On the way art can heal you and hold you

Can you tell me more about your belief that art is healing?

I think it’s coming from 12 years of Catholic school, which were pretty intense for me—bullying and stuff like that. My creative space at home, which my parents made for me, was a place I couldn’t wait to get to.

I didn’t know it as healing, but it was healing. I think it’s gotten me where I am today. I go to my art whenever I’m feeling stressed, and I don’t have that when I’m working.

Do you see work and art as two separate things? Are art and work the same thing for a living artist?

No, not for me. It is work as a relationship is work, but… I think of work as something that’s harder, that you’re doing because you have to do it. I don’t feel like that with my art. I feel it calls me to be. So I’m there.

I think the work part of art is the business side of it. I have a lot of help from my husband [Dan Martin] on that because it stresses me out, but it’s what I’ve been doing most of my life, and it’s my livelihood. That’s the work. I need to separate that from the pure essence of art, being an artist, and making art.

How did you take the path to where you are today, where you’re able to do the thing you love and minimize the things that feel like work?

I do the things that feel like work. I have to, because there’s some things that have to come from me for my work, to deal with clients [and] build a relationship. … This is really dramatic, but if I didn’t do [art], I wouldn’t be here. I can’t not do it, and I’ve tried other ways to do it, or teaching classes. I like all that stuff, but it’s not really until I go into the zone of… It’s emotional for me, too. [I’m] calling in ancestors…to make what I make. I wake up and I have to do it. And I go to sleep and that’s what I’m thinking about.

I hold that precious and sacred because it’s the thing that supported me through hard times. I didn’t have hard times at home. I had an incredible Italian family that supported me and loved me and everything that I did, but they didn’t know anything other than to have me be…rigid and structured. Leaving that, I carried the good fantasy, imaginary parts of that, like the statues and the priests’ outfits and things like that, into my next phase of college, and I carry it [today]. It’s the thing that holds me.

When I left [Philadelphia College of Art after] four years, I immediately, on South Street [in Philly] in 1973, opened a little storefront so that I could do my art. I had a window and I taught classes. … I did it in New York, too, for 20 years. [Art] follows me around. Well, I follow it.

You said you wake up thinking about art and go to sleep thinking about art, which is something I can relate to in one of my passion projects—it’s kind of always on my mind. How does that feel for you?

I’m comfortable in that space. When I lie down and I’m thinking, “How am I going to paint that next sculpture tomorrow,” it’s not a difficult space for me. It doesn’t keep me awake. It’s this space I have to live in, because again, if I didn’t, I don’t know how I would truly be here.

Sometimes it’s stressful if I’m working on a commission or specific project and it has to be a [certain] color and design. That’s a different story. But if we’re just talking about the pure essence of creative space and making art, it’s a bedtime story for me. I can’t wait to wake up so that I could get here.

I’m getting the sense that, when you talk about your artistry and your process, you most prefer situations where you just know that you want to create, but there aren’t boundaries around it. Does that sound right to you?

Yeah.

In moments where there are boundaries around it, how do you navigate that?

When I don’t have boundaries, what happens for me as an artist [is], when I get out of my way, something spectacular happens within the art. With boundaries, I have to be more hands-on and involved in it, so I go into a different space. I’m not as ethereal or spirit-centered. It’s still in the work because it’s me making it, but I’m working with the gift of making it. I’m more part of it then when I’m just doing it and it’s creating itself.

I want to ask about your relationship with Dan, because one of the threads I’ve uncovered in your art is that it’s been a way to keep the relationship going. Can you tell me about art and creativity as a way to power a relationship?

It’s bigger than visual art, because Dan and I write musicals, and Dan’s a composer. Through our relationship, I was a performer, a dancer, and he was making music. We started to collaborate on what we were calling queer performance art musicals. We would use sculptures that I have, and he would make music, and I would perform. He looked at some of my journals and put my poems to music.

Our relationship is very based in creative space. I mean, it’s 50 years this year that we’re together. A big part of that is that we give ourselves space, because he also does arrangements and composing for film and his own thing, and then I have my visual art. He helps me with that. I listen to what he’s doing and contribute to that. And then, when we come together and write musicals, which is a thing that we do as music and lyrics, it feeds the relationship. We’ve written a lot of songs together, and we’ve had productions and films made of our work. That all brings strength to our relationships. We’re not competitors. We’re collaborators in love, too, as two men.

Is there a prioritization of your visual art over your other creative pursuits? Tell me about how you find the time for it all.

It’s really all that I do. I’m not traveling. I travel the world through my work. I’m not taking vacation. I’m either doing the visual art or the lyric writing, because I’m not performing anymore and [Dan isn’t either]. We’re writing songs with book writers and film people that go into—we’re doing it right now. We have three projects, full-on musicals that are being shopped as episodic musical adventures for TV.

We just did a thing in Brooklyn, and it was like 25 people, because it’s the film crew and one actor. We were there for 10 days in New York. So when I’m doing that and I know I need to [work on my visual art], if I have a deadline for [it], then that is a problem.

But I try to schedule my space, or Dan helps me do that, so that when I’m doing [something like my] Clay Studio show, I just have time to do that [and] the theater stuff. And then, once I write my lyrics, it goes to him because he’s arranging them and working with the theater or film people to get the singers and harmonies and all that. I’m not doing any of that. I write words. It just works. It’s like a beautiful dance. I’m grateful for it every day of my life.

