The following was published in Last Artist Standing (2025)

Last Artist Standing: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life over 50

Edited by Sharon Louden

Last Artist Standing presents essays on the lives of thirty-one artists over the age of fifty, which explore how they have sustained their creative lives and the different paths they have taken throughout their artistic careers.

I was born in Harlem at the Harlem Hospital and I lived right across from the Schomburg Library.   Every parade came through my block, and I am thinking as a kid that the parade was coming through everybody’s block, but it came through my block because the armory, river and everything ended there. This is Harlem. Things have changed. My grandparents lived a block over on Lennox Ave, between  7th and 8th. I grew up attending Adam Clayton Powell’s church, Abyssinia Baptist Church , so that brought on another kind of consciousness because he was always talking about what we needed to do. People came from all over the world to attend that church.  It wasn’t just amen, thank you ma’am. In those days my father was a bartender, so I watched people talking about their experiences with him. You saw everybody. It fostered my political understanding of the world. Everything was going on without it being compartmentalized. It affected me, I wasn’t aware of how unique that was, to be in that time right there in that place with the Daughters of Ruth and Masons and organizers who were picketing in the streets because they couldn’t find jobs. People on soap boxes. Every kind of person, religion, belief were all in my neighborhood. Some of my early drawings as a teenager would be of those people; someone playing checkers on the sidewalk or people talking. 

I was an apprentice of a French portrait painter Elaine Journey  in New Rochelle. She would be there in the daytime and I had the night and weekends. I don’t remember what I wrote to apply, but she said that she didn’t call anybody but me. It was great to finally have a space, and they had money and threw away stuff, so I had access to paints and pencils. Elaine was a cellist as well as a portrait painter and her father was the designer for Paris operas, so she grew up sitting in the seats drawing people on the stage.  She would travel during the summer to Tanglewood in Connecticut. The whole summer I could use the space. That is the first real space that I had that I could use to make art. I used to bike up there, from Harlem to New Rochelle, so my father bought me my first scooter. 

After that I worked several odd jobs;  the telephone company, the post office, Macy’s. I had places I would sit all over the boroughs and just watch and draw. I did that all over the city. We were raised to swim, bike and ice skate, so I did all that stuff. We would never spend  a nickel on the bus or the train, we would walk. We walked everywhere. From Harlem to Brooklyn or anywhere. It was safe to do then. I was very adventurous. 

 I was a super for a few buildings. Did it on the east side 7th street, Uptown Broadway, 167th street, so I always had a space in those buildings to work. I would usually get the winos to do the maintenance work for me. I know my way around a boiler and other things too. I’ve always been savvy with mechanical things. While I was doing that I also worked with community centers and youth, I worked in theatres. I built lofts for a while. I made shoes and bags. I can make anything until I get bored with it. 

I worked at The Sculpture House for awhile around 1956-57. I went there to get a job so that I could learn more tools and that was the place for sculpture in New York. The brothers cast and sold sculpture supplies. I worked behind the counter and made friends with a guy from Puerto Rico who made the tools and I could call him up and describe the tool to him and he would meet me at the train with it. Another sculpture supply couple who lived on 1st or 2nd Avenue down on the east side, Stanley and I can’t recall his wife’s name, and he would call me up and say “Kiss your sugar daddy and get over here, we got something for you!” They would go to Italy once a year to buy stones and get mallets made. Once a year, they would save all of their money go. I had a lot of allies who could fix things or offer supplies. I learned a lot from people in hardware stores and mom and pop supplies stores.  

I started off working on portraits in the 1960s. I stopped doing portraits because those who posed always had critiques like, “don’t paint my right side” or “don’t draw me from that angle”. I drew fast and only charged one dollar a minute. I wasn’t getting any money, so I dropped it. After portraits I was working in the theatre and worked for the park department. That was the longest job I ever had. I worked the east side Thompkins Square Park and Washington Square Park in the village in the summers. All of the poets and writers, what folks called bohemians,  would congregate in the plaza of Washington Square Park. I would go to dance studios in Albany. I loved dance and all the theatre stuff. I could sow and make shoes, so I started doing those things. I was never serious in it, it didn’t hold me.  

