I recently had the great pleasure of seeing a solo show of paintings and sculptures by Sandra Harper during Agave Festival Marfa. The adobe walls of the exhibition space enlivened the poetic language and aura of Sandra’s collection of what she refers to as memory-holders. A timeless quality is characteristic of Sandra’s work, one that meets the present moment with an empathetic urgency as it honors the past and questions the future as a bridge to remembrance.
Sandra’s answers to the nine questions below reads like a good book. Her biographical sketch highlights intimate layers which thread together her personal history, and the nuances foundational to the work she’s created spanning five decades. I am truly honored to share Sandra’s words and work with you here.
9 questions on art making and motherhood
1 In a sentence or two define your art practice.
I am an artist and writer living in New York City and Marfa, Texas. My paintings and sculptures explore the intersections of language, ritual, myth and the natural world.
2 How do you carve out time for your art practice alongside motherly obligations?
Now that my daughters are 53, 33 and 30, I am a full-time artist. But, for most of my life this has not been so. I will begin with the delightful and intrepid Juliette. I was very young when she was born. The Seventies decade had just begun and the nurses attending my labor seemed to not know what natural childbirth was. They were determined to provide me with a painless, medicated birth. Yet I had been to Lamaze classes and was well prepared. At 8 centimeters dilated, only two to go, I had not experienced a contraction. The doctor ordered a bag of Pitocin, a form of oxytocin, a hormone that causes the uterus to contract. A nurse administered it intravenously. Very soon the contractions began. My abdomen, only moments before a quiet safe place for baby Juliette, began to heave up and down and to and fro. It was as if I had swallowed a freight train.
Abruptly awakened, Juliette appeared, wailing, limbs starfished, looking like she was being shocked by electric eels. In my arms, she was suddenly quiet, content. All newborns are beautiful, but she was especially perfect, nearly eight pounds, ready for her first close-ups.
When she was a toddler, we left Houston and our family for Los Angeles. We lived in Topanga Canyon. We were 20,30 minutes to Santa Monica. 45 to Hollywood or downtown LA and only occasionally visited these locations nearly an hour away. Or we could drive 15 minutes through the other end of the canyon and be in the Valley.
Topanga was an aromatic paradise of sagebrush, manzanita, greasewood, live oaks and wildflowers. Juliette knew all the trails and walked them with our German Shepherds, Tasha and Pearl. In the early springs, unable to wait for ripening, Juliette climbed the plum tree to eat the first green plums. Secretly, she rode the horse bareback in the pasture next door. She said the horse was lonely. She was much closer to animals and nature than I was. I would make a garden but she was the garden.
We lived in a very small cabin built on the edge of a hill. The bathroom, a separate building, had once been a chicken coop. We had no TV. At night I’d sit by the wood burning stove reading, drawing and listening to the coyotes calling to each other.
I took a night course in biodynamic gardening at a branch of the LA community college in Woodland Hills, just over the mountains in the Valley. Everything grew in California, and I wanted to learn how to garden in a way that the plants would enjoy as much as I would. After all plants communicated, the soil was alive, and the moon was the grower’s guide. I planted my first garden, the first of many throughout my life. I grew food, herbs and flowers in a closely sowed happy riot of habitation.
At least once a year we would drive or take the Amtrak back to Houston. I had been driving back and forth between Houston and LA since I was a teenager. I knew every desert. Each was different with particular plants, indicators, and animals. Going East there were the Mojave, Sonoran and the Chihuahuan Deserts. Joshua Tree National Park was in the Mojave. The Anza Borrega Desert State Park in the Sonoran and Big Bend National Park in the Chihuahuan Desert. I explored them all, camping and walking.
Once I had established California residency, I went to CSU in Northridge in the Valley. The cost was $80 a semester, another $100 for books. Every morning Juliette and I climbed into our dilapidated Toyota truck – the hood was secured with a rope – and we’d drive east through the canyon to Woodland Hills. We played Billy Holiday cassettes. Juliette knew all the songs, every word and sang them in a plaintive bluesy imitation of Billy. “Some day my man will come along. He’ll be big and strong.”
I dropped off Juliette at a Free School in Woodland Hills and drove to Northridge to attend classes at CSUN where I studied anthropology and sculpture. The Free School, modeled after A. S. Neil’s child-centered school in England, Summerhill, was small and intimate. The dozen or so students, ranging in age from 4 to 17- Juliette being the youngest- were taught in the same classrooms. In exchange for her enrollment, I taught art classes. The oldest students, two 17-year-olds, were a couple. The slight-framed boy drove a small red convertible. His voluptuous girlfriend sat on his lap during class time. A bit envious, Juliette and I watched them speed off in the red car at the end of each day, seemingly without a care in the world. Juliette wanted a convertible. Wind blowing her hair, the sun warming her skin, the feel and taste of the ocean breeze in the air, this state of engagement aligned with her free spirit.
I brought clay from the studio at CSUN to the Free School and invented experiences for the students. Once on a field trip in Topanga we covered our scantily clad bodies with wet clay, danced, slid, caroused and eventually washed off in the creek.
At the end of each school day Juliette and I returned to CSUN where I worked in the studio until just before midnight. She played in the studio, engaged with the few other students or teachers who were there, also working at night, and eventually fell asleep on the couch. The drive home took half an hour. I’d carry her to bed. The next morning we’d get up early and do it again. Those were some of the happiest days of my life. I loved school. And I loved working in the studio where I made things that sprang from imagination. Juliette loved those days too. She was the one who told me we lived in paradise.
Clay is the material I worked with during those years. I made raku sculptures whole and in sections that fit into the garbage can where the reduction process took place. The raku pieces came hot from the kiln. I lifted them with a broad flat manure shovel and slipped them into the garbage can that I had stuffed with straw. The straw burst into flame. I always wore a thick padded winter jacket picked up at Salvation Army to protect myself from the heat. Only once did I catch on fire. Fortunately, the grad student who worked the kilns at night was spotting me. The arms of my jacket were on fire. I finished loading the garbage can with work. Then we smothered the flames on my arms.
