art/vision/voice - Maryland Institute College of Art

124 art / vision / voice
After graduating from the High School of
Music & Art. I went to the Philadelphia
College of Art for one year and majored in
fine art, but painting seemed so irrelevant in
1968 that I left school and ventured out on my
own. I traveled around the country for a few
years trying to figure what I wanted to do.
When I returned to nyc, I was excited to read
a newspaper article about murals. Then one
day in Chinatown I came across some people
painting a mural, and I stopped to watch.
Someone handed me a paint brush and I
joined in. Soon after that, a mural job
became available—my first job as an artist.
That’s how I got involved. Those original
projects were set up to invite people on the
street to participate. For me, the experience
opened up a whole world.
Many of us relied on word of mouth for
news about art projects. In 1972, I heard about
a group that was meeting in a basement in
Chinatown to create an anthology of art and
poetry about Asians in America. No one in the
group was a professional artist but everyone
was interested in art and culture. We worked
together to create the first published
anthology of Asian American writing and art
(Yellow Pearl, 1972). Some of the members of
the group went on to found the Basement
Workshop, a community arts program in
Chinatown that was in existence for 16 years.
Basement Workshop became my introduction
to Asian-American history and inspired me to
make art about cultural identity. Working in
the community led to important relationships
and friendships that I’ve maintained for years.
It’s an example of how one program can open
a door and alter a person’s life.
Later, Cooper Union began bringing
Saturday students to my studio, and one of
them was Antoine Touze. I was struck by how
different these students were from the students
I went to school with. When I went to Music
& Art in 1966, there were only two Chinese
students in the entire school and only a
handful of African American students (who
were all in the music department). In contrast,
the Cooper classes were filled with young
students of color who were aspiring artists.
Marina Gutierrez had asked me to share my
experiences with these students, and at first I
found it awkward to talk about dropping out
of college. I realized that these young people
were at a crossroads in their lives and I wanted
to encourage them to take advantage of all the
opportunities to get a better education. I
didn’t want to give them the impression that
artists didn’t need to go to school. It turned
out that the students were eager to hear my
story because they were deeply interested in
the process of how one becomes an artist,
which is a process filled with decisions. I
remember as a visiting artist at Swarthmore
College that I was asked to give a talk and the
chair of the art department instructed me in
the car on the way to the auditorium not to
tell the students that I didn’t have a degree. I
suppose that it’s fairly common practice to
expect artists to talk about their work only in
formal terms, but I think that the personal
decisions that artists make in their lives
shape their work, their audiences, and their
unique way of looking at the world. I wanted
the students to understand that when I was
their age people were actively engaged in
creating alternatives to the status quo and
schools simply weren’t meeting those needs. I
wanted the students to understand that, like
life, there isn’t just one trajectory to
becoming an artist. Sometimes we need to
respond to the political and social climate we
live in, even if it means taking risks or making
choices that take us on different, often more
difficult paths.