On Audience
Looking Through Grief Towards Transformation
by Michele Carlson
I set my timer for one hour and stand before Andrew Wyeth’s Wind From the Sea (1947). I shuffle my feet, redistributing my weight back and forth, like I am trying to root them to the floor, as if I know an hour of stillness with one painting might knock me over. My first minutes are flooded with thoughts of anything but the work: The early weeks of the new administration have left me breathless. No one knows what to do. After my meeting, I fought my impulse to run off and respond to emails and deadlines, to bury myself in tasks that could be accomplished and quantified. Instead, I wandered the National Gallery of Art, even though it felt indulgent for this moment. This is one of the paradoxes of the field: Although my job is to make art and support artists, it is what I make the least time for. I’ve spent countless hours defending and convincing a range of audiences—students, doubting parents, institutions, funders, non-art people—that in times of upheaval, nothing is more important than art. Still, I know I am also sometimes trying to persuade myself. To look and make can feel deeply antithetical when it feels most necessary to do—as if these are oppositional actions.
I entered the first show I stumbled upon, a small exhibition called American Places: Featuring Selections from the Corcoran Collection, and chuckled at the coincidence. The works highlighted the former Corcoran Collection, originally founded by William Wilson Corcoran, a banker and philanthropist in Washington, DC. The Corcoran Gallery of Art was the first art museum in the country and one that would eventually include an art school—where I currently work. It was built to house and exhibit its founder’s vast collection of largely American art, and it did this for roughly 120 years until, in 2014, the independent art institution was forced, due to financial duress, to merge with George Washington University. This is the situation for many small private art schools whose business models don’t fit today’s unforgiving economies. Its collection of almost twenty thousand works was picked over and broken up across several separate collecting bodies, the largest being the National Gallery of Art, its pieces scattered like seeds thrown toward a hungry flock.
When I was hired in 2019, going to the National Gallery became a scavenger hunt for me. Evidence of this massive collection was noticeable only if you took the time to read the artworks’ tombstones—the subtle placards placed on the wall that reveal “the Corcoran Collection” in small print. I would survey room after room of nineteenth-century American landscapes, Impressionist paintings, and modernist abstractions, but I caught only glimpses of this once whole collection. Coming into this modest exhibition, its title laying claim to the collection’s former self, it was as if something shattered was starting to be slowly pieced back together, though its new shape was not yet recognizable.
I choose Wind From the Sea after I walk the exhibition a few times, observing how visitors move through the artwork: some looking carefully, others barely at all. A couple gets so close to a Stuart Davis painting that the guard asks them to step back—their pointed fingers almost touch the canvas as they trace the tight edges between the bright colors that want to but never blend into each other. Visitors spend minutes, long and short, with other American painters and photographers, but most skim or skip the Wyeth. It is, after all, just a window. Wind From the Sea is one of his many window pieces that arrest time in a quiet that can’t be pinned down. Tattered lace curtains billow inward, toward the viewer; the austere and murky palette weights the off-center window, which opens to an expansive field, itself framed by a heavy tree line and glimpse of water. Like the other visitors, I also gravitated at first toward works that had more immediate and obvious action and vibrancy—perhaps at this moment I am yearning for a quantifiable reward, an assurance that my time won’t be wasted on looking. So I stand in front of the Wyeth and offer myself as an audience even though I do not want to trust myself with something that is not a sure thing.
I turn my phone notifications off and settle in. This is an exercise I do when I can spare the time or have the mental capacity to focus on the stillness this looking requires. It helps me recalibrate when things get too fast and I feel like life is speeding by—the details of the world just abstract streaks and blurs. The first five minutes are the most challenging, and I begin by scanning the painting as you might a stranger you’re meeting for the first time, looking for hints of who they might become to you. My eyes dart around the canvas, taking note of the cool browns and grays that anchor the window frame to the wall and the image to the board. The lace curtains reaching out toward the viewer are so sheer they barely interfere with the view through the window of a serene landscape: thick trees hugging the shore of a body of water in the distance. My pace of looking is fast—I try to take in as much as possible in one glance as if this is the only time I will have. This is my learned nature, partly because I am as distracted as everyone else, a byproduct of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, doomscrolling, reels, binge-watching, and endless emails: the busyness of living now. But it is also an occupational hazard because, after teaching art and visual and cultural studies to college students for almost twenty years, I have honed a visual dexterity to look closely yet quickly—the looking needed to be an artist, a critic, and a sometimes curator. So while I see a lot of art and do so quickly, I do not always look at it as deeply as I should.
