Inside Out
Bernard Lumpkin
Art Patron
PART 1: INSIDE
When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down New York City during the third week of March, I like citizens around the world, was forced into quarantine and isolation. My husband set-up his home office in our bedroom. My 6 year-old twins started remote-learning, and I became a surrogate Kindergarten teacher, shepherding them through daily morning meetings on Zoom and homework assignments on Google Classroom.
The onset of Covid-19 also brought new challenges and opportunities in my work as a contemporary art collector and patron. Being a vocal and visible supporter of several museums and non-profits has given me a platform to talk about issues in contemporary art, particularly concerning emerging artists and artists of African descent. So when Covid struck I was asked to share my views. In my first-ever live webinar on the pandemic’s impact on the art world, I discussed the proliferation of virtual viewing rooms and other online platforms, the shifts in collectors’ buying habits, decisions happening behind museums’ closed doors about how and when to reopen, and the efforts of curators to help audiences stay engaged with art and artists. I was also asked to speak to other art patrons and museum trustees about the importance of honoring commitments to galas and benefits made before the pandemic hit. Covid or no Covid, patrons need to keep doing what they do because artists and art institutions depend on us.
As the lockdown in NYC continued, I was also interviewed about what it’s like to be quarantined at home with an art collection. What new discoveries was I making as a result of spending so much time at home with the artworks I love? True, I saw things anew. A detail in a Henry Taylor painting — a horse in an open field rearing up to the sky — caught my attention now as a strikingly vivid symbol of the physical freedom and outdoor space we’re all missing. A photograph by D’Angelo Lovell Williams of two black men locked in a kiss, their faces covered by du-rags: an image that in this age of face masks and protests now seems to capture the zeitgeist with uncanny accuracy.
The focus of my advocacy for artists and museums is early-career, or “emerging” African-American artists. There is a personal and specific reason for this focus. The contemporary art collection my husband Carmine and I have assembled together over the past ten years grew out of conversations I had with my father – who was black – about race, history, and family. The collection is a labor of love I share with my husband and our three children, whose mixed-race heritage is reflected in the paintings, sculptures, and photographs that surround them. An art collection is a conversation, a gathering of voices. And I’m grateful, thanks to the “Young, Gifted, and Black” traveling exhibition curated by Antwaun Sargent and Matt Wycoff — which features work from my family’s collection — to be able to share these artworks with people across the country who might not otherwise get to see them. The educational mission feels especially critical at a moment when so many are thinking and talking about what it means to be black in America today.
As a mission-driven collector and patron, I’ve always viewed art as a tool to foster dialogue. This can happen in many ways and involve artists, audiences, and patrons. And that’s where the studio visits come in. Studio visits: that time-honored tradition in which an artist invites someone (usually a curator or collector or professor or another artist) into their workspace for the purpose of a mutually-beneficial conversation about their work. The artist receives valuable feedback on their work. And the visitor has an opportunity to learn about the artist and the work they are making. As the Studio Museum patron George Wein has said, collecting art is like collecting knowledge, and I’ve always approached collecting art as an intellectual endeavor. I didn’t get a degree in art history (and contemporary art isn’t art history anyway) and so studio visits are how I learn. Art is my continuing education and the studio is my classroom.
Teachers and students. Doctors and patients. Lawyers and clients. Patrons and artists. Covid has certainly made it harder for people who depend on each other to connect. But not impossible. I’ve found that studio visits – especially when you’ve already met the artist and you’ve seen the work in person – actually one of the few face-to-face interactions that translate well to Zoom and FaceTime. And when you’re quarantined with 6 year-old twins and a baby boy, what better antidote to the pressures of family and the drumbeat of bad news from the outside world than a virtual escape into an artist’s imagined reality?
“This is exactly where I need to be right now, Bernard,” one artist told me on a recent Zoom. “In my studio. Making work.” In the age of Covid, when social distancing is the rule and personal protection is the protocol, the studio becomes a creative sanctuary and a safe space. Isolating oneself in the studio is the right thing to do as a citizen: it protects you and others too. Isolation has other advantages. You can concentrate and focus more easily. So much change can happen inside the safe and secure confines of the artist’s studio, where the imagination can run wild. You can shout and chant and march and break glass and burn things down. And, of course, rebuild. All without stepping outside. The art does all this work for you.
Art is still being made and artists need to be heard. Their work must continue to have an audience, to be talked about, to have a life. And that’s how I see my role in these studio visits. I ask questions. We share observations. The conversations cover a range of themes and topics: color, materiality, and process. Scumbling, iconography, and narrative.
