate in the 70s when Soho was super cheap and now that’s worth a lot of money.  They were able to sustain a radical art practice without having to be an A list artist, but that’s still left behind as part of their legacy.  So all of these things have to be worked out, it’s not just the art.  The legacy lives on in their family and in their studio assistants or managers that have a wealth of expertise in their own bodies and minds.  

BF: I started working with artists and their estates and families 10 years ago.  I was supporting Douglas Baxter in his office.  We were working with Judd and Sol Lewitt. I had the privilege of learning with that level of studio practice.  These were wealthier artists, wealthier estates.  These are artists who have collections of other A list artists.  When you’re dealing with significant artists critically and commercially, you can do a lot more.  Like Nicole, your experience with Rauschenberg.  You can do so many more things with money.  You can have internships, you can have foundations, you can have separate businesses within the estate and foundation.  The creative legacy is really about what we do with the resources that are left.  The idea is to do this before the artist is dead.  It’s a two-parter.  This is a conversation the artist starts before their death, which continues after they die.  It’s about the artist’s intentions.  Really, it’s economic.  How do we manage the remaining assets of this artist? Whether they are art assets, the body of work, the archive materials, or critical dialogue surrounding the artists.  That’s the job of the gallerist.  Who’s seeing this work, who’s working on this retrospective?  Are we talking to MOMA? The Whitney? The Guggenheim? Pompidou?  There’s a critical conversation that’s economic, and there’s an economic conversation that has nothing to do with the body of the estate.  There’s two parts of an artist’s estate–the creative estate and the “stuff” left from a life that everyone has.  They’re kept a bit separate, but at the end of the day the artist’s studio still has to deal with the body of work.  

KB: What Bryan said about their own collection was very interesting because some artit’s also have collections of other artist’s work.  It’s interesting to go into someone’s flat files and find a Robert Smithson drawing or a Peter Beard written on in a pile of papers in their desk drawers.  Those are the kinds of discoveries that you make because artists are friends and swapping with other artists.  

BF: You really start to see the influence then.  This was another area of research that came out of this.  You start to see studio practice being influenced by various elements other than strict art and art history.  What are their gallerist friends saying to them? What are the other artists saying to them?  What are their collector friends saying to them? How is all of this feedback coming in and re-influencing what they’re making? Sometimes they chose the color blue not because of something esoteric or ephemeral but because blue sells.  You don’t know until you read a note someone wrote that this was a commercial choice that they made.  Which is fine, it is what it is, but you have to know.  

NB: I do feel like this field has been a relatively new point of interest for the art world.  The realization that there needs to be more academic study and dedicated professionals to this area has developed mostly by seeing travesties with artists’ estates.  The realization that there needed to be more structure and rigor to this portion of an artist’s life and beyond.  There is such a lack of academic writing in this field.  Where was the genesis of the book? What kind of gaps were you looking to fill? 

BF: I was teaching at Sotheby’s and Kathy asked me to lecture with her in the Estates class. We were looking for readings and couldn’t find anything.  I said kiddingly, we should write a book. Kathy turns to me, dead serious, “Darling, we have to do this”.  I’m sitting there thinking we’re just pontificating, but it really started materializing.  

KB: We were at my corner office at Sotheby’s.  We knew Loretta Wuürtenberger’s book was coming out because Carl von Trot had gone to Sotheby’s, and we were in touch with him still.  We were waiting for it to come out for the class.  We thought of doing our own book.  We proposed one to Lund Humphries since it has a relationship with Sotheby’s institute.  They were keen on it.  The timing was also good because the editor Lucy Meyers, who’s wonderful, was coming to New York two weeks later to talk about a possible book.  It was very organic.  

BF: It happened very quickly.  

NB: Was the intention always to have contributors? What drove your thinking around the format of the book? 

KB: It was the fact that we thought we could get different and disparate points of view like legal, archival, or curatorial from getting different people involved.  For example, Bryan had the idea to get Alexandra Bowes-Lyon to write about English country-houses and the art in them which was fascinating because that whole structure changed so much in the 20^th century.  My knowledge was limited to Downton Abbey.  We had a person whose family actually lived through it and knew it.  That was great.

Then, you know, someone like Natalie Khan, who’s dealing with this quite a lot in fashion.  She’s researching people like Leigh Bowery.  The idea for us in getting different disciplines was that although there’s no one size fits all even for artists, you can make some structure, there’s something every estate should do, but each one is so unique.  You can’t just take a blueprint and put any artist’s estate into it.  There are always curveballs.  What we thought too is, wow, this is so similar to a film director, architect, fashion designer, or jewelry designer’s estate.  There are archives, the works, the oral history handed down in ateliers.  We thought it would be interesting to extend the discussion to other disciplines.  All of the books on estates so far have been focused on the visual arts.  