I coax myself to go slower. Wind From the Sea hangs on the wall next to the gallery entrance, and it is difficult not to get distracted by every movement outside of the frame. I notice a road that carves across the midsection of the canvas, which I did not see at first. How could I miss this very obvious gesture? The dirt road so clearly cuts through the painting and steadily disappears as it nears the shore in the distance. Two tire tracks expose the dirt beneath the field, like someone took a razor and shaved right down to the skin; the browns and greens of the grass transition into each other, evidence of a threshold between two unknown seasons. While the road is not the main element of the painting, it is its most vital. It reveals the habitual movement by a person, or people, who drive methodically over the grass so often they’ve created their own path. It is a most human gesture—our mundane movements so faithful that the earth packs the grass tight enough that it doesn’t dare push its way back to the surface.
After about twenty minutes, I want to touch the painting. I can almost feel the breeze, just strong enough to push through the lace curtains that seem to have grown finer with wear and duty to this open window. They drift toward me, inviting my fingers to get tangled in the loose threads that have become fringed, as if unraveled by time. Faint birds and flowers are etched into the lace. It feels like the right breath of wind might blow the ghostly sparrows into flight, releasing them from the web grounding them to this place and moment in time. I am immediately drawn to the intricacy of the curtains and how Wyeth controlled the line work to render the tight grid of lace in a delicate and weightless order that is slowly being undone. Wyeth’s brushstrokes begin with control and then loosen, just as the lace’s disciplined knots also slack—detangling themselves from legibility through expressive marks. It is as if he let the brush move on its own for only this slight moment of fraying. The ends of the lace are not just the depiction of the fabric falling apart but also of the painter himself embracing a stylistic unraveling: a subtle, gestural reminder that coming apart does not have to mean falling apart.
From early in his career, Wyeth pushed back on being categorized as a realist painter—a label tightly woven into the American canon of art history and an easy category to accept if you don’t know his work well. But he self-identified as an abstractionist who happened to render the representational through his evocation of the world he moved through. He often pieced together his scenes or used props or models to create the vision he saw in his mind and, more importantly, the feeling he wanted to express. He did not paint from observation or for the sake of representation, as audiences often assume from quick studies of his work. As with many of Wyeth’s paintings, when you entrust your time to Wind From the Sea, you see a clear distinction between a painter who paints what they see and one who uses paint to communicate how they feel.
Audiences often read a melancholy onto Wyeth’s work, projecting a sadness or loneliness—again, an easy, quick read. I suspect this is in part because his interiors and color palette seem unemotional—any spark of joy is dulled by the material quality of tempera paint on board—or because his figures typically sit alone and stare pensively into a distance that the viewer is not privy to. It is easier to reduce Wyeth’s paintings to a singular emotion with a negative connotation—another abstraction—than to look closely at the complexity necessary to achieve ambivalence. Because Wyeth’s subjects undoubtedly gaze not just into an unknown space but also deeply into themselves. In Wind From the Sea, as in many of Wyeth’s paintings, the cropping of the window and the curtains, which both extend beyond the composition, suggest the viewer is within the scene, not outside of it looking in. Unlike many other American realist painters, Wyeth is not asking us to observe a situation he also sees—we are also of the scene. Perhaps we bear witness not just to the artist’s interiority but to our own, forming a singular audience for one painting, rendering one window so we may be lost for one moment.
*
When I was hired in 2019, I knew that the merger between the Corcoran and George Washington University had been deeply painful for all involved and that it had a lasting impact on the local arts community. Like other independent art schools around the country, the school had served for many as a main artery, if not the beating heart, of the DC arts scene. The museum’s closure, the dismantling of the collection, the sale of physical infrastructure, the merciless dismissal of faculty, who were all local artists—this was the kind of injury you don’t just heal from. It changes everything. It’s the kind of wound that makes you long for the before times, even if those times were what caused this one.