My other art practice was a collaborative one with my friend, the artist, George Goode. He and I had been friends since we were teenagers in Houston. He had known Juliette since her birth. He was a young black man who could draw anything. He always carried a sketchpad and pens wherever he went. In LA he had a job drawing storyboards for Saturday morning cartoons. It was a soul-killing job yet allowed him to rent an apartment in the Valley and to buy the things he wanted: a large black truck, guns, costumes, cameras and drugs. I knew about everything except the drugs. We used the “things” in our collaborations. However, I didn’t do drugs, so he didn’t tell me about his use. He had always smoked a little weed. Several years passed before he told me he was freebasing. George was a quiet, shy person. He managed a deep sadness. He had a laugh that made me happy. The freebasing revelation was an acknowledgement of the seriousness of his engagement with the drug. He shared it with a mix of pride and resignation.
Our collaborations were performances that we photographed and filmed. We’d make up stories based on his drawings, fantasies, and black history. At the time I was interested in the aesthetics of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Though it was a brotherhood, women embodied the idealized Medieval look portrayed in the paintings. Women were the models. They had red frizzy hair, sickly pale skin and curly voluptuous lips. Frequently the women were the wives, sisters and daughters of the painters. Some learned to draw and paint and made their own Pre-Raphaelite paintings. I combined some of the pre-Raphaelite visual tropes with the current back-to-the-land-movement ones in some of our performances.
George and I had been deeply outraged and saddened by the assassination of Fred Hampton in 1969. The performance stories we created were about defending ourselves against white violence, escaping white violence and living in isolated utopias. The stories were characterized by interracial romances and friendships. Drugs and drug use never became a part of the stories. These documented performances were collaborations, so I entered his world instead of him entering the more feminist centered psyche of mine.
At the end of the Seventies Juliette and I moved to NYC. The city had everything LA did not. A literary and artistic tradition and a culture that was not driven by the film industry. I was in love with New York, especially the industrial factory spaces downtown. Juliette missed climbing trees and hiking with her dogs, but being the social creature she was, she jumped into life at PS 10 and then a more complicated one at IS 89 in Chelsea.
For a few years we squatted in the studio of the Swiss artist, Olivier Mosset. He lived with his girlfriend, a filmmaker, in a proper apartment. The studio was in Soho on Broadway between Broome and Grand. Every day I walked by Judd’s home/studio building at 101 Spring. I didn’t know Judd or his family or that in 2013 I would be exploring the Judd Foundation’s restoration of the 1870 cast-iron building and recalling the life of a working artist in the Seventies in Soho. With this restoration, the Judd Foundation had preserved this time for everyone to experience.
In Olivier’s studio Juliette and I shared a bathroom and shower with another Swiss artist, Gregoire Mueller. His studio was next to Olivier’s. In fact, if we entered the building from Broadway, we had to walk through Gregoire’s space to get to Olivier’s. Usually, entering from Crosby St, we came up in the factory elevator that opened onto Olivier’s space. The elevator was as large as a small room. We had a fridge and a hot plate. The heat shut off at 4PM every day, the time when the factories on the other floors closed for the day and the workers, women sewers, went home. Honestly it wasn’t unbearably cold. We dressed warmly and went to bed early under piles of blankets. We liked our life there. Juliette and her friends could roller-skate on the loft floors. Living on the 8th floor and facing east, our view was dominated by the cupola of the deserted Police Building on Centre St. It looked like we were living in Florence.
I had various jobs including working at the Bleecker St and Carnegie Hall Cinemas. I also worked as a model for an artist who lived upstairs from us. Her name was Patricia Hansen, Patty. She was a realist painter and painted from life: flowers, cityscapes and life-size figures. In the 80s realism was dead as far as the art scene and market were concerned. The realist painter, Philip Pearlstein, had prevailed during the reign of Abstraction Expressionism and was a respected figure in the history of American contemporary art. Only Minimalism could respond to the cacophony of abstraction.
Donald Judd’s essay “Specific Objects” written in 1964 explored the idea that “the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture.” Now it was the 80s. Artists experimented in every way possible, except realism. They had shows, sold work, and became known. This was also the decade of the Aids epidemic. Artists were called to action. People were dying. Friends were dying.
Patty was devoted to her way of painting. She was very good at it. It was how she saw things and people. Those years she lived in Soho were productive ones, but her work was disconnected from the work artists were making at the time. In a sense, her work was timeless, Renaissance-like, in the tradition of Sofonisba Anguissola and Atremseia Gentileschi, but with a steely rawness only a modern liberated woman could paint with. Her animal portraits were as sublime as the French 19th century painter, Rosa Bonheur. Her still lifes were as gorgeous and meticulous and three-dimensional as the Dutch Golden Age artist, Clara Peeters, a magnificent painter trained in the tradition of Flemish Baroque painting.
We spent many hours together. She was an independent woman supporting herself as an artist. She had traveled the world, knew Kazakhstan and Turkey as well as she knew Europe. She had had a life of adventure, risk and purpose and she had been a teenager mother of two. She was a spiritual person and had been a Sufi for many years. Juliette also worked as a model for her. One that Patty easily sold portrayed Juliette playing dress up. She wore an old fur stole and a pink evening gown that she had pulled from her play box. In the painting she is brushing the hair of a naked doll.
Another painting Patty made of Juliette showing her in her own adolescent world turned out to be unsellable. Juliette was a few years older dressed in a purple sweatshirt whose neck she had cut. She was perched on a stool listening to her Walkman, seemingly disinterested in anything an adult might tell her. Patty made several paintings of Juliette and me. In one I am French braiding Juliette’s hair. Mine is already braided. I used to love braiding my hair while it was wet. A few days later when the braids were dry, I’d let them out and luxuriate in my big head of hair.
I knew all the used bookstores downtown. Strand on Broadway near 14th St was the largest. I spent hours there climbing up and down the ladders to search the rows of books for authors and discovering magical books like one on the 15th Century Songhai Empire in the Sahel savanna of western Africa. There were a few in Soho. The most interesting one was a photography book shop. One glorious day I discovered Susan Meiselsas’ Carnival Strippers. This book may be the single most important book I’ve had in my life. It’s about women. During the Seventies Meiselas spent her summers documenting the small-town carnival circuit life of a group of strippers. She photographed the women on and off the stage, their boyfriends, managers and customers. She made hours of taped interviews with the women. Theirs was a hard-core life, getting their pussys licked on stage for a dollar, dealing with pregnancies and drugs and nowhere to go with their lives. The book became bedtime reading for me and Juliette along with Roald Dahl books, Black Beauty and Bemelmans’s Madeline series.