Covid has made offices in many industries off-limits. What happens when the studio isn’t a studio? Barred from campus and locked out of their traditional workspaces, many young artists I know have migrated elsewhere: their own apartments, friends’ living rooms, or parents’ houses. Artists are resourceful, and – like all of us – are finding new spaces to do the work that would normally happen in a conventional workspace. One painter I know discovered an unrented, empty unit down the hall from his own apartment. His landlord told him that it belonged to a tenant who had fled the city. So – in exchange for doing some handyman work – the landlord let the artist use the unit as a painting studio. When I did a FaceTime visit with the artist, he showed me newer, smaller paintings. “This is what I have space for now,” he said.
Transformations in medium as well as scale are happening. Another artist, who works primarily in three dimensions (sculpture) or four (performance), was now teaching himself to draw, developing a daily drawing practice with pastel and colored pencil. “It’s more intimate,” he explained to me, mark-making being a solitary mode of artistic expression which also aligns nicely with social-distancing protocols. “With the sculptures and performances, I need other people.” Making work in solitary isolation didn’t mean that artists weren’t still connecting. Social media took on a new and expanded role, as online platforms such as Instagram became surrogate studio spaces, with artists posting and sharing new work and inviting comment and discussion. In my studio visits I began seeing other shifts in artist’s work directly related to Covid-19, particularly the disproportionate impact of the virus on African-Americans. One artist I spoke to who normally works in figuration had started making abstract drawings. “I’m tired of seeing black bodies in the spotlight – in distress, struggling, dying. I’m trying to envision something else here.”
PART 2: OUTSIDE
At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the spectacle of black death was once again front-page news. On May 25th Minnesota police officer Derrick Chauvin used his knee to pin George Floyd’s neck to the ground until he stopped breathing. In the days that followed, protests against police brutality and systemic racism erupted in Minneapolis and quickly spread like wildfire to cities across the country. These protests, many led by Black Lives Matter organizers but populated by people of all ages and backgrounds, were about more than one man, George Floyd. Fresh in people’s minds are Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. And their deaths have in turn reopened the wounds of Trayvon Martin, Michael Ferguson, and – particularly for New Yorkers – Eric Garner. The legacy of white on black violence dates back to slavery. It’s as old as America.
How would artists respond to this resurgence of racism, this virus of hate and violence which was rearing its ugly head once again? Indeed, I noticed a distinct shift in my studio visit dialogues after George Floyd. Artists told me they were spending less time making work and more time talking, texting, and engaging with people outside the studio. It became clear that – even before action was taken – conversations needed to happen: among friends and neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances, and partners and spouses. One artist, who is black, said to me that he was focusing on interracial dialogues: having conversations with his white artist-friends to help them understand what was happening and why. This same artist asked me: “Bernard, how do you talk about Black Lives Matter with Carmine?”
The question should have caught me off guard, but it didn’t. Why? As I explained to the artist, I don’t see my husband Carmine as “white” – even though he’s Italian-American, and therefore white in the eyes of many. When we met (thirty years ago, in college at Yale), Carmine was taking a course in black literature which he loved and which he couldn’t stop talking about. But most importantly there was Carmine’s relationship with my father. Soon after we started dating in college, Carmine met my father – and they developed a friendship that grew stronger and deeper over the years. Their bond and their banter was that of like-minded intellectuals. They debated politics and current events. They shared a love of math and science (my father was a Physics professor). My sister and I, both decidedly right-brainers, weren’t always interested in our father’s latest favorite theorem; but Dad always had an eager audience in Carmine. And their connection was more than intellectual; they came from similar backgrounds (working class) and they were each the “breakout star” of their respective families: the first sons to attend college, the first to lead lives far from home.
After George Floyd, Black Lives Matter conversations started happening between partners and spouses, as well as between colleagues. Another artist I spoke with was preparing to moderate a live virtual conversation with two other artists about the recent protests. This performance artist’s chosen mode of response — asking fellow creatives to take the stage with him —echoes his own practice, in which he frequently invites fellow artists and audience members to participate in making his performances. In this way, his response to the crisis is essentially an extension of his own creative process, and the moderated conversation becomes a work of art in its own right.
This idea – that one’s response to a crisis should be genuine, authentic, and organic – started to emerge in my conversations with artists about how they were answering the various calls to action. “You have to be true to yourself, and to your work,” is how one artist put it. There were riots and looting in the streets, and there was also an explosion on social media, with friends and followers sharing lists of causes and organizations to support. Now, instead of posting new work, or issuing creative challenges, artists were using their personal social media as a vehicle for political action. One artist told me that she believed the best path to reform is to change laws, and therefore she decided to use her Instagram feed as a platform to auction her work and donate the proceeds to the ACLU. It was an edition of colorful figurative drawings hand-printed by the artist. Staying true to her voice and vision, the artist creates a work of protest.