I knew this before I joined the faculty because when I interviewed for the position, it was made explicit by almost every person I met. When I arrived on campus that fall, I felt it everywhere: in the careful articulation by some faculty who risked hoping for a new future but with a reticence particular to the brutality of an institutional overhaul. Others, particularly those who kept their jobs when their colleagues were let go, had difficulty moving forward—the pain of survivor guilt weighed ever-present in every decision // every change // every possibility. To hope is sometimes its own punishing betrayal. I felt it in the students who arrived as Corcoran students and were forced to bear witness to this gutting but then graduated as GW alumni. It seeped from the community and still does.
Ever since I moved to the region, local artists, teachers, poets, and writers who once taught or attended the school have reminded me of the community’s pain. The ghosts of the former, pre-merger Corcoran are almost immediately conjured after it is revealed where I work. Sometimes, these comments sound like reprimands because I am an agent of the new institution, and there are still grievances to air. Other times, these interactions are clearly a processing of a pain that is still right below the surface, waiting to consume them—and me. I know these are expressions of emotion that happen at me, not to me, and I try to receive this pain that isn’t mine because I, too, have seen things that were once a part of me end. But each encounter assumes that things are still terrible, as if the merger just happened. They are not. They are quite the opposite, but parts of the community are arrested in this loss, and in some situations, my presence becomes a refresh button replaying how the merger ruined the arts community here. I see, in some, how the wounds will never heal and things will never be the same—there can be no forgiveness or trust no matter what we do within these walls.
By taking the job I knew that I would carry the scars of these wounds even though I hadn’t created them. This is what working within institutions and communities entails. You do not get to extract the institution’s privileges without accounting for how they have come to be. But it is a strange feeling to move through a place that exists for some as a living monument to historic wounds and be reminded that repair is impossible. Or perhaps the repair work, at this moment, is acknowledging this injury despite it being as abstract to me as a painting—an expression that comes from a time and place unknown to me and for reasons I can only understand theoretically. I try to make meaning of their remarks, just enough to embody empathy for this community so I may endure their grief as they demand // need // long for. I try to be the audience they desire because they were not afforded this possibility when it happened.
So I do: at a poetry reading in an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue where I was told directly, “You all ruined the arts scene here.” Once over a coffee in Takoma Park with a few writers who had lived their multidecade careers in DC. I listened with concern as they listed every class they’d ever taught at the Corcoran but never taught again after the merger, never asking me what I taught. I had lunch in San Francisco with an artist from DC whose first exhibition was at the Corcoran, and she couldn’t imagine her career or the world without it. Last fall, at the Venice Biennale in Italy, I met an art historian who ran a finger down her cheek miming tears falling for “her” museum, where she had spent much of her career. She bemoaned how terrible it felt to drive by the building every day knowing it sat empty and had for ten years. Her body physically jolted in surprise when I told her it wasn’t unoccupied and that I teach there every week—my counternarrative was so abstract to her she could only shake her head in disbelief. I understand that part of my job is to be an audience to this grief, and I try to be a window they might be able to see through, a transition, even though I know this is likely too much to ask.
When the merger occurred, I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and was adjuncting across five schools and trying to make art, a living, and a life. As in many cities, a vital resource of the Bay Area arts ecosystem has been the MFA programs of about fifteen colleges and universities that feed the region. In the mid-2000s, hundreds of MFAs would graduate into the local scene every year. Though the community supported this renewal with a commercial thirst, it meant there was new blood pumping into it that spread across the entire body of the art world: museums, alternative spaces, nonprofits, residencies, commercial galleries, artist-run projects, and on and on. At this peak, the city wasn’t quite as economically bloated as it became in the 2010s and real estate was slightly more affordable, so there were considerable physical spaces to accommodate hungry audiences. This was in part because of the Bay Area’s DIY culture and ability to turn just about anything into an exhibition or a performance space. We trusted in this, and we were hungry to be an audience, so every week there was art to see and people to do this with. You could easily find yourself at an exhibition in someone’s garage right after you went to an opening at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and then at a small alternative space in the back of a bookstore or in a five-story building full of commercial galleries. Everyone at all levels of profession came out, and we all mingled together as an audience, making our scene and contributing to our art world.