You’re saying that you two used to perform. Is there a reason you two stopped performing, or was it just kind of a natural evolution of where you’re at in your collaborations artistically and in love?

Our performance was very queer-centric. … It’s things that some people are doing now, but we did it in 1980 and ‘76, early ‘77. [We were] naked, [we] talked to the audience. We were just being… It’s performance art. And about our relationship, that’s what the pieces were about.

We would discuss things. Dan would sing songs. I would put a mask on and move with that. I felt at that time, as young queer men, it’s something we were just called to do. It’s like, “You guys are in a relationship. You write lyrics. You do this. You’re theater people,” which is also my [visual] art, all my characters. It’s theatrical to me. So we started making our own things like [the performance art musicals] Homo Love Song and Xposed. And we did that for a while.

I connected with Ishmael Houston-Jones, who’s a choreographer in New York, and we started a company called Two Men Dancing. … It was very focused on queer community and bringing a sense of love and healing into that world. We were going through intense AIDS things and losing people. We would go onto the stage and conjure hope and possibility from just working with people with HIV, caring for them, bathing them, and all of that. We did a piece on the stage [in which we were] bathing a man as he’s leaving the earth.

We were presenting that work in New York and there was a producer, a woman we’re still working with, that sold the work and said, “I have a screenplay, and I just saw your musical and I love the work you’re doing.” It’s funny, I still tease her, [she said], “Do you do anything that’s not gay?” We sort of laughed and I said, “It’s not really gay, it’s just about love.”

We worked with her, and that brought us into a world of working with another story just as writers, and bringing actors in [for] more commercial, but not 100% commercial, things. We stopped performing, and we started giving our work to actors and singers [who] took it to a whole other level. Sometimes our male dancing thing, I think it was of a time, and this [more commercial work] put us in a different kind of light as just writers of great songs for musicals.

Dan still, once in a while, does a concert here [in our studio] of our songs, or we’ll call in five actors and they’ll sing our songs. It was just time to get off the stage, and I didn’t really want to… It was intense for us because we were really shedding and exposing ourselves in a big way.

The thing that strikes me about your sculptures is that, yes, sculptures often have faces, but the faces on yours are starkly realistic. Can you tell me about the intentionality of making your faces so realistic in your sculptures?

So many of the faces, they’re from life masks. I do masks of people. When I do the mold, it has that life force in it. A face just tells the story. Or, you could look at it and see yourself, or not see yourself, or feel happy or sad or angry, or weep or laugh.

Again, I think it’s about character and theater. For me, it’s theatrical. It’s all dancing together. A lot of the faces, and also working with Ishmael, there’s a thing within the Black community, which I carry with me [from] my bullying days… The Black men in my high school were my sort of safety. I don’t know what that is or why, but they would protect me. I bring that into my work too, that there’s a spirit-centered thing that I feel very empowered by when I bring light to that.

It’s kind of interesting within the theater world and in the art world. When you apply to things, a lot of it is, they’re looking for BIPOC. I’ve done it my whole life. I’m not doing it because it’s what I have to do or it’s trendy or important. It’s always been there, so almost all of my life masks are of color.

Before going to The Clay Studio and seeing your exhibition, I didn’t know you worked in photography. How do you choose when to use photography versus sculpture in your visual art?

The photography is from Thomas Moore, and that’s from 1980, the series with the teapot. Thomas was a friend of ours, and we have great photos of all the performance stuff. When I did this tea set for a show in Philadelphia that Helen Drutt curated, Dan and I arrived in codpieces, and she said, “This is completely inappropriate.”

[For the exhibition], I found Thomas, who I’ve not been in touch with for many years, and I said, “I had three or four photos, little ones, do you have any documentation?” He had a portfolio of these beautiful [photos], and I said, “Let’s do a show.”

I wrote to Helen Drutt and I said, “I’m having a show of the piece that you hated.” That’s the thing that brought me to The Clay Studio, because Jennifer Zwilling came to see the show. She had never been here. And she said, “What is this?” They were all photos of me with clay and Ishmael. She said, “This needs to be seen, these bodies with clay, in performance.”

This is all new for me. … I mean, The Clay Studio [is nearby]. We’ve been here since 1976. They’ve never been here. That show brought me there, and it’s kind of a breakthrough time. … It was time for me, in my early ‘70s, to come out again.

I got a call from someone that said, “Do you have this tea set or codpiece?” I [said] no, and he said, “Well, I’m really interested in the codpiece. Would you make them?” So I made some, which were in The Clay Studio show. We did another session with Thomas of all [the] photos.

As I keep working, it’s nothing that I’m orchestrating. I feel it’s coming to me as theater and art, capturing it in photography–which we’ve always done anyway–but they mainly are for a portfolio for me to send around. Now, I’m starting to put them up and show them as art.

That was everything I wanted to ask you about today, but if you wanted to say anything more about anything related to your creativity or otherwise, then please.

When I submit work to an art show and it says “emerging artist,” this is what I would like to say about that. I’m emerging at 73, and I will continue to, as long as I can be healthy, do what I do. It’s not like you stop growing, because I think some artists [think], “You create what you do and that’s what you do forever.” That can go into big galleries and people can follow you. My path is different because it shifts. It goes to theatre, to art, to performance, to music and sculpture and photography. I’m always exploring, and I think that’s the key to being an artist: that we let in all those muses, give them space to present themselves.