My Thesis Was Destroyed in a Fire
and Shown by the World’s Top Art Dealer, and All I Got Was This T-Shirt
A few months ago I met a professor from my college, Pratt Institute, at a life drawing night at a gay bar in Brooklyn and he asked me about the red-dyed paper I was drawing on. The convoluted story of how I came to possess that paper began when the school’s Main Building, where I had my painting studio, burned down in 2013. He was surprised: he’d never heard there’d been a fire. It really wasn’t all that long ago, but they’ve fixed up the building since then. I suppose people don’t really talk about it anymore.
If you’re familiar with the movie Art School Confidential, it takes place, sort of, at Pratt. Daniel Clowes, the author of the comics the film is adapted from, got his BFA there in 1984, and based the comics on his experiences. The movie takes place in a fictionalized version of Pratt: filmed at two schools in California, but clearly set in New York. The fact that it wasn’t filmed at Pratt may involve the fact (unverified) that Pratt banned professional filming on campus for decades after some scenes in the 1978 porn film Debbie Does Dallas were shot in the school’s Tiffany glass library stacks. Identifying features of the real Pratt — like the colony of semi-feral cats, cared for by the engineer who ran the school’s steam engine — are absent from Art School Confidential.
Is art school really like Art School Confidential? Did three separate students independently and simultaneously decide to piss in bottles for a project on sustainability? They’re there to get an education, right? School is when you make messes, break out of old habits even if it takes too long, try things that might be bad ideas, you know, learn. I didn’t even apply to art school with the intention of becoming a painter: I wanted to draw comics, myself. And hell maybe the piss art was good. Maybe “good” and “bad” are poor descriptors of art.
If you’re wondering if I’m bringing up Art School Confidential, a movie where a student falsely presents himself as a serial killer in order to gain publicity for his work, to imply that the fire at Pratt was arson, some kind of plot to promote student work: no, there’s really been no evidence of any foul play whatsoever. It was probably an electrical fire.
Pratt’s Main Building is a nationally registered historic building, so it wasn’t legally required to be up to modern code, no matter how many jugs of paint thinner we were keeping in there. There was no working fire alarm or sprinkler system on the top floor where the senior painting studios were, so the fire went unnoticed until it burned through the roof and tripped a burglar alarm.
I was probably the last person to hear about the fire. It happened in the middle of the night, on Valentine’s Day. I lived off campus and, due to my transfer credits from UCF, I only had one class for the entire semester: Painting. I had lost my $8/hr work study job in an art gallery for not taking enough credits, which my boss didn’t realize: I kept coming to work for a few weeks until I went to pick up my paycheck from the bursar and was told I couldn’t be paid. All this meant I would sleep in pretty much every day except the one day I had class, and then spend all day in the studio. And when I did have class, I’d get up early, and spend all day in the studio.
So I woke around 10:30 AM to an email from my professor titled “DEVASTATION!” saying something vague about how “the TV showed the inferno destroying your work in our studios” and I thought it was some kind of prank — to see how we’d feel if our work was all destroyed, or something. A thought experiment. Baldessari burned all the paintings he made between 1953 and 1966 and baked cookies from the ashes: what would we do with the ashes? After looking up the news, I made my way to the meeting my professor had set up in the on-campus pizza shop, with a dollar store tablecloth confetti glitter bomb full of Little Hugs barrel drinks that I’d crafted on impulse on the way there and scattered on the meeting table. One student did not attend the meeting — we worried that he had been killed until we were able to contact him. He just hadn’t felt up to it. I don’t remember what we discussed.
It was pretty clear that everything in my studio had been completely destroyed: the side of the building it was on was absolutely gutted. The only object to survive was a steel chair I made in metal shop, shaped like a bottle cap. Three friends recognized and saved it from a pile of charred rubble in a dumpster, after cleanup crews began to haul out all the wreckage. The floor below us, where the juniors kept their paintings, had a lot of water damage, but some things were saved. Students whose work suffered water and smoke damage were told they would be connected with art restorers who could fix their work up, but the cost was prohibitive: Pratt wasn’t going to pay for it.
There were reports that someone was injured, but refused treatment and fled. This was widely believed to have been “Tent Girl,” who was probably a former student, who once lived on campus in a tent, and later camped out in the junior classrooms and made elaborate chalk drawings on the blackboards at night. There were no other reports of anyone being hurt, or being there at all. The fire escape in our studios had been nailed shut because someone had reported seeing a homeless person climb in through the window to sleep in the studio, on a cold winter night.
It was February, about 2/3 of the way through our senior year. We were supposed to be just about finishing our thesis work, getting ready to curate small group shows, mostly in groups of three or four, which we would install and promote ourselves. A few students had already had their shows. We had no materials, no space to work, and were tired, angry, traumatized, overwhelmed, and so on — for the most part, we didn’t want to keep on doing the sort of work we were doing before, or to try to remake that work, like nothing had happened.
Donors began to send us boxes of art supplies, which we picked through, trying to approximate what we had before. But donations of traditional art supplies could only do so much: students worked with things like priceless family heirlooms, power tools, and found objects. Not to mention the furniture, books, and supplies for other classes we stored in our studios. Art supply stores gave us gift cards for a few hundred dollars. Williamsburg Oils even sent their high-grade paint, which I use exclusively today, and because my paintings are small, I’m still using the same donated tubes seven years later. Monetary donations were eventually used to buy us a few specialty items. This was all generous of the donors, but the materials we had lost were accumulated over years, worth thousands, and could not be easily replaced. As far as I can recall, donations were the only compensation the school voluntarily offered.
