The Art of Collecting
Collecting Art
Mama’s first collection that I can recall were miniatures that could fit in a repurposed printer’s block letter tray she eventually found and put up in the hallway of my most well known childhood home in the Northeast Heights of Albuquerque. She taught me about the thrill of looking for trinkets and the joys of collecting. With the wisdom of adulthood I now recognize that my time hunting craft fairs and garage sales for the little things she would find to put up on her special shelf was a safe activity. One where she would be in a good mood, and we wouldn’t escalate past the constant tween and teenage tensions between us. These shopping experiences were unlike what would happen when we found ourselves negotiating over clothes in the Junior’s section fitting rooms at Mervyn’s. We rarely got mad at each other during craft fair exploration. Some of my favorite memories with Mama are the days we would be roaming the folding tables filled with handmade goods, or wading through other people’s junk, soon to become our treasures.
I also remember the thrill in trying to find something for her collection and the vibration of pleasure, recognition and validation I would receive when she would want to add that something I had spotted onto her special shelf. Space in the converted letter tray was limited. Every choice meant rearranging the current orientation of objects or possible displacement. But that thrill still surges through me today, either when I find something for one of my collections or when I spot something shopping with Hermanita I know she might like to acquire, who also caught the collecting bug from Mama.
The art of collecting turns out to also be an act of curation. Until you over-collect and become a dealer of antique and repurposed wares yourself, there is a limit to the spaces that you might tend and the area by which your collections may fit. I’ve learned this as I’ve met my limits on the space capacity for my juice glass collection (nine sets and holding), my honey jars (steady at five), my tequila sets (five but much more room to grow there), and my expanding jadeite Fire King dish set. My first and longest-running collection is books, which I don’t even tend to think of as a collection. To know me, is to come up against a book in every room of the house. A true challenge for me to consider filling all 6000+ square feet of our country home with books. For some, it might already seem like I’ve accomplished that goal. As it stands I’ve got my cookbooks in the kitchen, a library upstairs dedicated to the true home for books, a bookshelf in the living room for books in rotation, a special table where I keep my library books arranged in read and to-be-read piles. I’ve got a stack of the books I’m truly currently reading on my bedside table. And as I write this, I am spotting one on the table by my chair in the sitting area, one on the kitchen nook table, and the one I brought over to be quoted from later that I’ve found myself carrying from room to room as if it is on a pilgrimage with me until I turn its last page. And let’s not forget the guest suites are named after authors so of course the Octavia Butler Suite should hold her oeuvre. My studio has a special nook where I keep my art history reference books, and I take comfort in the pile I’m working through in stacks here and there as well. Wow, some might find that collection to be a bit overwhelming, and I feel like it’s shy a few thousand titles.
[My most recent painting acquisition all the way from Australia - Venus of Manjimup by Jo Hanna]
Paintings and other artworks come up when you seek out the definition of a collection. A museum holds a collection of works, and so do private collectors. I have found so much joy in my small but mighty art collection. Prints, and paintings, a collage, they are some of my favorite, prized possessions. Roxane Gay spurred this exploration on collection because she recently wrote and edited a section in the Gagosian Quarterly winter issue on Black art. She starts the section with a very compelling essay called “How to Collect Art.” In it, she describes some of the challenges she has faced as she has attempted to navigate a gallery system as the main entry point for collecting works. I was struck by how this was difficult for Gay even after growing up with large scale oil paintings of scenes from Haitian life on her childhood home’s walls, and being the grand-niece of a gallery owner in Port-au-Prince. Of course, I am not navigating New York or LA galleries like Gay is, from my northern Midwest outpost. But I do get that sense of uneasiness that surrounds art, either the making or the selling of it. One of my goals is to be as open and transparent about what goes into my creative practice as possible so as to make it a more accessible possibility for aligned individuals to engage. Maybe it’s my anxiety speaking, but I too have had dis-ease in art studio spaces. I too have wondered, do I belong here? Is this a place for someone like me? I have been uneasy in galleries with others’ art on the walls, looking at price tags and scoffing - who has that kind of money to pay for a picture?
But a collector is gonna collect. And art is just as worthy of an investment as the nicknacks one seeks at the places one haunts for such homely adornments. I like the challenge of collecting a painting that is one of a kind. But again, I am also the kind of person who shops for clothes and accessories ensuring I look like no one else. The great thing is, artists (including me) are often more than willing to work with you on a payment plan for paintings that feel out of reach. That’s how I acquired Magic Forest No. 3 from Carmen Bruhn, a regional artist who was exhibiting in a gallery near me. I emailed her and asked if she would be willing to take payments toward the painting and she was more than willing to do so. And then, when I fell in love with Jonathan Thunder’s Deer Woman Gets a Manicure, I emailed him too and started working my way toward paying down the most expensive addition to my collection to date. Artists it turns out, are also collectors of patrons, and both of these artists wanted to get to know the collector before entrusting their work to me. I like that too, replacing that typical one-way transactional norm of commerce with a more soulful exchange.