BF: For me, a few things stood out. Just nuances.  The contributor list changed.  There’s a difference between practitioners and academics.  It’s a different approach to what’s being discussed.  That’s what we wanted.  We wanted people with granular knowledge who were in the trenches and people who necessarily weren’t but had studied this.  They were granular on a different level.  Some contributors had to fall out because they didn’t know how to discuss it because it’s such a nascent thing.  There isn’t a field of creative legacy practitioners.  It’s people who deal with art in different capacities.  I think a lot of people are dealing with creative legacies in their own ways.  You don’t go to school to do this.  You fall into it.  Artists say “Hey, can you help me put together an estate plan.” Or “Hey, can you help me liquidate or sell or find a gallery.” Robin Wright, a jewelry specialist who’s a friend of mine at the auction house, was keen to write something with us.  She gave us an image from Verdura, the jewelry house.  Even Verdura was buying back pieces into their own collection.  the image she chose was a work they had bought back into their own collection.  It was an early broach.  It was fascinating because the clearance sheet I received was signed by a member of the Vedura family.  It was ironic because here we are talking about creative legacies and here we have a major jewelry house using this essay as a way of managing their creative legacy.  This is a minor thing in how they view their estate, but it was still part of it.  They’re artisans, but they’re not conceptual painters or performance artists.  You can see the threads to Kathy’s points in the similarities between the modalities.  What’s staggering is how different each situation is.  

NB: I find it really fascinating when you see how the fashion houses or couture houses take their iconic pieces back into the archives.  They realize how incredibly important it is to build up and document that archive through the years.  For artists, they go into museums, but outside of the visual arts, where do those iconic pieces live? They can’t be in grandma’s dresser.  To bring them back into the ateliers is a way of preserving their own history.  Do you see this book as an intellectual resource or a handbook or something else? 

KB: We were adamant that we didn’t want to make a handbook.  First of all, the Würtenburger book is good at taking you through the different things that need to be done and giving you a time estimate on it.  There’s also a book by an artist widow that is sort of like a handbook.  Then there is the Handbook For Artist’s Estates that is kind of old now. We didn’t want to do a handbook.  We wanted to do something where people could have more freedom to talk about intellectual problems or issues that come up.  Like where Mark Morris talks about architectural models and how they are so useful for pedagogical reasons, or the way Tom McNulty writes about appraising libraries or archives.  We wanted to give people leeway to write on what they found interesting about legacies.  Everyone has their own personal experience with it.  Ann-Marie Richard had amazing experiences with celebrity estates, a lot of it that she’s not allowed to talk about.  As a footnote to this, it was very interesting to see how estates and foundations are careful about how people write and talk about the work.  It is an increasing trend that they want to see everything that’s written by a scholar.  

BF: Just the process really taught us a lot about what people are willing to say, what they are not willing to say, which in some cases is understandable.  People are just so unsure about how things are going to affect their artist or estate. 

NB: How do you see the field of legacy planning expanding into the future? 

BF: We talked about this a bit with Loretta Würtenburger when we interviewed her two or three years ago.  We were at Art Basel and we happened to meet up.  It was serendipitous.  There are a lot more students too who are saying that they want to be a legacy planner.  I didn’t know that was a thing.  I’m like, yeah, you need to go to law school.  Or you need to get into investment, which has nothing to do with art and artists’ legacies but then you can work with that.  It was interesting just to hear where people are coming from.  I think there should be an educational opportunity for a certificate that guides you through the issues at hand.  At the end of the day, if you’re an artist’s legacy practitioner, you need to be the quarterback.  Or studio manager.  You need to come in and be the person who is taking everything into account.  Managing the financial advisor, the lawyer, the studio, the family.  

NB: And you’re applying the art world knowledge and practices across all of them.   

KB: I think what we’re seeing now are more agencies developing to deal with artist’s estates.  I think we saw this with Sotheby’s when they went into this.  It’s such a boutique industry.  Each estate takes so much work and so much finesse, it’s almost better for independent practitioners.  For the people who are artists and artist’s families to see the role of the artist advisor to shepherd estates too.  It’s very hard to take on ten estates for any company.  I think most of these places  have a few artists that they maintain very well.  I think Sotheby’s plan was to have 12 artists at a time.  I think it’s unbelievable how much finessing there is with each estate.  