I feel grateful for having gone to graduate school when and where I did. In many ways, it was the heyday of small private independent art schools, even if we didn’t know it at the time. Most medium to big cities had at least one—they were expensive and impractical, but in the early 2000s, wasn’t everything? For years in the Bay Area, the San Francisco Art Institute and California College of the Arts were those schools, and each contributed a slightly different flavor of students and artists to the collective. But in 2023 SFAI closed its doors, and for those programs at other schools that remained, the unforgiving costs of higher education, coupled with the cost of operating in a city like San Francisco, forced many of them to greatly contract or become part of larger institutions. In the past decade, this has been the national trend, and many small private art schools across the country have either closed or merged with larger institutions: Tufts absorbed the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), as did Belmont University with Watkins College of Art and Design (Nashville). Schools like Oregon College of Arts and Crafts (Portland), University of the Arts (Philadelphia), and SFAI fully shuttered. Of course, the Corcoran. It is sobering to consider that I began my career in the fullness of so many independent art institutions and that, during the trajectory of my career, I may witness the collapse of independent art schools.
Even more galleries and museums have shuttered their doors at all levels and scales, particularly small to mid-size nonprofit and alternative artist-run spaces. The cost of living in cities makes it challenging for artists to live and work in them—artists scatter to less urban areas or smaller cities trying to find a way to be artists, or they leave for better opportunities in other locales. These shifts can make an art world anemic over time, especially if new iterations do not manifest quickly or legibly. It can take an even greater toll on morale—exhaustion making it even harder to rebuild or better yet to imagine and build anew. Spaces to be an audience or learn how to be one are critical to a healthy arts world. One of the greatest privileges of living and working in the Washington, DC, area is that all of the Smithsonian and federally funded museums offer free admission to the public. You can sit every day in front of Albert Bierstadt landscape paintings and be swallowed by the vastness of their mountain views for hours. Or you can attend lectures, performances, and events and leave halfway through because they’re free. Since you don’t have to worry about getting your money’s worth, you can even pop in to use the bathroom or wait out a summer rainstorm without looking at the art at all. The activity of looking and the mechanics of being an audience can be explicitly personal and unquantifiable—these spaces account for this abstraction.
I was reminded by Glen, a curator and writer in the Bay Area, that he took his class to the Mills College Art Museum the fall the fires in California became so threatening that they choked the air in the cities and turned the sky orange and hazy pinks—before this was a common occurrence every year. To preserve the art, museums have extensive HVAC systems intended to control the environmental conditions, which also make them places where the air is cool and clear, even if the world outside is not. His class could breathe, and the museum, for a moment, offered a respite from the brutal reality of climate disaster as well as space for being an art audience. Of course, museums are not the only sites that can offer refuge from the world, and many others are more accessible and accommodating to wide audiences. When the summers in DC get too hot, the public library becomes a cooling center, particularly for houseless folks to catch reprieve from the brutal heat. And truthfully, there are times when going to a museum feels too much like work. For that reason, I have also established this practice of looking and finding reprieve from the chaos of daily life in more informal settings, like Ikeas around the country. When I lived in the Bay Area and was going through especially stressful points in my career, I used to go to the Ikea in Emeryville and sit for long periods in different living room staging configurations. I would observe the throngs of people who poured through the massive spaces eyeing new purchases, looking through fake windows and doors, imagining their daily lives within those sets. They’d bicker about shelving as though predicting the future frustration of assembling furniture with names like Billy and Lack. I could sit in Ikea for hours, partly because there was no cell service. But I also knew that I, too, was caught in a mutual field of looking, as others used my presence to measure their imagined futures on their couch // their armchair // their desk, imagining me as a guest in their newly furnished home, understanding something about the belonging they were constructing by seeing me in it.
Undoubtedly, museums are not safe for everyone, and they have a lot more work to do to make their expansive audiences feel autonomy in their perception of accessibility. But for many of us, these art institutions, whether museums or schools, offer a harbor, shielding us from whatever storm we run from, or toward, for a moment. It is a reminder that, despite their failings, we still rely on institutions and organizations to physically ground us and bring us into space together in response to a range of reasons they create. What does it mean to be without this, and how do we uplift what is useful from these spaces while letting go of what is not? In this current climate, it seems less likely that the center will hold along with the institutions that define it—will higher ed, museums, and non-profits survive this administration’s dismantling? Will they survive the sowing of further distrust? Many of us have been fighting for this deconstruction to reassemble the institution to be more human, but now that it might be here in totality, it is overwhelming. What is possible when too many of these art spaces fold—how do we see something in these frayed ends that is neither an obligation to the past nor a foreclosure on the future? I try to remember that a dismantling does not have to be our undoing.