Now I was 30, but when I was younger, I thought I would do the kind of documentary work Meiselas did with Carnival Strippers. I had aspired to be like the women on the cover of National Geographic. In 1965 Jane Goodall appeared on the cover studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Then in 1970 Dian Fossey was photographed carrying a large baby mountain gorilla on her hip in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda. In 1976 Catalina Trail then called Cathy Brugger was photographed in the mountains of Michoacan covered in monarch butterflies. She and her then husband had discovered the over wintering site of the migrating insects. Meiselas was a war photographer. She documented the Sandinista revolution and the massacres in El Salvador. The Kurds fleeing Northern Iraq and the mass graves. I had none of the strengths, fearlessness and talents this artist and activist possessed. However, I thought, Juliette and I could drive to Michoacan.
Trying to make ends meet, my art practice halted for years. When I did resume, I did so by taking drawing and painting classes at the School of Visual Arts. The best class convened at the Met Museum. The teacher gave us exercises to do, for instance, pick an art piece on display as a subject and make a drawing with no connecting lines. I had a new relationship; someone I would eventually marry and with whom I am still with. We’ve managed such a long time together by taking breaks. His name is Ham. We would have two daughters and the cycle of caring for young children would begin over again. But, before the births, I must return to a recurring thread or occupation in my life – gardening.
Towards the end of the 80s, I moved to a friend’s one room studio on the eastern side of a rocky slope overlooking the Hudson River just south of the city of Hudson. There I embarked upon a grand growing scheme. I wanted to learn Gertrude Jekyll’s practice of perennial flower gardening. Though colder than Jekyll’s planting zone, the climate along the Hudson was perfect for many perennials. Juliette had recently left for Whittier College in California. I had a new kind of mad freedom and threw myself into the big bouquet of gardening. What began as a series of perennial flowering beds grew into a 1/4-acre fenced plan of wide raised beds and herb circles. It was a happy jumble of herbs, flowers and food, threatened only by my taking on too much and a thriving community of woodchucks and their tunnels.
For one year I was a vendor at the Greenmarket in Union Square, a year-round market producer, rain, sleet or shine. Ham would come up on the weekends, help me load the truck, drive to the city, set up a canopy and tables and sell. By the time we treated ourselves to a nice city dinner and paid for gas, we’d roll back in at midnight with very little cash left.
At the foot of the driveway on 9G sat a small unused red barn. The little barn became Harper’s, an organic farm stand. The one room house where I lived and grew the garden was integral to the production. The cellar was crammed with tables stacked with cell flats of growing seeds. Hanging low over the cell flats were fluorescent tube lights, keeping the soil warm and urging the seedlings up towards the light. Upstairs, the ceiling was completely covered with drying flowers and herbs.
I was overworked but interested in the work I had taken on. I was 40, strong, excited about learning from plants. And I was pregnant.
Eliza was birthed in Rhinebeck on March 1st. Luckily it was a Friday and Ham had come up on the train the night before. The 3 AM drive to the hospital had been a mystical experience. The snow-covered ground created an insulated silence. A stark black and white palette of wet black road, white covered houses and woods made it seem like we were in nature more than we were in civilization. The labor was short. I knew the breathing techniques. Though the labor only lasted a few hours, the stages of birth were textbook. Ham was a supportive partner in the birthing process. The nurses and doctor also supported my intention to birth naturally. When transition, the most intense and painful stage of labor began, I understood that our little girl was preparing to enter the world of bright lights and big sounds. And caressing arms. The happiness emanating from this newborn was powerful. She was electric with love.
For the first year, Eliza and I spent most of our days and nights alone. Perhaps the close bond that mothers and babies experience in the early weeks of life together were extended for us. When I worked in the garden, I tried strapping her to my body or lying her in a basket near me. As she grew older that summer, I set up a playpen outside. However, gardening with a baby was not the blissful activity I had read about in other mothers’ accounts. The gardening I was doing was hard physical work done in full sun. Eliza required shade. Insects were flying around her and crawling into the mosquito netting I had arranged to protect her. Also, she did not want to be left alone.
Work was accomplished only while she napped. But sneaking out of the house without making a sound was nearly impossible. She woke at the slightest squeak. I was tired. Mothers with babies are tired. Not only does baby alter work patterns but also those of sleep. Most mothers will admit that napping when your baby naps is tempting but a mistake. To do any work or even to go to the toilet without a baby on your lap, meant working while baby slept.
Two very old and tall pear trees grew close to the house. In early summer they were smothered in petite white blossoms that buzzed with bees. At that time of year, the unremarkable house seemed enchanted. Sentinels of old-fashioned hollyhocks with their watercolor flowers crowded around the front porch. The pears ripened in the fall from pale green to gold. A Rose of Sharon, hibiscus syriacus, that grew against the north side of the house flowered in late summer into the fall. This Rose of Sharon was as large as an old, snarled tree, its heavy branches bending away from the house towards the pear tree and laying the ground. The rough black bark was hidden by dark purple, big-cupped blooms with blood red centers. Pureed pear became Eliza’s first food. I fed her bowls and bowls of the perfumed dark yellow mush. The freezer was full of it so that she could eat it all winter. It’s a surprise she still likes pears.
Unless Ham was traveling for work, which was frequent, he arrived at the Hudson train station on Thursday nights for the weekend. We spent the weekend socializing. We loved introducing our wonderful baby to friends and she loved it too. When the late freeze came at Halloween, I closed Harper’s and began to search for a place to live nearer the city to be closer to her father. Perhaps he could even commute.
We celebrated Eliza’s first birthday in a house we had rented in Cold Spring, NY with friends: the artist, Eric Erickson, his partner, Marilyn Young, a gardener, Grace Kennedy, an artist and landscape designer and her partner, Tim D’Quisto, an artist and builder, who shared Eliza’s birthday. Most artists I knew, good and great ones, had to invent other careers. At the moment, all I seemed to manage was the care of one baby. I stopped nursing. I was ready. But of course, Eliza wasn’t and cried standing up in her crib for a sad long time.