I taught myself to print at the Studio Museum of Harlem. There was no print workshop there before my residency, so I created one. I went to Bob Blackburn who had a shop in Manhattan. I told him that I needed a press and he gave me a contact to get my own press. He was an amazing man, an amazing print maker.  He had a shop for many years, he remembered everyone, your name and the country you were from. I made a few lithographs there and I set up my press in an old dress factory. This was in the 60s. 

I had a loft on 126th St.  I started a gallery where I could put work, not my work, in peoples’ offices and it would stay a month or so and then I would switch the work out with new art. A woman had started a Black employment agency in the 1940s and I was switching some work in there when I met a guy who offered me the opportunity to go to Poland Spring, Maine to work with youth. I agreed and when I arrived I was the only person there from the city who had worked in community centers, camps or parks. He later offered me a job to do that work full time, so I set up an organization called Arts for Living based on a query about how we could live our lives without putting a dollar down, basically teaching people how to live without debt. Students would learn how to sow, make their own shoes, or anything they needed to live.  The program became the largest job corp in the country. 

My brother was arrested in 1970 and I came and found a place, a basement studio in Hunts Point in the Bronx, and I was looking for a lawyer for him. I traveled all over the city trying to find a lawyer. James Wechsler, a reporter on the NY Post began to write things about my brother and his trial which was a stroke of great luck. I started sculpting around then. I had no money, so I made and sold prints, did trade and barter and held fundraisers to cover legal fees. For the seven years that he was in jail, that is all I did. After 2,177 days my brother was released.  By the time he was released I had a studio on 126th street across from Morningside.  

When you see artists now, all they do is their art. I was never that person. I grew up in a community and we did everything. In Harlem, you are a part of everything. I never thought about the work I was making as going towards a career as an artist. I did everything. I used to make medallions and social commentary works, quick sketches about what I saw. I loved working for the park department because I had a lot of fun with the kids. I have always been attracted to wilderness and water– both are spiritual places.  I  participated in many artist residencies including, the Blue Mountain Center in New York, The Walker Institute, Brandywine Graphic Workshop, MacDowell Colony, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) among others. Residencies are a way of transcending the space you are in– finding fluidity. I met a lot of interesting people. The studio is a sacred space for me. I didn’t have the same kind of regiment as other artists who attended the residency. I didn’t have the same constraints. I think I have always been an anomaly in those spaces — always moving in my own rhythm. 

 I have always been an explorer of buildings. They always thought I was the maid, so no one ever stopped me. One day I walked into the Arts Students League and spoke with a guard who told me I should meet the Director who shared an opportunity to attend a residency in Vermont. I went there for the summer and worked with Native American and Haitian sculptors. I carved my first stone there. While I was carving a clay head, some of the older sculptors corrected the way I was doing it—they had all gone to school and learned the proper way to sculpt. 

 The first major public work I completed is on 126th and 3rd avenue at the City of New York Multi-Service Center, I knew the architect of the building in Harlem, Jerry Barr. I was commissioned to make a ceramic bas-relief (11’ H X 16 ½’ W) for his building while in residence at the Studio Museum of Harlem running the print workshop.  During that time, the Studio Museum was just a few lofts overtop a liquor store. We knew everybody on the block, every kind of person you could find in Harlem and they knew us. 

I never thought that art making was all that there is. I was never just an artist. I had to eat. I had to pay rent, but I wasn’t making art to do those things. I know that the rest of the world was part of the world too, not just because I was an artist. I felt a responsibility to us, to a community that would not allow me to be just an artist. I knew that I wanted to do public works and do something that wouldn’t be painted over. I wanted to do work that wasn’t commercial. 

 Right now I am trying to finish the work that I started. I have many finished and unfinished works. I am an artist, but now my focus is on finishing works, archiving, and mentoring. Some of the so-called students of mine are grandmothers now. I am happy to still be living. Day by day I digest new things. My life as an artist has not been compartmentalized; from the ground up and everyplace I have been or made work in, life has informed my art making practice. The privilege of being alive, seeing people grow, seeing what the battles are, what the battles will always be, what the love is, everything influences me and has influenced my work. What’s really important to me these days is finding some nature, being in the woods and just being there. There, you are connecting to yourself, to your human-being-ness.