BF: At the end of the day, these are really emotional situations.  Whether we’re selling works from a private collection or creating an estate plan, you have intimate knowledge of people’s lives.  

NB: It’s not always the conversation that people want to have prior to their death.  It’s a difficult topic for an individual and their family members to have to face.  

BF: Especially artists.  Artists want to live forever, and in a way, their work will.  

Derek Fordjour:

“Self Must Die”

Derek Fordjour’s paintings, notable for their layered textures and materials, address complex themes of race, inequality and American society. Fordjour has achieved astonishing commercial success and firmly cemented his place in the art world. At Frieze art fair in 2019, he sold 10 paintings to Jay-Z and Beyonce.  He often depicts Black athletes and performers–dancers, riders, rowers, drum-majors–characters that “navigate the ambiguities that come with their achievement, and the racial scrutiny that accompanies visibility in the mainstream culture.” With his newer work, however, less emphasis has been placed on these performative roles, and more on memorializing Black lives lost this year.  

He explores mourning in a new ensemble painting “Chorus of Maternal Grief”, creating specific portraits of women like Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, Tamika Palmer, and Breonna Taylor’s mother. In “Pallbearers”, he features the coffin of George Floyd. The works are on view alongside other installations, including a puppet show, at Petzel Gallery in “Self Must Die”. Accompanying Fordjour’s show is an epigraph from “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being” written by scholar Christina Sharpe.  Sharpe writes “What does it look like, entail and mean to attend to, care for, comfort, and defend those already dead, those dying, and those living lives consigned to the possibility of always-imminent death, life lived in the presence of death… it means work.” Sharpe refers to “wake work”, an “ensemble of activities, grand and mundane, that acknowledge and address Black death, and in doing so, affirm Black life”.  Fordjour addresses this concept alongside Black liberation theory and studies of Black mourning within his new work.  

Chiffon Thomas

Memory and Materiality

N: Can you tell us your story up until you were accepted into the Yale program?

C: I’ll start with a story about my high school experience because it’s how I got into embroidery, which is always featured in my practice.  I was a senior in high school when I first took art.  I had a teacher who would bounce ideas off of me.  One day, she showed me a book on this artist, Daryl Morrison, an embroiderer who embroidered narratives about his upbringing.  He wouldn’t use image references to create them; they were more imagined and illustrative.  She asked me what I’d think about assigning a project like that for the class and having each student bring in a photograph to embroider. That’s how this journey started: I brought in a photograph and was able to embroider it.  I was able to do it really quickly and she assigned me to do an entire portfolio of 12 of them. I ended up applying to the Art Institute with that work. It all happened so quickly.  I was accepted into the Art Institute and actually studied education instead of art.  I wanted to be a teacher and create an impact on someone’s life.  I ended up getting my Bachelor’s of Arts Education, so I started teaching in Chicago public schools for 3 years. I taught art full time. It was a nice experience for me, but I didn’t have a lot of time to be in the studio or a practicing artist.  It’s something I always had a desire to do.  I always had these creative projects and ideas for my students that came from my own interests and wanting to make art myself.  I ended up leaving teaching, just to have the opportunity to express and create a body of work. For a year, I didn’t have a job.  I worked in the basement creating a portfolio to apply to grad schools to study art specifically and get a master’s.  I made this portfolio from 2017-2018 and ended up applying to seven different universities and grad programs.  I got into all of them except for one.  I went to Skowhegan using the same portfolio. It was so crazy because I didn’t have a lot of exposure to art. I was mainly focusing on education and psychology—so I didn’t get a lot of that background.  When I went to Skowhegan, it prepped me for being in a program like Yale.  It exposed me to readings and artists that I was super unfamiliar with that actually helped to inform my practice when I started grad school at Yale.  

N: Why don’t we talk about some of the themes you explore in your work and how has your journey contributed to this? How do the various materials contribute to the idea?  