We did see Ham more, but really, not that much more. The train commute was 1 ½ hours, plus another half hour to the office. And of course, the time between the train and the house. It was over a two-hour commute, closer to 2 ½ hours. That alone was brutal, but there was more. Ham worked late and he attended nearly nightly events. Many nights I’d pick him up at the train at midnight. By 8 in the morning, he’d have to catch a morning train.
At the three houses we rented over the next few years, I had a series of flower beds. I had arrived at the first rental with a truck load of perennials I had dug up from my garden in Columbia County. I repeated this process each time we moved, though truly each time fewer and fewer plants made the cut. I grew weary moving gardens and nearly, but not quite, lost my inspiration.
The beds I made were interesting to me. I loved the hellebores that bloomed at the end of winter, though still winter. I had not become a native plant grower yet; however, I was most interested in perennials that had a wilder more natural look. I was also partial to aromatic ones like lavender, santolina, Agastache, bergamot, the salvias and mints. The Heleniums. Any milkweeds, especially butterfly asclepias, or clematis and wild geraniums. Penstemons and oakleaf hydrangea. Woodland plants were other favorites: aquilegia, may apple, baneberry, cimicifuga, jack in a pulpit, thalictrum. Roses and Peonies of course, but they took a few years to mature and weren’t easily transplanted to the next rental. Tree peonies proved impossible to transplant.
Eliza was two and I was pregnant with Sophia. Her birth was extraordinary because it was swift. Ham and I I arrived at the hospital in Peekskill before dawn. She was birthed within half an hour of our arrival. We had barely settled into the birthing room. I had tried sitting in the tub of hot water, meant to ease the back pain of contractions. Within minutes I insisted Ham lift me out and call for the doctor. Ham had to support me. I could not stand or walk on my own. I was only a few feet from the bed, but it looked very far away and about 6 feet high. I told the doctor I couldn’t make it. She threw a towel on the floor and told me to squat. As I squatted Sophia flew out, arms stretched in flight. The doctor caught her.
A few hours later the pediatrician examined Sophia and released us. We drove home and passed a friends’ driveway with a sign announcing estate sale. “Pull in,” I called to Ham from the back seat where I sat next to Sophia in her backward facing car seat. I stayed in the car with Sophia while Ham briefly inspected the wares, said hello to friends and announced the birth. I suppose I thought I would jump right back into the life I had been leading the day before the birth. In fact, I needed time to heal and to rest.
We had only been gone from home for three hours. Eliza and our friend Suzi and her 3-year-old son Bryce were waiting for us. Sophia had thick black hair. Because her zoom through my body had been so swift her nose was smushed and pushed to the side. She looked as if she had been in a fight. Eliza, 2 ½, didn’t really know what to think, but she knew her life had changed.
Ham’s father lived only an hour away. Before noon he arrived to meet his new grandchild. I had not eaten anything since the night before and was ravenous. In the fridge an unopened bottle of chocolate milk in a glass pint bottle glistened like in a cartoon. I had purchased it only the day before. I drank the entire bottle. Quickly a migraine came on that kept me in bed until the next day. For several days I was woozy and headachy. I had never had a migraine and would not take any medication that would compromise my milk. Recovering from giving birth was easier than migraine recovery.
I was 43. My life was changing. It was always beginning.
Two little girls made a beginning.
Even with childcare I nearly always had one child with me. Since the girls were different ages, this pattern would continue for years. Their activities, playdates, appointments, and for a while even their schools took place at different locations and times.
I did have several art experiences that influenced me and encouraged me to begin to make work again. Grace Kennedy designed and planted gardens. She was also a wonderful artist who had little time for art making. She did however teach a course, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” The book and course program were written and designed by Grace’s friend, Betty Edwards. The course was composed of a series of exercises. Each exercise was different but had a few common elements. One, was the drawing tool - a pencil. The exercises were about looking, seeing, a kind of intense and intentional attention that stimulated and focused your thinking as you drew.
A simple skill I learned in the class is the practice of using the pencil as a measure. With the pencil held out in front of me, I learned to measure various parts of whatever I was drawing. The pencil is also good for establishing the angle, say of the upper lip or of an eyebrow or the stem of a plant. These were revelations to me. So simple and helpful. I use this technique nearly daily.
Other influences occurred during those years I lived out of the city. One was the building and completion of Dia Beacon. Living not far from the site, a former Nabisco box-printing factory, our friends and Ham and I were intrigued and excited by the project. In fact, we knew some important players, one being Lynne Cooke. A few years later we saw Lynne in Marfa and talked about the museum, the astonishing natural light coming through the high up lateral windows and the collection of work from the Sixties to the present. She connected Dia Beacon to Marfa, saying that it was Judd’s idea of permanent installation that had shaped the concept of the museum.
I learned about art from friends who were practicing artists, especially from Peter Clark. Peter could see in the forest. He made work from found forms and materials. Some were organic, some were purchased from tag sales and antique shops, auto graveyards and demolition sites. Other materials came from the lumberyard and hardware store. Using paint and masking tape, he would make what he called a drawing on a 15” x 15” piece of copper. He placed found objects and created installations and sculptures.
In the winter he worked in the forest. During this time of year, he could see the bones of the forest, its intimate parts, boulders and pebbles, its trunks and fallen branches. In fact, he collected the branches and made “Nest,” a large circle, 5’ high and 12’ wide. Nest was deep in the woods. Only his wife and a few friends saw it.
It was Peter who told us about Marfa. He had made a pilgrimage to see Donald Judd’s work and to immerse himself in the vision. We promised ourselves we would go.
Darkness coming early during the winter in the country is different from nighttime falling in the city. The city has lights and life. People walking up and down the sidewalks. Though I had friends in Garrison and Cold Spring with babies and young children and many with no children, nights outside of the city were spent at home. There was no going for a walk or running around the corner to have a drink with a friend or dropping into a gallery opening. Life outside of the home shut down. This was especially hard for me. Not because I was particularly social, or that I was used to going out every night when living in the city, but simply because there was no getting away from the house and children for a quick hour or even less, a half hour. Even a nighttime walk with the children in the stroller would have been welcomed.