A decade after the merger, I walk through the halls of the historic Beaux-Arts-style Flagg Building, the one Corcoran building that wasn’t sold off during the merger, which sits directly across the street from the White House. It can feel empty—disquietingly so. If people are inclined, this emptiness is one of the things they quickly point to as evidence of the merger’s long-term impact. But this is only one way to look at it. When they say, “It is just so empty,” I wonder what it must feel like to be full. What did it look like before the merger and before their buildings // collection // people were scattered, and is there no way to reinvent this? How did it feel before COVID lockdowns and the impact of a global pandemic fundamentally changed how we move in the world? Who was here before we scrolled for hours on end because it felt safer inside our homes than in public, when the weight of collapse was slightly lighter? Or before a renewed administration moved back in, literally across the street, and in under two weeks began dismantling everything we have worked for? Before our faculty meetings turned to preparing for ICE raids and active shooters? With all this and no merger, would it have stayed the same? Why can’t now be more than then, not less?
When I woke this morning, the first headline I saw stated that the words transgender and queer had been deleted from Stonewall’s national website and that women, Black, Latinx, and disability are newly forbidden keywords that might flag an agency for investigation by the federal government. A week ago I was in a meeting where a federal worker mentioned that the word belonging was no longer allowed. So when I’m reminded about the time when the Corcoran was great, I want to ask what it was like then, when teaching was more than trying to hold students together as they quite literally crumble in my grasp, as the world in which they are becoming erases them from the record.
I know emptiness is not simply about the number of bodies in space but a yearning for meaning that happens distinctly across people: belonging. In today’s world, this has become something to deeply distrust—one can take only so much betrayal before we simply cannot. Still, it is exhausting to feel like I must fill a void that I did not create, especially one that continues to look back on what was—further rooting into a refusal to see what is now or what could be. We are held by this abstraction that holds us all captive.
Yet still my colleagues and I make, produce, organize, schedule, market, and perform for each other and the community of young people who show up each week, using what we have, despite what some say or how they murmur that we do not do it well enough. But how do you compete with a haunting? I know this feeling is what happens when an audience has been lost—phantom limbs that remind us of what used to be. I know we could do more to try to regain their trust, but like them, we are also exhausted and carry with us our own ghosts. I hope the audience we lost has found new ways to share in an exchange of looking // knowing // becoming that is core to being a community, even if they will never return to us. I know they cannot bear to look too closely in case they see us for what is possible and their hope betrays them; I hope they have found ways to move through their grief.
I prefer to believe that we are in the moment before, not the one after. This is where emptiness, like in Wyeth’s paintings, requires you to look deeply into it to see its simplicity and, just for a time, the possibilities that lie within it. If we cannot attend to this, how can we see that there is no end when we look through these windows? How do we learn to open up to the moments in between?
*
At school, I organize a visiting artist lecture series, and we require all the art and design undergraduate and graduate majors to attend by building it into their official course schedule. I know many students dislike this mandatory structure, but the truth is, if we do not require it, they will not show up. This is in part understandable: Their schedules are full, life is busy, and one more event that does not cater to their taste feels like an unnecessary burden. They often object. Their lives are personally curated to unfold around their own interests, whether algorithmically or in person—always situating them at the center. This is in part a broader societal evolution, but the students often articulate their refusal to decenter themselves as acts of self-care and boundary setting, necessary to protect their mental health and preserve their person. To do only what they like is a shield they build to muffle the voices that shout the world won’t give them what they want. And to get what generations before them have acquired requires a kind of effort they have already exhausted. But this is also a cage.
When I was eleven, my dad took me to see Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi accompanied by a live performance of Philip Glass’s music for the film. I don’t remember details of the event outside of knowing I was bored out of my mind. But all these years later, I still recall the feeling of being there with him, in all of my tween agony. This was not unheard of between us—he would have me watch or read things that weren’t necessarily curated for me or even particularly age appropriate. I didn’t have to like the book, film, TV show, or art, but he offered me the choice to look closely, and then we would discuss it. While there are many ways to read into this, I am appreciative that, from the time I was a young age, he wanted to share his interests with me and offered space—with the gentle expectation that I would step forward and meet him where he was and look further than my taste. I understand that my dad was teaching me the practice of being an audience, and core to building this practice is engaging, with equal rigor, material that might not be precisely for me. To look closely into something unexpected, oppositional, or even boring tells us as much about ourselves as it does about itself.