In spite of opportunities like this to protest virtually, using social media, many of the artists I spoke to reported that they could no longer keep their studio doors shut – literally and figuratively. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to just think about oneself,” one artist explained to me. “Especially when what’s going on outside is impacting so many.” The calls from friends to join protests and marches were harder to ignore. The outside world was beckoning. And many artists I spoke to gladly answered the call. After all, what’s scarier: staring down a line of National Guardsman in riot gear or staring at a blank canvas?
“I want to be present,” a photographer I know told me. “I want to bear witness.” Since the protests started, he had taken to carrying his camera around everywhere. It was a 35 mm, medium-format SLR which he had purchased many years ago with funds from an art grant. “It’s film, so it forces you to slow down,” he told me, explaining his process of shooting candid and posed shots of other protesters he encountered in the streets. “It’s different than an iPhone. It feels more permanent.” As a kid he had wanted to be a
photojournalist, and now he was finally getting his chance. For other artists I spoke to, the move from the studio to the street was less about advancing your artistic education than about beefing up your knowledge of policies and politics: “When I go to marches I’m listening to the speeches and taking notes.”
Following the example of the artists once again, I took to the streets. It happened very quickly one sunny afternoon in June. The streak of beautiful late spring weather in the City was beckoning. My quarantining had reached a tipping point. I finished helping Lucy and Felix with their daily assignments on Google Classroom, checked out #justiceforgeorgenyc on Instagram, and saw that there was a march starting at 4 p.m. in Washington Market Park. “Let’s go,” I told the kids. We grabbed our masks and raced through the doors.
My parents always said that my first word was “Out!”
I was born in New York City, and – even though I was raised in Southern California – I’ve never stopped being a city kid. And, they also told me, one of the things I loved most about the City as a child was the subway. With Lucy and Felix holding my hands, we marched across West Broadway and ducked into our neighborhood station at Canal Street. I hadn’t been inside there in nearly three months. And what I found at the bottom of the stairs was cleaner and emptier than I could ever imagine. We were a familiar sight on the platform: New Yorkers in a rush, and the clock was ticking. After a few minutes the train came – and it was as clean and empty as the station. “It smelled like Fabuloso,” an artist told me, recounting his own A-train ride to a protest. “It didn’t even smell like the subway.”
“Who outside? We outside! Who outside?? We outside!!” The chants reached our ears as soon as we emerged from the subway at West 4th Street. Streets which had for months been lifeless and desolate were teeming with people walking with that focused intensity we instantly associate with New Yorkers. When we arrived at Washington Square Park we were greeted by protesters. It was a crowd of strangers but I felt like I was being welcomed by old friends. “No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!” I joined the chant, and we fell into the parade of marchers. As we passed through the giant arch at the northern edge of the park, I caught a whiff of someone’s cologne – it enveloped me completely and stopped me dead in my tracks. In an instant I was transported back to a crowded restaurant or bar, where one is constantly assaulted by the smells of other people. After three months of being quarantined with the same sights, sounds, and smells – this stranger’s cologne was like freedom in a bottle.
“No justice! No peace!” As we marched up 5th Avenue, Lucy and Felix were chanting along too, their paper masks no match for their high-pitched 6 year-old voices. There were no other kids in the crowd around us so we got a lot of thumbs ups and encouraging waves. Schools were closed but Felix and Lucy were getting a civics lesson in the streets. They marched along and blew the whistles I had bought them and they kept asking “Daddy, where did all these people come from?!” It was their first-ever protest but yet they seemed to be in their element. It was like they had been there before. Then again, protest is in their blood. My father had been a civil rights activist while at Columbia University in the 1960s. One day I will tell them the whole story. I continued marching up Fifth Avenue, hand in hand with Lucy and Felix. Who outside? We outside.
PART 3: CONCLUSION
My conversations with artists during these crazy past three months — as Americans wrestled with the twin viruses of Covid and racism — have helped keep me sane. Artists are my extended family, and just as they invite me into their studios, I welcome them into my home as if they were one of my own. I hope that Lucy, Felix, and baby Zachary will follow in their father’s footsteps and use the family art collection as a tool to learn about themselves, enlighten their friends, and better understand the world. God forbid another pandemic like Covid-19 befalls my children. And I pray that they live to see an America where the virus of racism is more contained than it is today. But whatever the uncertain future holds for them, I hope that in moments of crisis and turmoil, when their own destinies and the fate of humanity is unclear, they will stop and look at the art all around them – inside and outside, and talk to those artists, and listen.