NYC
When Eliza was 6 and Sophia, nearly 3, we moved back to the city. We had purchased a long narrow floor in a small building in Tribeca near PS 234 and made it into an apartment. In the early 90s, ownership was possible. Still, our relentless search had taken over a year. It was the first property we had owned together. Ham and I continue to live in the same apartment.
In many ways our family life in the city, in this singular neighborhood was bliss. Washington Park was across the street from their school. The Hudson River Park was a block away. Though Ham never arrived home before 9 at night and he continued to travel for half the month, living in the city meant the daughters and I had more family time with him.
How did women with careers and jobs manage young children and their work lives? I had no idea. I struggled to hold things together. And I had help from a talented and loving Stuyvesant student, Rosanna Ohba. Rosanna worked with Eliza on homework. She also took her to playdates and to dance lessons. I had Sophia. Some afternoons we switched. The afternoons were filled with activities. Then there was dinner preparation, homework, laundry, bath time and bedtime. Around 10 at night I stopped. I read.
I did have 8:30 to 2:30 as time for myself. I practiced yoga and painted with watercolor, did errands, cleaned the apartment. Unless I was at yoga class, I spent the morning working with watercolors on the dining table. I listened to a CD of invigorating Indian music over and over. And painted. Experimented. I had no direction really. I was simply applying color and water to paper. Color for me was always a healer, brightening my mind instead of letting it slip into lethargy or dispiritedness.
9/11
I’d like to talk about the first studio space I had in NYC. It came about because of 9/11. We live downtown on the West Side not far from the World Trade Center Site. On September 11th my young daughters, 10 and 7, and our puppy Ruby were walking to school. PS 234 is even closer to the WTC than our apartment. We witnessed the impact of the first plane, the second plane and the collapse of the towers. Ham was out of the country working on a new European journal and would not be able to find a flight home until the following week. The puppy went insane and never recovered. We were traumatized. Still, soon after the tragedy, the children made it very clear that they wanted to live in their home and not outside of the city. But the neighborhood was a tragic one, not a healthy one.
For a while the neighborhood was cordoned off with sentries. Tanks spraying water drove up and down the streets. Over one hundred dump trucks a day covered with flapping tarps left the site, circled the children’s school and headed up the West Side Highway a few blocks to the barges. They were docked at the end of our street. Workers in hazmat suits unloaded the debris onto barges. The parks were closed because of contamination. Flyers of the disappeared were posted everywhere. Make-shift altars crowded the sidewalks. Posters calling for the death of Osama Bin Laden were pasted on walls and vehicles. We watched the fires burning at night until February. Amid this, the children went to school, reunited with their friends and spent most of their time indoors near air purifiers.
The daughters and I were terrified to fly but at Christmastime, together with Ham, we boarded a plane and flew to San Francisco to be with Juliette and her husband. Juliette was 5 months pregnant. I summoned the emotional strength to board the plane so that we could be together. Four months later in late April when Juliette was due to give birth, we flew again to San Francisco. When Juliette went into labor and was ready to go to the hospital in Berkeley, Eliza, Sophia and I went with her. We watched as baby Garrison slid from his mother’s body. It’s true Sophia was hiding behind me, but the three daughters and I were together at this spectacular moment. In fact, I was the videographer, freeing Juliette’s husband to be by her side and attend the birth. Even though they are twenty years apart, the daughters are very close.
A year after 9/11, we had made progress in our recovery. The neighborhood was home, scarred but whirring along. Most residents lived and worked in the neighborhood. It was in the aftermath of the event that I was able to rent my first studio space in the city. I rented a small room on W. Broadway near Warren St. from a wonderful artist, Maura Sheehan, who worked in a contiguous space. The night of September 10, she had left the windows open. The weather was beautiful then, the gentle beginning of fall. The air fresh and cool. The next day her studio rooms were piled high with dust and debris. After they had been cleaned by a federal cleanup effort, I rented the smaller of these rooms. In this room, I had to begin at the beginning. For me, this always meant drawing. I drew with graphite. I made large collage drawings. I was also obsessed with photocopying at that time, still am. There was a copy shop around the corner on Greenwich. I’d go there at least once a day and make close-up copies on 9” x 12” sheets of paper of the work of the 14th century anatomist, Andreas Vesalius. Skeletons. With these Xerox copies I made a wall-size collage of bigger than life skeletons in a village like landscape.
MARFA
In 2006 we bought an adobe house in Marfa. It was built in 1918 by ranchers who used it as their “Sunday house,” a place where the family lived when they needed to do business, see doctors, attend social gatherings, church and school. Ham and I began visiting Marfa in the winter of 2000. The West Texas desert was the perfect anecdote to NYC. We drove for hours mesmerized by the undulating high plateau that was a mile high. The Beuna Vista Social Club album had been released the summer before. It was our soundtrack. We blasted it across Texas. The tiny herds of pronghorns crossing the dry grassland astonished us with their beauty. The light had a brightness we weren’t used to but that captured us.
The Marfa community was small and a creative one. Something interesting was always happening. Book readings, performances, art shows, concerts. Drought, monsoon, high winds, brilliant big sky, expressive clouds. Yuccas, cacti, tall ivory colored inflorescences, the dark fuchsia fruit of the prickly pear, raptors and reptiles. Furry spiders as big as my hand. Owls as tiny as sparrows. The town was circled by lone volcanic mountains that extended to the Rio Grande River sixty miles to the south. This was not a new place. It had been shorn, worn, dried, carved by wind and water, choked to death by loss of grasses. Still, it thrived, shone brilliant, exhibited blooms, survived.
While our daughters were in boarding school, I lived in Marfa, started the farmers’ market and grew food for the market. I made art sometimes, but working for the market was a full-time job. Also, I ran the recycling program the first year of its existence and began a school garden. Though I had taken on more work than I could handle, the school garden was an inspirational experience for two years. Then the school stopped letting the children spend class time in the garden because the school’s state tests scores were so low they were threatened with closure. They believed more class time to study for the tests was required, when, in fact, the children learned math and science more easily in the garden than out of it.
For the last few years, I’ve been living in Marfa half the year and making art. I’m interested in this place, what it is saying and what it remembers. That’s what I listen to and look at and study. I’ve been making memory-holders, sculptures of the plants and animals that live in the Chihuahuan Desert. This is a very old place. Once it was covered by a sea. There are clam shells in its walls.