C: I guess I’ll start at the beginning, around the time I was creating these bodies of work. I came from the interest of working with family photographs.  I continued that because I look at family photo albums all the time.  I know a lot of people do because it’s different from looking at a digital device.  It’s so nice to have something tangible.  Something shot in film is so different from being shot on your phone.  I look at family photo albums out of pure nostalgia and a desire to be seen as an individual that can aspire to be anything that they want to be. As I was growing into adulthood, some of the ways that I wanted to identify were not accepted or rejected.  The pull and distance created in my relationships with my family were making me self-aware of not having a space of belonging. I was craving to have those things I would find in family photo albums and to investigate where they were or where they got lost over the course of time. I started to recreate them in these large-scale embroideries, which I was making in 2017.  Everybody loves to look back at their pasts and at their family. Giving people access into Black family structure was something I didn’t realize I was doing at the time.  When viewers would actually engage with the work, I could tell they were looking at a world they didn’t have access to before.  Even crafting these domestic scenes out of fibers, using things like pillowcases, brought things home to people.  They saw how familial bonds were created through families like mine with the tenderness of these relationships and how fragile they are.  A fragility is presented in the bodies that aren’t represented as well.  People have a level of care and can relate to those images that I make of my family. That’s what that work was about.  Even now, some of those things are finding their way into the bodies I make even when I’m not directly showing something that’s pictorial in my work.  People can see the humanity—I want the humanity to be present in the work in the way that I’m handling the body.  There’s this reconstruction of a being from being constantly oppressed, beat down, misrepresented or projected upon in these misinformed ways. I try to correct this and shift the viewer’s eyes and show a psychological perspective.  I bring that through material too, as material has its own history or it’s weathered or not polished.  You can see its scarring and how those things occurred through its activities without you being present.  You end up finding ways to repurpose it and reconstruct back into a form where it’s not devalued.  

N: Allowing the material to almost live like your skin, because your skin is scarred and has bruises and marks.  It’s a living organism like the materials you used.  When you mentioned your embroidery, pillowcases, fragility and tenderness that comes with that, all I could think about is the smell of someone’s pillowcases.  When you put your head down on that pillow and get that “ah, this is my bed” it conjures the nostalgia and comfort of your home, and how you grew up. It’s a beautiful way to look at these things.

C: It’s so crazy how our senses are activated from something we remember.  I was watching a TV show I hadn’t seen in years.  Over the summer, I just said “Let me find it on Hulu.” I rented it and was watching it in my room in the dark.  Immediately, I felt immersed in a setting or time period where I used to watch the show all the time. It overwhelmed my whole experience. I felt like I was back at that age in the room I was watching it in.  I hadn’t felt something so intense. I felt so nostalgic.

N: It’s an intangible feeling.  Let’s talk a little bit about the last year. I know you were recently featured in the show and subsequent catalogue “Young, Gifted, and Black” with Bernard Lumpkin.  You have some extraordinarily talented friends, some that are friends of mine.  Who do you look at in the generation before you for inspiration and admiration?

C: I know that that book is going to make an impact on artists.  It’s so crazy to even think about.  The work in that book is so strong and experimental.  Bernard’s collection has a nice, rich variety. It’s such a genius idea.  For that work in particular, I was looking at a lot of popular culture.  But for composition and color I was looking at this court case illustrator.  This woman illustrated the Cosby trials, Christine Cornell.  The way that she composes her court case scene are like a scale of individuals enlarged to show exaggeration or give weight to the actual mood occurring with her ability to use color.  She did a lot of drawing with chalk pastels.  That’s how I translate images: I translate them into pastel drawings.  I got that from looking at her drawings.  That’s a nice approach to understand color, human anatomy, and muscles.  I was really learning from the way that she composed mood.  I also sometimes just look at things that pop up on social media or even googling certain words and seeing what images I link to those words in search engines.  I get a lot of inspiration from that. Another artist I was looking at was Lauren DiCioccio, a soft sculpture artist that embroiders The New York Times in painterly, fluid ways, allowing the thread to hang freely. She wasn’t just doing that, she was making soft sculptures of things like polaroids, shopping bags recreated out of fabric and fiber. I just thought that was a way to kind of elevate and archive a moment in your history.  It is mundane, minute, or overlooked, but you have taken the time to care for this object and give it a sense of importance.  I really liked her aesthetic and tried to incorporate some of those techniques into my own practice. I was also looking at Sedrick Huckabee, who is also Yale alumni. He painted these little paintings of domestic spaces that pulled the eyes in dramatic ways, like the foreshortening of an image or a perspective pushed back. He has these images of his grandmother in a bedroom scene that are really painterly.  The paintings have a kinetic appeal to them, even though there in the mixed format of paint or whatever material the artist is exploring.  

N: Can you tell us about your most recent shows and residencies, and what’s coming up?

C: I’m in a group show in Beacon New York, “Parts and Labor”.  I was just in the group show “Myself” at Kohn Gallery in LA, which ended this month. I’m going to be in my own solo show at Kohn Gallery in March. I recently finished Fountainhead Residency. I was there for a month and it was amazing.  It was in Miami.  Kathryn Mikesell and Dan Mikesell are amazing, they run the residency space. I’m going to be in Art Basel and I’m showing work with P.P.O.W. in New York.  I’m showing an embroidery and three drawings.  I’m also going to be represented by P.P.O.W. and Kohn.  Plus, I have some exciting things coming up in the new year. Lots to look forward to!

