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    Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
    Unavailable
    Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
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    Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
    Ebook368 pages5 hours

    Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over

    By Nell Irvin Painter

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir of one woman's later in life career change is “a smart, funny and compelling case for going after your heart's desires, no matter your age” (Essence).

    Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school--in her sixties--to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful demands of a life fully lived.

    How are women and artists seen and judged by their age, looks, and race? What does it mean when someone says, “You will never be an artist”? Who defines what an artist is and all that goes with such an identity, and how are these ideas tied to our shared conceptions of beauty, value, and difference?

    Bringing to bear incisive insights from two careers, Painter weaves a frank, funny, and often surprising tale of her move from academia to art in this "glorious achievement--bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives" (Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage).

    Editor's Note

    Back to school…

    The perfect — and very literal — read for back-to-school season, this inspiring memoir follows a retired history professor who decides to earn an art degree in her 60s. A must-read for anyone who’s ever felt “too old” to do what they want.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCounterpoint
    Release dateJun 19, 2018
    ISBN9781640090620
    Unavailable
    Old In Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over
    Author

    Nell Irvin Painter

    NELL IRVIN PAINTER is the Edwards Professor of American History Emerita at Princeton University. Her most recent books are The History of White People and Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era.

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    Reviews for Old In Art School

    4/5

    37 ratings6 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Great read, incisive opinions, fascinating woman.
    • 4/5
      And on her first day, a fellow student asks “How old are you?” randomly, blatantly, honestly. Agog at the sixty-four reply, Painter is made more aware of her oddity. A class of freshmen students, age appropriate, and herself. Grandmotherly in a flock of direction-seeking sheep. Day one. Onward!But here, being a black female that is also older than the norm, she has his the trifecta of ismisms: race, sex, age. All she needs is a disability and it’s a royal flush of disregard. But having a mother who broke from established expectations and started her own writing career in her later 60’s, it gave Painter a template of chutzpah to be herself, unfiltered, unrestrained.The backstory of how her family set the stage for her aria, there is much emphasis on the sad hindrance of race. Then we get the paragraphs of all her extensive accomplishments, awards and accolades. Initially a writer of history, she finds herself ruminating over early days of drawing and is pulled back into that realm. Onward to college and her degrees therein.We spend some time with her in Newark, reminiscing on neighbors and events. Take a few classes with her at Rutgers, meeting a few of her classmates and teachers. She mentions numerous artists, from which she draws both admiration and frustration, citing the why’s of the what’s.Mixing in some humor (as when she compares walking into an art supply store to entering a vagina, inviting and sensuous) she trudges through classes while holding down outside duties and trying to complete a book she’d been writing. Supported by her husband, she at least had that relief.Onto Mason Gross. Feeling a bit more sure of herself, she readily doles out the snark on artists she is less fond of. (She may have yet another career as a stand-up comedian)Interesting how she paid tribute to female artists by copying their work, often by gridded squares, and always with admiration. Much mention of the lack of recognition given women in the art field (Hello Guerrilla Girls!)Her chapter “Look Like An Artist” was redundant to me. Tho a frame can really set a piece for show, I never really got the artist costume. Hell, just wear what you wore when you painted the thing.... That would be a true artist attire. Still, I had to laugh at how she, so much older than her classmates, tried to look the look... despite her “Passed fuck-by date.” This really has some good laughs in it.The chapter on not being able to draw her dying mother was touching. She and her father, at her mother’s bedside, reading Obama’s memoir aloud, which segued into a bit of politics (as does my every book club meeting) but circled back to her mother.Onward to her time at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she rents an apartment, studio space and attains “contentment” ... albeit apart from her husband and pets. Here, again, she nods to the numerous artists who inspire her as she lolls away the hours at the Fleet Library. She creates, receives responses, shares hers, and learns. Aside from the art imbuing, she learns that no matter where or with whom, isms exist, isms interfere. (I have to wonder how her co-students & teachers felt if they read about themselves here.) It’s not long before that “contentment” is abated and she drifts alone in her graduate goals.Everywhere she turns, it seems everyone repeats their mantra of squelching “You can not draw. You can not paint. You are not an artist!” What tenacity she had. What faith in oneself. What all out chutzpah!And if dealing with all the perpetual negativity we’re not despairing enough, she had the constant pleas of her depressed father for her company, her time, her devotion.But that changes. Perhaps it was recognition of her work aside as a historian, archived and praised, or the books she authored, also praised, or just her unending impetus to be taken seriously. Whatever it took, she got it at last.
    • 4/5