3. What project or body of work are you currently developing?
I’d like to talk about the work I am making in Marfa, I began this exploration here in the Chihuahuan Desert, observing the pollination event between the blooming yucca elata and its moth, tegeticula yuccasella. The yucca flower is a sublime container for its sexual organs. Camouflaged by white wings, the female yucca moth lays her eggs in the ovary of the flower. Hatching out, the larvae thrive on the seeds in the developing fruit. The blossom and its moth expressing their symbiotic relationship took hold of my imagination.
At the same time, I was humbled by this magnificent yucca which had given much to the survival of the people who have lived in the desert. Food, fiber, soap, medicine. As well as ritual and myth that strengthened community, increasing the chances of longevity.
I wanted to listen to this plant and to this desert. As I breathed the air the yucca was giving me, perhaps, I thought, I might hear what this living being, had to say. After all our microbial clouds were mingling.
“I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials,” Ana Mendieta said, “but their emotional and sensual ones.”
“She would collect earth from certain places she held dear — Cuba, The Nile,” Raquelin Mendieta said of her sister. “She called it a charge. An object would have a charge, it would have the vibration of that place.”
Loud and clear, the yucca, the land and the river had a vibration. Every plant and animal pulsed with memory.
These sculptures were made using everyday materials - wire, plaster, paint, wax and plant material. They were made with the intention of linking them to a botanical and biological system of memory. I think of the artist Adriana Corral. In her work memory is threatened by the erasure of peoples. Her flag piece, Unearthed: Desenterrado, flies over Ballroom Marfa waving in the wind to remind us to honor the migrant labor forces and to recognize the abuse they suffered.
The pieces here sprang from this desert: the hare, the pronghorn, the yucca flower, the plant women. As memory-holders they attempt to mediate the intimacy and the detachment we experience with the natural world.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” wrote Simone Weil.
It is this attending to that allows us to see beyond the surface into the bloom where the interconnectedness of life is taking place.
I want to thank Marfa for being the perfect blossom for an agave festival. And Jim Martinez and Jim Fissel for their endless supply of plant material. Finally, Tim Johnson for bringing our attention to the borderless life that has always inhabited and defined this desert.
4. Describe your studio space and working environment: the location, ambient sounds, etc.
In Marfa, because I am usually alone, I work in nearly every room of the house. But for a month in the winter, I make a lot of work on the back porch. It’s a screened-in porch. The birdsong is constant. Half the year, hummingbirds constantly slurp from the feeder. My dog, Roma, is usually in the back yard with a friend. Friends walk by and say, hi.
In New York, I have a north facing workspace in a building built in 1865. The windows are very tall. To the west they look out onto a shaft of other workspaces. To the north, a fire escape, a massive steel architectural structure, zigzags up the back of the building. Roma accompanies me to the studio. My husband has a small office next to mine, so Roma can go there for visits. Our daughter, Sophia, who is a fashion designer, has her workspace set up in one corner of my studio. Because she works full-time as a production manager for a fashion designer, we overlap only on the weekends.
5 Where are you currently finding inspiration?
In Marfa I watch the day and night sky. Every morning, Roma and I walk the northwest perimeter of the town. She smells every tiny thing and understands it and catalogues it with her nose. She also reads the scent of the wind, watches for movements in the landscape and listens to the birds or the truck coming up the hill raising a storm of dust. I notice the plants and how they change with the time of year regardless of whether there is rain. There isn’t much moisture, but when snow or rain falls, the plants begin to respond before the first drop falls. I’m here to listen to them.
I love the city of New York. I feel the urge to caress the street. I’m interested in every rock, piece of rusted metal, and plant growing up through the cracks. This July I’ve seen Amaranthus, lamb’s quarter’s, sunflower, purslane, chickweed and asclepias (butterfly weed) growing in the crevasses of the street. Because it’s summer, a tomato plant and a squash plant have burst through the soil in front of Morgan’s the corner market. Every now and then I will find a good toss-out left on the sidewalk. Ten years ago, I had an art practice making rubbings of the manhole covers. Early Sunday morning was the best time to be kneeling in the street with a large piece of mulberry paper and giant chunks of graphite. The rubbings are beautiful.
Also New York streets filled with people provides constant inspiration, fascination and awe.
6 How has motherhood impacted the evolution of your vocation as an artist-mother?
Motherhood has shaped me. I learned to love in a lasting way because of the children, to take care of someone other than myself and to not operate solely from a self-centered perspective. The relationships with my daughters have been a gift.
With children I struggled to be an artist. I didn’t have the resources or stamina to have what it takes to make art and take care of a family. When I could, I always returned to artmaking and made my way creatively but slowly. For me, to make progress I needed more time to myself than was possible. Also, this is not critical to my development, but I will say that for the most part, being a mother, and I’ve been a mother since I was 20, has kept my artmaking fairly tame. Childless, I probably would have been more experimental. I think from a feminist’s perspective. And my orientation towards life is based on the principles of equality.
7 What female artists do you find intriguing and important to reference in your own work?
Artists whose work and lives I recall most frequently are Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta, Lee Bontecou and Agnes Martin. Also the surrealist artist, Remedios Varos, the artist, Carrie Mae Weems and the filmmaker, Chantal Akerman.
In addition to being hairdressers, my parents were artists. They made paintings. My mother was a traditional artist and painted with oils. Besides painting my father also made some sculptures. His work was always changing. He liked to experiment with different styles and materials. I was influenced and inspired by their dedication and output. My mother taught me to draw, along with my younger siblings, a sister and two brothers. Every surface in our house was covered with art books. I grew up looking at paintings and sculptures in books. Very few of the artworks were made by women. I remember only Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot and Georgia O’Keefe. Perhaps the work of Artemesia Gentileschi and Suzane Valadon was tucked somewhere amongst the male artists, but I didn’t learn about their work until I was in my twenties.
My parents thought of hairdressing as an art. My father especially loved mixing hair dyes. My mother’s hair constantly changed colors. Besides a beauty shop, they owned a wig shop. My mother wore a different wig or hairpiece every day. In the 60s, the Batman TV series inspired my father to create the Bat Bang wig. My mother modeled the wig for an ad in the local paper.