The art world is experiencing a necessary evolution and expansion in 2020. Nothing replaces the experience of standing in front of an artwork, feeling its aura, and hearing its story, yet the art world has been thrust into the world of digital viewing rooms, online sales, and price transparency like never before. While shut down, galleries and auction houses found new ways to stay connected to collectors by staging virtual exhibitions, developing content, and hosting Zoom panels, initiatives that galleries had on the back burner for years. The upside: viewing art is made more accessible through virtual options and price transparency has been embraced. Buying art online is not a new concept; Gagosian sold a Cecily Brown online for $5.5M in 2019. Yet, it has generally been a resisted concept until becoming a necessity.

This time last year, we would have attended dozens of art fairs across the globe, riding the endless merry-go-round of fair-after-fair. Now, almost all fairs have now paused and (many of us) have taken a collective breath. Dealers, galleries, advisors, and auction house specialists have had to lean into the digital and figure out how to translate the storytelling of artworks online, followed up by an old-fashioned phone call and emails. What we have found is that privately existing collectors make up three-quarters of online sales and are comfortable transacting into low six-figures online. However, the auction houses tell a different online story and have seen multiple seven figure bids and sales, including an online bidder from Asia for a Francis Bacon that sold at Sotheby’s for $84.5M in June 2020. In this same Sotheby’s sale (the first since lock down), the art market took a giant sigh of relief when it totaled $300 million USD, signaling that collectors still had a heartbeat. High net worth collectors have demonstrated that they’re still comfortable buying at $250,000+. It wasn’t until the cliff of the election that we started to see jitters at $4M+.

Beyond the shift to digital, collectors have continued to demonstrate a keen interest in collecting cross-category, which is not surprising, unless it’s a dinosaur. In October, Christie’s placed STAN, the largest and most complete fossil ever found of a T-Rex in their Evening Sale, alongside Picassos and Pollocks. It sold for $30.8M against an estimate of $6-8M. Similarly, Sotheby’s placed three Alfa Romeo’s, an automotive triptych from 1953, 1954, and 1955 that resemble something from The Jetsons, in their Evening Sale, fetching $14.8M. Just as Lizzo described herself to Letterman, collectors are multi-faceted. They love beautiful things that move them and tell a story regardless of designated genre.

While the highest echelons of the market are buzzing, it’s important to recognize young talent, especially MFA students who graduated this year. There are so many gifted artists out there and it will be my pleasure to share the work of Hangama Amiri in the next artREAL article. Stay tuned!

Hangama Amiri:

Storytelling Through Textiles

N: Can you tell us your story up until you were accepted into the Yale MFA Program?

H: I was born in a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1989. That was during the civil war, the war in Afghanistan, where people were migrating from country to country. My Mom was a refugee in her own neighborhood.  I spent most of my life in Kabul, Afghanistan, and that’s why I call myself an Afghan artist. Since then, when the Taliban took power in 1996, we became refugees to Pakistan again.  We were there until 1999.  After that we became refugees to Dushanbe, Tajikistan.  We lived there until 2005, when we immigrated to Canada.  During these times I was always interested in the arts.  From a young age I was always drawing my dreams and stories about moving country to country. I was also drawing about my future or my utopic hope for the future.  It was really interesting.  In Tajikistan I took my arts seriously, because I won a small scholarship in the arts program.  It was a two-year scholarship for the Olimov College of the Arts.  I applied through a UNICEF competition–I won first place and that led me to a two-year degree in the college of arts.  From there I learned a lot about academic drawing.  It was a very Russian based school, so they taught me a lot about observational life drawing. My passion for that grew, and when we immigrated to Canada in 2005, I decided to continue making my art. I graduated my BFA program from NSCAD University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.  From there I took five years to exclusively do artist residencies.  I’ve done residencies in Europe and Canada.  I was also a Canadian Fulbright.  I completed an independent research program at Yale University—it was a different program at than the MFA, but being in New Haven for a year as a Fulbrighter gave me an opportunity to be closer to the Yale School of Art.  There I made really close friends. Tomashi Jackson was still in school, it was her second year I think. Alteronce Gumby was there too, so lots of great artists that we now know these days.  It was really interesting because people were so serious about their art and their views in artmaking, practice, and material.  Discussions were taking place and it really opened me to also seeing my art here someday, at this level.  I took another year off again after my research and came back.  I graduated during the pandemic, and now I’m still working and living in New Haven.