      "I was such an old fuddy-duddy among the frolicking youth, a twentieth-century relic, a repository of useless knowledge, of experience no longer interesting, a fogey wanting art to be artful.""It took me years in art school to recognize my twentieth-century eyes as my major handicap as an artist....My lying twentieth-century eyes favored craft, clarity, skill, narrative, and meaning. My twenty-first-century classmates and teachers preferred everyday subject matter, the do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetic, appropriation, and the visible marks of failure: drips, smudges, and what in the twentieth century would have been considered mistakes needing to be cleaned up."Nell Painter was an esteemed historian, author of several best-selling books, and a tenured professor of history at Princeton when in her mid-60's she decided to give up her historian career and go to art school. When she entered the freshman class at Rutgers art college she noticed that, unlike during her historian career when her defining characteristics to her peers were that she is Black, and a woman, now, her art school colleagues defined her by her age: she was Old!This engaging memoir follows her over the next several years as she earns an undergraduate art degree and then her MFA at Rhode Island School of Design. I loved her discussions of how she conceived her art and her artistic processes. There are discussions of art theory, and the book contains many illustrations of her work. I enjoyed learning (mostly by googling after her brief references to them) about dozens of contemporary artists, including many overlooked female artists and artists of color. I did sometimes find the discussions of what constitutes a capital "A" Artist, which is what she (and other art school students) yearned to be, a bit pretentious, but I think she herself ultimately came to the conclusion that being a capital "A" Artist is not where it's at.The memoir is not just about art. Along the way she must balance her other life obligations, something her younger cohorts did not have to contend with along the way to becoming capital "A" Artists. ("'An Artist' finds her identity in art, does nothing but make art and does it all the time, making work of unimaginable creativity.") During her time in art school, she had to contend with the care and ultimate deaths of her elderly parents. She also had to complete and edit a major history book, as well as to fulfill her duties as president of an important association of historians.This book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. It's also on sale for Kindle right now for only $3.99.Recommended.3 1/2 starsOne personally discouraging quote from the book:"The combination of gender plus money plus age plays into the stereotype of amateurism, even of inability, as in the impossibility of an old woman with money making good art."
    • 4/5
      Still reading, so this is an interim review: I identify with so many of the observations from an older woman's point of view. A lot of insight into the flaws and fallacies of art schooling generally. Although I never went to art school, I see the weaknesses of the 'fine arts' world she writes about (and that Banksy has recently exemplified by shredding his art at an auction!). So far, my main criticism is where the writing occasionally descends into some whining and moaning from an academic perspective. I can understand that Painter was a highly respected history prof and that she needs to express her sorrow over leaving that career. This may have coloured her experience of being back in school again in a way that those without the 'professor' background wouldn't have encountered.As I say, still reading the book...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This one took a while--it's on the nonlinear side, with a lot to say about the art world and art world politics, but the narrative wasn't always straightforwardly propulsive. Plus Painter has a bit of an oddball writing style that pushes back as much as it pulls you in. But it works, and I ended up liking this very much. Her voice is a surprise at first, but it’s as unique as her art, and communicates her heart and mind as effectively. I enjoyed being along on that journey with her, from eager artist to disillusioned graduate student dealing with a multitude of outsider statuses—female, black, over 60, out of sync with art world hip (marked, among other things, by a love of incorporating history and text into her work), with a firmly established non-art career already under her belt (Painter was a tenured, well-published professor of history at Princeton), and the caretaker of elderly parents—to a truly adventurous artist who believes in her own voice, her own hand, and her own old self. If my description of it sounds sunshiney, the book is decidedly not. But it’s affirming, maybe especially for those of us who aspire to make art in the face of the rest of life, or just to give fewer fucks. There’s a lot of incidentally good art history slipped in, and some good description of techniques, as well. This is a genuinely outside-the-lines memoir, and I’m so pleased it is.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      A mixed bag - maybe closer to an "it was OK" than "I liked it." As an art enjoyer with a degree in art history and absolutely ZERO talent of my own, I was interested in the experiences of someone with a passion for (Painter's phrase) "making art." So her explorations of learning to see, learning to look, muddling through different kinds of paper, drawing tools... the actual physical process of learning how to DRAW or PAINT were fascinating to me. Almost exactly her age, I could shake my head sympathetically over her invisibility, her status as a curiosity to her decades-younger fellow students. She writes vividly and well about this generational gap in the arts, how her own training and background and expectations of basic premises in art are completely irrelevant, even faintly ridiculous, to the current generation. The Art World, it turns out, is also pretty much the same deal as in The Literary World - a closed society, where certain stars are necessary to smoothe a path for younger wanna-be stars, and if you're not in the inner circle, you are going to have a very tough time of it. Kudos to her for sticking it out, discovering her own way to make art that no one can make but her. Painter does go on and on a bit, and we hear quite a lot too much of her fame and accomplishments in her academic career (not undeserved, but still...). She *is* privileged with money, support, and the ability to make choices many people cannot. As other readers have noted, she brings to attention many artists I was not familiar with, and I read parts of the book with iPad at hand to look them up, and learned a lot as we went. I wouldn't even mind buying her delightful ink sketch of her cat Ro (p. 115) - I love how she has caught the back-tilted ear, the way cats let you know they are keeping an "ear" on you while pretending ignore you.

      Some very interesting aspects, and she seems like an ebullient character who might be fun to be be around (as she did on a PBS segment I saw). But the book needed some serious editing, and if you're not into art, art school, the art world, skip it.