Every holiday provided my parents with a theme around which to create tableaux, sculptures and paintings. For Halloween my father made a life size coffin that sat on the credenza near the front door. While a creepy howling recording played, children had to enter the house to retrieve the candy from a bowl nestled in the lap of a Frankenstein-like corpse my parents had made. For Christmas they made a large fireplace out of cardboard and a life-sized Santa my mother painted in oils. “The Harpers,” Santa’s placard declared, his red cheeks shiny as cherries.
A turning point for me in my life occurred when I was around 13 or 14. It was a Sunday. My parents had taken us to the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. At the time, with its Mies van der Rohe addition of Cullian Hall, I thought it must have been as massive as the Louvre in Paris. I know it was a Sunday because hairdressers work on Saturdays and have Sundays and Monday off, a school day.
I saw a sculpture, hanging on the wall, made of welded steel and canvas that startled and hypnotized me. It was dirtied or painted with soot. The work looked straight at me. I looked back at it and into it and was embarrassed but couldn’t help myself. This artwork changed how I thought about life and art and being a woman. The sculpture was made by a woman. Lee Bontecou was the artist. The piece was a gift from Dominique and John de Menil, whose foundation would play a seminal part in the realization of Donald Judd’s vision in West Texas.
When I was 17 and a senior at Bellaire High School, I was eligible for a school/ work program. I spent my mornings in required classes, left school at the lunch hour and drove downtown to work in the commercial art department of a department store. In the 60s stores created their own ads. Ads changed daily. I worked for a commercial artist who had recently moved to Houston from New York City. His name was Walter Silver. In fact, his thick wavy black hair was silvering. He lived with his life partner, a slightly younger man and a corgi. Walter was gloriously and with an inspired dignity, out. My parents were in the beauty business. All of our friends were gay men. Walter became my mentor and friend.
Walter changed my life. He taught me to draw in a fast, free way with line and color using inks and washes. He took me to meet his yoga teacher, Billie Golnick. She taught Hatha yoga wearing a caftan while a young lithe nearly naked man demonstrated the postures. On special evenings, she wore apricot-colored tights and a little top that she’d lift up to show us nauli kriya. She rolled her abdomen from side to side. It looked like she had swallowed an eel. At work I modeled the department store’s clothes for Walter while he drew from life. When we ran out of clothes, I cut and pasted the ads together for print.
Frequently I read a piece about a woman artist in which she states that she does not want to be known as a female artist, but rather as an artist. I understand. However, fear of the marginalization of being identified as a woman artist, is not one I share. I celebrate the work of women artists, whether their work reflects a woman’s perspective or not. At the same time, being a woman automatically assigns one to a place of insignificance or, even, oblivion.
Artists must be strong, driven, naturally occupied with making, whether with words or sounds or materials. For many of us the definition of artist means a person who cannot be categorized. After all, the making of art should not be confined or contained. Artists attempt to capture imagination, thoughts, sounds. What does that look like or sound like? Art.
Carrie Mae Weems is clear about her intentions: to “respond to a number of issues: woman’s subjectivity, woman’s capacity to revel in her body, and the woman’s construction of herself, and her own image.” Her work is gorgeous and mind-blowing. Other work asks, Who is looking and why? She says, “My work endlessly explodes the limits of tradition.”
Another artist who made work from a woman’s perspective and “exploded tradition” was the filmmaker and writer, Chantal Akerman. In her 1974 film, Ju, Tu, Il, Elle, Akerman is writer, director and actor. In one long scene she sat on a mattress on the floor and ate sugar out of a bag. This was her first film. The next year she made the exquisite, disturbing “Jeanne Deilman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels" starring Delphine Seyrig. The film broke every rule. With static, long takes creating a threatening real time discomfort in claustrophobic teacup-like settings, Akerman’s Jeanne tried hard to keep it together until she couldn’t. Caring for a child, earning money as a prostitute, making breakfast and dinner, cleaning the apartment, having an orgasm and stabbing her client with a pair of scissors, Seyrig quietly lived the trauma of being a woman.
In the 1970s when I was in my 20s, a woman occupied a status/position in society, culture and the workplace that was different from a man’s. Almost always there was a vast gender gap regarding salary, hourly wage and the price of an art piece. It’s 2024. There have been gains, but there is no equality.
My first daughter, Juliette, was born in the early seventies. As young women in the late 60s and early 70s, we learned to look at our vulvas with a mirror. What an odd, charming idea. Most of us reacted, “Whoa! It looks like that?” Post childbirth vulvas were often darker and the labia sometimes appeared larger. Our genitals no longer suggested the small tightness of a young mussel, but that of a large mature one. In 1974 we read the well-illustrated Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book about women’s health and sexuality. The book taught us to own our bodies, to be pro-active in the care of our bodies and to not feel fear or alone when coping with health, sex and mental issues.
In the art world at that time, Hannah Wilke shaped vulvas from chewing gum and stuck them all over her face. In 1975 Carolee Schneemann performed “Interior Scroll.” She stood naked on a tabletop, pulled a long narrow and folded piece of paper from her vagina and read what she had typed on it. Here is an excerpt:
If you are a woman (and things are not utterly changed)
They will almost never believe you really did it
(what you did do)
These artists spoke for me, made art for me. Driven by their natural impulse to create, they led the parade, a loud, brave one, not caring what anyone thought. They performed. They were seen. Many of them did not have children. But they were performing so that women and children would be free, not afraid, and so that children, regardless of sex, would be raised with a natural understanding of equality.
In my early 20s my bag was full of small used paperbacks written by Flannery O’Conner, Carson McCullers, and Sylvia Plath. Yet, I was still reading and re-reading Faulkner and Hemingway. They were archetypal geniuses. Up to that point in my life I had read books and looked at art which had been produced overwhelmingly by men. Beginning then I changed my focus to learn about what women had made and what they were making. Instead of focusing on the work of Corbusier, I looked at the work of Charlotte Perriand. Or Lee Miller instead of Man Ray. Camille Claudel was a sculptor but known for her relationship with Rodin. Though I understood the importance of the photographers Manuel Alvaro Bravo and Edward Weston, I was more interested in the photographic work of their partners, Lola Alvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti. Kahlo and Rivera were another couple. O’Keefe and Stieglitz. Lee Krasner and Elaine de Kooning were consequential artists connected to famous male painters.