[Healing Forest No. 3 by Carmen Bruhn in our bedroom]
The book currently making its pilgrimage with me is Phillip Guston’s writings on painting. In notes from a lecture he gave to the New York Studio School in 1965 he articulates his, and others’ paintings as a collection bound across time. “To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. (What a sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to ‘see’ the future links)” (27). Ahhhh, to read the words of a painter who gets it. Who knows that simply making a painting is never simply, only making the painting. I wish I could reproduce the whole lecture for you here because it is filled with so many gems. And painting for Guston, and the rest of us, is not just about painting, but really about life. What if we saw our collections as not simply the act of grabbing and owning, but part of a larger cycle of the history of the things we choose to live beside? Guston, like other painters, is preoccupied by the end of a painting. But it’s because he knows the weight of beginning again, and the burden of carrying on. “Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow” (30). Is that not true of all our lives? Who knows what we did five years ago that we must now begin anew. In search of the marvelous painting, I am.
Now that I’ve taken off, I want to keep collecting words and ideas and thoughts here for you to receive. Though I too am aware that the collection of these words meets the limits of the reader’s attention. Pushed to the limit on a computer, in your email, through your podcast delivery system, I know I have limited time to collect your focus. In another lecture Guston is asked by an audience member as he works through slides of his paintings, if he remembers how long it took him to work on it. He responds, “It was done in an hour and a half, two hours. Or thirty years. Either way you want to look at it” (96). Up until recently I was a little aggrieved by what I felt was the lack of art in my young life. I didn’t have an auntie who ran a gallery, I didn’t live with paintings my parents had collected on their walls. The painting I remember best from my childhood was a mural above the fireplace. Primarily a landscape, my memory of it is that it was a southwestern desert scene of a woman holding a hat with a ribbon blowing in the breeze. My parents unceremoniously painted right over it. I recently did the same to a painting that was on a canvas gifted to me. So I get the impulse, but it still stings recognizing your work could just as easily be primed over by yourself, or somebody else. Anyways, I don’t have to feel so left out anymore because I didn’t have the paintings then that I have now. Both the ones I’m charged with ushering into the world as painter, and those that I have welcomed into my home through patronage. While I didn’t have paintings until my thirties, I’ve had a Mama who showed me the way through the thrills of collecting, and forty years of practice.
What I’m Reading
Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour
I have not devoured a book like this in a long time. I’m also marveling at the fact that it’s 2022 and the mainstream publishing industry is releasing stories about women who love women and that I could find this book in my library’s shelves in rural Minnesota. It’s part a testament to my awesome library and the staff, but also evidence that somethings have truly changed in my lifetime. The story follows two women’s lives as they try to find their passions and love each other. There is history, mystery, intense yet relatable themes for LGBTQ youth and love and resilience. Emilie and Sara’s stories are split up in separate chapters until their lives intertwine, and the way the story is told is refreshing and not forced. I’m grateful to have been in this world for a bit, and that it exists for me as a reader in 2022.
Artist Offerings
- I am completely blown away by Bill Miller’s collages made out of salvaged linoleum he gets out of homes undergoing renovations
- Michelle Tea launched a new newsletter on substack and her first letter was a review of Ali Libegott’s show up in LA right now. Such good writing about such good paintings.
- As I discussed in my last email I am a fan of the holidays going in order and am personally not a supporter of Christmas Creep which apparently is discourse that has been happening for longer than I knew!
- I really enjoyed this comic about the not so pretty history of US-American landscape painting which led me to a lecture on Indigenous Sovereignty cited in the comic by Dr. Scott Manning Stevens that is worth a watch
- Latino USA highlighted the work of Narsiso Martinez which are compelling contemporary paintings of farmworkers on the boxes that typically hold the fruits of their laboring
- Apparently comics are calling to me, because this comic about non-binary feelings by Sarah Mirk was also lovely
Creative Ritual
I journeyed to Missouri with paintings the first week of November and installed an entire show at Cottey College with Vaimo as my install assistant. Very exciting times! I had the honor of being featured in the Artist’s Joy section of The Optimist which is an independent journalism endeavor based in Greater Minnesota, I’ll include the link to my work when it’s up on the archive in my next issue! In the meantime, you can read this interview I did with Canvas Rebel that they recently published. These writing projects have taken up a lot of my time post-travels. On the painting front, I did finish a gift of a Tiny Tequila for the wonderful producer who shot my Postcards episode that recently won a Midwestern Emmy! It’s been snowing in Minnesota, the pond has frozen, though the lake remains open, we're in accumulative snow plowing season already. As such, I’ve been spending evenings cozily under layers of fabric quilting by hand and have been filled with such joys while slow stitching. I'm already dreaming about my next appliqué quilt top I want to make to fill a gap in my Roots show after one of the paintings makes its way to its new home in December. Life is great.
Questions to ponder
What are you collecting and why?
How has collecting shaped your life?
What have you created that could also be seen as a collection?
While there are clear joys in collecting, how has power shaped your own notions of collections either in terms of what is worthy of being collected or who has the ability to collect?
Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time.
-KCF
PS: Tomorrow is my birthday! You know what I would love as a present? You supporting my work even more than you already do by spreading the word about my work! Need more ideas? Share this newsletter with others, buy a painting, start a payment plan for one of my larger works, or fill my cup with a one-time or monthly contribution for my creative efforts. Community counts! In honor of me, do something that pushes you creatively and tell me about it. Let’s keep the love going for another journey around the sun as I celebrate 41 years! Muah!