Artists need audiences not just for their work but for each other. Artists create in a field of looking that is sometimes deeply internal and other times requires a community of personal, professional, or even historical relations; our audiences do not come only at the end when the work is “done.” And honing the craft of having—but more importantly, being—an audience, requires us to look closely, over time, sometimes at things that are not made for us. It is, in part, how we refine our critical eye, expand our artistic literacy, and build our positions as artists in a world full of artists. Sometimes, this happens through allegiance, inspiration, and even antipathy. But I have always thought this ability to critically engage across difference is one of the many transferrable skills that artists craft, even though it is abstract. Perhaps if we were all a bit better at spending time with things that aren’t made perfectly for us, the chasms that divide us as a social body might be slightly less vast. This is one of the many things we teach in art school when we are teaching young people the unfathomable locality of “the artist,” and this is why we require students to pay witness to creative production that isn’t curated exactly to their individual interests.
Post-COVID it feels harder than it once did to fulfill this role as an audience. This is not just because there seems to be less of everything: fewer exhibitions // galleries // funding // time. But there is also less energy and capacity to extend oneself—we are all sheathed with an oppressive exhaustion. It is also tiring to fight against my self-imposed restraints binding my ability to look: Don’t read the news, stay off social media, and stop seeing the end—democracy // climate disaster // systemic racism and violence // women’s bodily autonomy // the rights of transpeople // humanness. Wait, but also think about it because you can’t get apathetic; do more. Be a better teacher // use your privilege to support those most vulnerable // make and write more // give more // be a success but resist capitalism. Remember when you could just breathe the air—open a window and just breathe? Weston, an artist and my collaborator, tells me that his therapist recently suggested he build space for mourning within his life. Not necessarily for the passing of people, which is what I automatically thought, but for his practice and what it once was. She proposed that he was anchoring himself in how he recalls things were or how the studio // his work // his career used to be and that this does not allow him to move forward into what it is now and can become. This seemed to break something open for him, to give him permission to release his ghosts, which anchor the undefined future in all of its daunting illegibility to what he remembers as better, good, or how it was and ultimately should be, even if this past is only an abstraction of the actual present. In a moment that feels on the precipice of collapse, these ghosts haunt us all. It is sometimes easier to live in the knowing of past joys and disappointments, where time has morphed their edges into a new image, than to accept the unknowing of the future and the possibility that what you do right now might directly determine it all. If Weston always situates himself in what haunts him, he will never be. He will never become. And neither will the work that he is both haunting and haunted by. Perhaps we all need more space for this grief, together.
I see this in the students as well, but because they are just starting in their artistic journeys, they instead preemptively account for their future failure—they are sure they won’t become artists—so they refuse to allow themselves to imagine it; it is too abstract. Imagining their future and believing they can have it are too open, and there is no one left to trust. Many punish themselves for this failure that has yet to be. Breathe, I often have to remind them, breathe. I watch their hands and voices shake as we sit in their studios talking about the meaning of their work. I can see their heads quickly clouding as they try to see through infinite thoughts that roll in like fog overtaking their minds. Some speak so fast they trip over the frenzy of thoughts trying to escape their body all at once, while others are rendered speechless. Many wear huge noise-canceling headphones over their ears to filter the background noise, allowing them to focus more clearly; others wear them because the noise of the world is simply too much. They are endlessly trying to accommodate themselves in spaces ruthlessly not built for them. There are many tears. There are many absences. I try to remind them that each thing they make is its own threshold through this overwhelming density, not a solution for it, and they must keep laying stones and planting seeds and building bridges, any metaphor for the slow and agonizing experience of transformation and becoming. I remind them that they are trying to sprint through this marathon.