There was an endless history of women artists to learn about, including those who were not automatically associated with their male partners, Louise Bourgeois for one. Also, there were those artists not bound by gender such as the daring, inventive and marvelous French surrealist artist Claude Cahun, born Lucy Schwob, who, beginning in the Twenties, worked with her partner the artist and writer Marcel Moore, born Suzanne Malherbe, to create tableaux and portraits.
Having only enough money to subsist on, I had few possessions. One beloved object-tool-work of art I owned and used was an antique Rolleiflex camera. The Rollei was a twin lens reflex camera held at waist height to frame and shoot the image. I popped open the top and looked down through a lens at the image I was framing to shoot. The camera was encased in a caramel-colored leather box and hung from my neck by a strap.
When I was at CSUN, I had access to their slide collection and library. I spent hours looking at photographs. I searched the archives for images of Mexico. Mexico was my place of dreams, my Europe, where I had never been. Since I was a teenager, I had traveled by car exploring Mexico. My daughter Juliette and I frequently drove to Baja. Ensenada was only 200 miles away.
Because I was interested in women artists, Lola Alvarez Bravo and Tina Modotti were the photographers on whom I focused my research. Both women had been apprenticed to and were partners of important male photographers, Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Edward Weston, respectively. Even in the 70s many images of Bravo and Weston were iconic ones. The work of the women, Bravo and Modotti, had to be excavated. Their stories were similar to those of other women artists, historic and contemporary. They were models, lovers, colleagues, sometimes all three at once, of male artists who commanded attention.
During those school years I must have come across a hundred images of Frida Kahlo. I knew her through photographs not so much as an artist, but as a striking subject for a photographer and as Diego Rivera’s partner. I didn’t learn about Kahlo’s work until Hayden Herrera’s biography, Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo, was published in 1983.
Modotti, not only photographed objects but also workers and women, especially, engaged in revolutionary acts. She was Kahlo’s friend and took numerous photos of her, some formal, but many more seemingly casual ones that showed the intimacy of friendship. The one of Kahlo and Chavela Vargas, the singer, falling back on a sofa, laughing, is delightful. l envied these women and their engagement in life, the arts and politics, their ever-expanding and shrinking group of creative and radical friends.
Modotti spent more of her short life immersed in radical politics than she did in taking photos. When the Mexican government deported her, she sold her cameras to the Bravos. Lola Alvarez Bravo would use Tina’s Graflex to take important images. Some of those were of Frida.
When Frida spoke, when she walked, when she painted, when she expressed herself, she already inspired something. For me, it was like birds and flowers and knitted quilts; a Mexican style that concentrated an era and poured through it. Frida was that.
Lola Alvarez Bravo
The photographs of Imogen Cunningham were a wonder, delicate but strong, literary, story-like, or abstract with strong dark brushstrokes. Whether portraits or flowers, dancers or hands, they were defined by light. Cunningham used a Rollei. The camera could be seen hanging from her neck, waist-height, ready to shoot, in numerous photographs of her. There was a famous photograph taken in 1974 by Judy Dater of Cunningham and Twinka Thibaud. In the photo a nude Twinka is leaning against a redwood and peeking around behind her at Cunningham, who, camera around her neck, is peeking around the tree to peer at Twinka. It’s a delightful photograph, even if a set-up. Cunningham, 91, and Twinka, 20 something, played it beautifully. Cunningham also photographed Kahlo, a remarkable one taken in 1931 when Kahlo was 24 years old.
In 1980 a year after moving to NY I learned about the work of Howardena Pindell, Ana Mendieta and Kazuko Miyamotto and many more intriguing artists at the A.I.R Gallery show “Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists of the United States.” The show’s essay declared that American feminism was a white middle class movement and that the purpose of founding A.I.R, a women’s artist collective, had been subverted by its practice of hierarchy and white rule. However, the essay continues: “This exhibition points not necessarily to the injustice or incapacity of a society that has not been willing to include us, but more towards a personal will to continue being “other.” “
Five years later, Ana Mendieta died tragically in a fall from a high floor in a Soho building. She was 36. In 2004 when Sophia was 10 and Eliza, 12, Ham and I took them to the Whitney Museum to see ''Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance, 1972-1985.'' The walls moved with Mendieta’s films. Blood, fire, chicken feathers, her naked form performing ritual, female forms dug out the earth and covered in flowers. She decapitated whatever ideas you might have had about gender and the sanitized ritual.
“My art is grounded on the belief in one universal energy which runs through all being and matter, all space and time,” Mendieta said. Immersed in her work, we felt a part of the “universal energy.”
The artist Carolee Schneemann attended the show. ''I see her death as part of some larger denial of the feminine. Like a huge metaphor saying, we don't want this depth of feminine eroticism, nature, absorption, integration to happen. It's too organic. It's too sacral.''
Sophia was more intent looking at the work than I was. She stared up close at each piece. Became a part of the walls of fire. Afterwards we drove out of town for the weekend to an old house we rented. She wondered if the chickens were really dead or if they were just acting. As we struggled with our bags towards the house, Sophia asked me to buy her enough frozen blueberries to fill the kiddie pool. She wanted to lie in them and dye her body blue.
8 Future dream project, collaboration or exhibition?
Although I am a loner and work best alone, I have thought about making time to work with other artists. I hope to collaborate with the artist, Tina Rivera, who is based in Marfa. We both have been making flowers recently.
In NY the artist Robert Buck and I have talked about the idea of collaborating. This would be an interesting experiment and a good one for me because Robert thinks conceptually. He’s been making complicated work for decades. He’s an intellectual, a Lacanian and an emotional being. When we communicate it’s like taking a ride on a creative brain wave.
9 Final thoughts on being an artist-mother, anything more you would like to share?
I’m not an obvious mother. I’m counterintuitive. I like to be alone. I can’t think unless I’m alone and it’s quiet. My daughters learned to be with me. They were puzzled by it, but they coped. Meanwhile they were living their own private lives whether in their imaginations or in secret with their friends.
My daughters are my biggest supporters. They understand the work better than anyone and know what it takes to make it. After all, their cooperation and tolerance of having an artist for a mother has made my work possible.
Connect with Sandra: sandraharper.com + @sandraharpernymarfa