Pratt rushed to provide us with space: first, we were put in an empty gallery, with tape lines marked off on the floor and walls to divide the space. The work we did in that space was largely experimental, and the lack of dividing walls meant we communicated and influenced one another heavily— basically all I did was throw things into vats of dye, and encourage my classmates to throw their things in before I dumped it out. That’s where the red paper came from: somebody had given Maria de Los Angeles, (who, if I recall, had not yet begun to make dresses) a bolt of white silk, and she gave me a few pieces of it. I decided to dye them red and blue in a cardboard box lined with a shower curtain, and made it large enough that I could also soak some heavy printmaking paper. Susan Luss put a few yards of folded canvas into the red dye vat after I was done with it, and that’s been a major part of her practice ever since.
We were eventually moved to a more permanent space that was built in half the gym, on top of the basketball courts, with real walls, sinks, and ventilation. There were meetings where we had to argue for these things, for basics like sinks and ventilation. I often felt my concerns weren’t being taken seriously because I was a student. In the eyes of those who would remain at the school after we left, the fire and reconstruction of the building were matters that affected the faculty and administration long-term, but would only affect the graduating seniors for a few more months. The faculty likely felt that we were wasting what little time we had left arguing, when we should be in our studios, working. And it was there, in the gym, that we began to make serious work.
Since we no longer had enough work or time or space to go on with the self-curated group shows which seniors traditionally have, our school president Thomas Schutte announced he had something big in store for us instead: we were going to have one show together, sponsored by Larry Gagosian — the man who may be the the world’s most powerful art dealer, if no one else has usurped that title at the moment. He makes nearly a billion a year in art sales, in any case. It was a big deal; at least, it sounded like a big deal.
A professional curator was going to come and choose pieces to put in the show. The curator seemed, to me, biased toward work that was the least like traditional painting: we were being taught that painting was thought of as uncool and old-fashioned in the art world. I’m not sure if that was true. We were also being taught that “identity art” was dead, right at the rise of the contemporary trans rights movement.
One of the pieces she chose was an eight second video in which I threw a slice of pizza into a toilet in the photography lab, something that was kind of bullshit, but is kind of less so when contextualized as the first time I, as a transgender person, felt safe doing something kind of (innocuously) fucked up in a public bathroom. (My previous experience with gendered college facilities: on my first night in a UCF dorm, my roommate called security on me while I was asleep.) I didn’t provide any context with the piece. I never provided context for anything, at the time, wanting to be validated in the idea that my work was good without it. I do not think this strategy was good for me. I offered hand-silkscreened DVDs of the video (they had menu screens and everything) for sale for something absurd like $100.
Details for the show were kept secret (or more likely, plans had not been finalized) until the last minute, which made it difficult for us to promote the show. Some students’ families had already bought plane tickets to be in town for an opening that they later learned they would not be allowed to attend: that night was a private opening, only for Gagosian’s guest list. There would be a second opening for our friends and family, on the night of graduation.
We were excited at the prospect of Gagosian’s guest list: millionaire art buyers were coming to see our art. It would be nothing to them to buy it all out of pity, right? We were going to have to start paying back our student loans soon after all. We were advised to inflate our prices, and I set my prices, I had thought, very high. But they were, mostly, quite reasonable for a professional artist. It’s just that I didn’t think of myself as a professional artist, and neither did anyone else. And that’s something I think we really need to do while we’re still in school, even if our work hasn’t really gotten good yet: stop thinking of ourselves as just students, start thinking of our work as labor.
The show was called “Flameproof.” Wandering waiters served us sparkling wine and fancy hors d’oeuvres. No one asked me about my work. Certainly, no one bought it. One visitor practically shoved me out of the way to read a sign describing the show. I talked to my classmates and ate foie gras for the first time without realizing what it was. The elevator on the way out was filled with the scent of the first big leather daddy I ever really saw up close. Somebody told me Larry Gagosian himself had been there, but I did not see him. One student’s work was sold.
For our friends and family, there was no filet mignon, there was no champagne. Pratt doesn’t allow alcohol at art openings, something they were probably able to get around by having the first opening be Gagosian’s thing. This policy had something to do with a student show where some punk kid was naked and covered in duct tape and a bunch of people got wasted and trashed the gallery, allegedly.
A few weeks later, the listing for the show had been removed from Gagosian’s web site. None of us were, after all, actually represented by his gallery. The name of our school mattered, maybe, but our names were never important. I wondered if he was ashamed of it somehow. Like Gagosian would feel personally insulted by the fact that other people remembered that this show, of a bunch of BFA students whose work shared no common theme, had taken place under his name.
There were a number of galleries that offered us space throughout the summer, as a group, for a series of shows all themed around the fact that we’d lost work in a fire together. By this time most of us had much more to show. I always thought that the theme — about the fire and the loss of work — made people less likely to engage with the art. It doesn’t tell people anything about the work itself, after all, or about the backgrounds of the artists. We were all very different from one another and it was all decontextualized and mixed together. But it got a lot of us in the habit of trying to get our work shown: some of us did go on to get solo shows in bigger galleries and go to residencies and sell art.
Today, a lot of the art supplies I have are still weird, random donations; things I don’t really use but don’t want to let go of. I don’t remember where a lot of this stuff came from. My paintings are small, and light: portable. I asked for a Canon Rebel and a set of photography lights for my graduation gift. I immediately photograph everything when it’s finished. Even if it’s just a phone pic; those have gotten much better since 2013. Essentially all of us regretted not taking good photos of our work before the fire. Pratt even hosted a workshop on photographing art, at our request.
I had a studio space for a little while, but I have enough space to work at home, and lately have been going out to life drawing events around the city, especially ones that feature queer and trans models. I’ve applied to a few grad schools, and was discouraged when the Yale School of Art managed to lose one of my paintings after an interview — but that’s another story. For now, I’m going to stay in Brooklyn and keep painting, and try to engage more with the community here.