I resist wanting to tell them to toughen up. This is how I was raised, but I know this generation’s raw nerves are because of the relentless heteronormative individuality of my parents. The way young people can authentically show up for each other with kindness and a sensitivity that is unnerving and unraveling to people my age is still arresting to me, even when, at times, it is performative. When I was their age, we were performing an embodied patriarchy that was seemingly against competition, elitism, and exclusivity on the surface, but in actuality, we were nurturing it. I am still trying to unlearn this. The students are so sensitized to their world that it sometimes makes me want to grab them and storm up to the peaks of their mountains they are so hesitant to climb but so determined to build. These high pinnacles are so far away, yet they think they must somehow scale them before they can shake off the cages that bind them in place. I often want to drag them there myself to show them: Look … we can just get there, but we must move through the now to do so. Maybe then they will recognize that this road they are making for themselves is not too much to ask for and that they are already where they need to be; it does not have to be so hard that they break. We do not have to grieve a thing that has not yet come to pass. I want to guide them to the balmy edge of the sea where they may soothe and comfort their bodies after the impact of this breakage, but they have to do this on their own. I want to reassure them that I know coming out of a cocoon is anything but gentle and beautiful, to tell them not to be fooled by the way we abstract the world to feel better, because most of the time transformation is painful, messy, and merciless, whether in the studio or life. Sometimes we do not all survive in the same way, if at all, and I, too, am haunted by this.
It can be overwhelming to be in the classroom at this moment. It is different. The students bring everything they feel and experience out in the world into our studios. In part, this is who they are, but it is, for better or worse, also curricular. We are not just teaching students to make a sculpture or painting but to harness their place in the world to visually speak to issues bigger than them. In this sense, there is space for almost any experience or perspective to be called into the studio, as happens in the broader art world. This means that the studio is a complex site, at times contested, emotional, violent, and raw. It relies on the bravery of self-expression for young people who are still trying to understand their own subjectivities. I have wondered more and more out loud if I am effective in this space anymore, if it isn’t time to step back and make way for others differently equipped for this stewardship. Perhaps there is another place where my contribution could go further and that extracted less of me in the process. Sometimes it feels like my own body is the students’ threshold that holds the weight of their unease as they decide whether they can // should // are allowed to walk through the doors we offer them. This can be crushing. I can feel their every hesitation and many expressions of anxiety. Every shift of their feet as they redistribute their worry back and forth on me becomes a mutuality that is sometimes paralyzing for us both. It is laden with the fear of a future they are overdetermining so as not to have to face it.
Teaching is not how it used to be. But I know that one day we’ll look out the window and it won’t be what it is now. Two semesters ago, a student who was almost nonverbal when I first met them now speaks every class. Students who early on were double majors or thinking about leaving our program for a more “practical” one with seemingly more job security now almost live in their studios and prepare for futures in MFA programs or art-related fields. Students come out // become // transition // transform. They do this through the work they make but also in their person, growing into artists who are abstract, dynamic, and brave, not things that can be observed legibly by the outside world on a quick look. To be an audience to this transition is a gift. This is systemic to art school, and so we will continue to step forward even as these spaces become less and less for us, no matter how empty the buildings // how much funding gets cut // how much the outside world reminds us what we do now is not how it used to be and therefore is not. There is no other place like this. I know in an unknown future this might look completely different because there is nothing more threatening than spaces that are for freedom, imagination, and the building of autonomy. Shortly, it will be harder to make // be critical // be free // be artists within institutions, but there is no one better equipped than artists to peer into this void and see the possibilities to no end. That is our job.
*
When my timer goes off in my pocket after an hour of standing in front of Wind From the Sea, I know I could stay longer, but I have already spent too much time at the museum, and the gallery guards are as curious about me as I seem about this painting. My eyes adjust from the dim warmth of the Corcoran exhibition and the deep earth tones of the painting as I emerge into the bright cavernous lobby of the National Gallery’s East Wing and take the escalators up to the modern art collection. The galleries are almost empty, with a few pairs of visitors out for a midday excursion. I wander through the painting galleries filled with the heavy hitters of the Western canon with a growing disinterest; this is mostly a professional fatigue from my formal training that constantly reminds me the works in this room are meant to be the most important, a directive that has long made me weary. As I maneuver the largest gallery, another visitor who had been leaving as I entered the space returns and begins to circle the room again, taking in the abstract expressionist paintings that line the walls. While we are not alone in the gallery, I can see that he and I are beginning to pace each other: both circumnavigating the space, following the marks, colors, lines, and canvas that map the walls and hold us both like magnets to the edges of this course, beginning to keep some sort of time with each other.
There is a choreography that happens with people who spend a lot of time in museums and galleries. I am always aware of those who look around me. I feel for their eyes and the sways of their bodies and try to predict the direction of their gaze or movement so that I can both position myself for my own looking but also not hinder theirs. Every once in a while, they also do this, and we sync, moving in and around the artworks in an unspoken mutuality of looking, not at or with each other but for the shared benefit of being an audience, together. It is a choreographed reciprocity built of tiny shuffles, active stillness, and small steps that weave between objects and images in one room to a rhythm customized to your and a stranger’s field of looking. There is an understood distance kept; it is a solitariness full of recognition. Sometimes you travel the entirety of a museum doing this dance with a stranger without ever directly acknowledging it with them.
