Is Art School Only For the Young?

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In Nell Painter’s new memoir Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, the writer’s journey through art education often looks more like an adventure in masochism than an enriching retirement activity. At the age of 64, Painter leaves her post as a distinguished Princeton University historian and enrolls first in a BA program at Rutgers University, then earns an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She develops a colorful style often rooted in text and figuration, eventually exploring collage with both paint and digital tools.

Throughout her rigorous studies, Painter juggles many other responsibilities: She develops and publishes her seventh book, The History of White People (2010). Duke University opens an archive in the school’s John Hope Franklin Center, devoted entirely to her personal and professional papers and artwork. Painter regularly receives acclaim for her non-art achievements (book talks, reviews, et cetera). Yet at Rutgers and RISD, her teachers and peers chide her for her absences, dismiss her art, and even let her know that she’ll never be a “real artist.” Lesson #1: The art school establishment will gleefully tear you down, no matter what your accomplishments.

Painter relates her struggles with openness and honesty. “The motherless oldest person in this whole goddam world, eating alone, living alone, feeling alone. I hated fucking RISD, and I knew RISD fucking hated me,” she writes about a decidedly low point in graduate school. The narrative, however, goes far beyond denigrating and exposing the sometimes idiotic, impenetrable things that instructors and students say (her description of art school “crits,” or full-class critiques, reads as near satire). As a historian with years of incisive scholarship behind her, Painter is perfectly poised to examine her experience, and the larger art ecosystem, from a more nuanced lens.

Painter notes the “common reluctance of non-black viewers to engage with black figuration,” an attitude which is unfairly discouraging to any art school student working in this vein. Her mostly white classmates don’t have much to say about her work regarding black identity, at all.

Painter also recognizes an unhealthy essentialism in the way the system determines what it means to be an artist. “Both race and art can be envisioned as some quality beyond words that inheres within the person, a quality that can’t reliably be measured,” she writes. “According to this kind of logic, art and race reside in something as slippery as your temperament and the way you perform your identity of black person or artist; you can’t change them…for they cannot be taught or learned.”  

The book begins by detailing two of Painter’s major challenges throughout her years in art school: being taken seriously as a real artist, and experiencing prejudice due to her age. “The crucial fact of my age emerged, not as an incidental, but as my defining characteristic,” she writes. As she learns, there’s a particular bias against artists who begin artmaking later in life. Judged as Sunday painters, dabblers, or dilettantes, they’re also scorned for their (often) comfortable financial position. After all, with annual tuition at RISD clocking in at $49,000 (before financial aid), an advanced art degree can certainly be seen as a luxury.

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