He and I circle the room in full twice. It is unclear who is leading and who is following, but he moves into the next room after the second lap. I make another full pass around the gallery to give him space, that room being substantially smaller. Assuming he has moved on, I am surprised to find him still there and sitting in front of Helen Frankenthaler’s Mountains and Sea (1952), a large abstract painting she painted when she was twenty-three years old that some say changed the course of abstraction. Frankenthaler’s stained raw canvas, soaked with strokes, marks, drips, and pours, is a calculated breathlessness that evokes a landscape as much as it doesn’t. Its lightness and muted bright colors offer an unexpected soothing, even in their chaoticness. Mountains and Sea takes you to the brink of recognition in a way that questions what can be observed. Is that a mountain? Are the marks intended? Is this just a mess? A viewer might seek legibility in a Frankenthaler painting, asking for evidence that this is meant for them. Where Wyeth uses realism to emote abstraction, Frankenthaler uses abstraction and reduction to break open observation, as if her paintings are thresholds into the space of anything, even if you must try to seek the literal mountains and sea.
Both paintings require their viewer to believe there is more than what we might simply recognize. The possibilities in the paintings are revealed only after we step forward with belief, over time, in that space of deep looking. In this way, abstraction can absorb you if you let it and speak to the parts of the world too unbearable to represent, in form or words. It is no wonder that abstraction rises in popularity in times of war and crisis: early abstraction during World War I, with artists like Wassily Kandinsky, abstract expressionism as a post–World War II reaction, or even the emergence of “crapstraction” after 9/11. A week after the election in 2016, three graduate students I worked with immediately turned to abstraction, one ceremoniously painting all of her figurative canvases into solid black color fields, washing out any chance of recognition, as if there was no way to render the world as it was. For her, being in the studio had become a betrayal because how could painting on a canvas mean anything when the world was on the brink of collapse?
I hover a few feet behind the man in the gallery and the Frankenthaler painting, trying to stay out of his periphery. He should have his time, but I am also growing restless waiting for him to move. Most people use benches in galleries to rest their feet or ease boredom by fiddling on their phones, and I assume my interest in the painting is more consequential than his. Suddenly conspicuous of my own elitism, I turn to inspect a nearby Alma Thomas painting, briefly getting lost in the controlled rhythm of her heavy brushstrokes of thick paint and bright colors that come together in a colorful circular pattern—a sharp distinction to the airiness of the Frankenthaler. With impatience, I return my gaze to the visitor on the bench just as he leans back and stretches his arms behind himself, bracing his body with each hand as if adding structural integrity between him and the simple piece of furniture. He is settling in to stay—to look. As if he could sense me, he tilts his head in my direction. The gesture is barely noticeable but a quiet acknowledgment that we are both still moving through this choreography together. I know if I want to sit he will scoot over to accommodate me, with plenty of space to still be separate and distanced. Instead, I take a step back—that recognition would signal an end.
I stand slightly behind the bench but with him—this stranger—for some time until tears sting my eyes. For just these few moments, we become an audience together, a sharing that is completely unspoken and unrecognizable to anyone else. We hold an utter agreement to keep looking together into this painting as if we too can witness the everything that artists see from anything. And in times like this, when it can feel like the world is trying to render us into nothing, I am reminded that being an audience offers us a mutuality to look closely at the world—past our hauntings and through our grief, toward that which has no end.
Michele Carlson uses creative strategies to question systems of power and legacies of racialization. She is an artist, writer, educator, and facilitator of projects ranging from conversations to publications to occasional curatorial endeavors. Her work is as much about how we create and endure systems of power as how we can refuse or reform them through creative imagining and action.
She is a founding member of Related Tactics, an artistic collective working at the intersection of race and culture. Related Tactics prioritizes the collaboration and consensus required to meaningfully engage the relational work of social change and movement building. Their work spans many forms, from photography and expanded printmaking to conversations and space-making.
Her work has been exhibited, presented, and published nationally. Based in the Washington, D.C., area, she is an associate professor of printmaking at George Washington University.