Francine Perlman
STORY
Kindergarten, my favorite grade of all time: there I was, lost in the sublime, ignoring all the other children, cutting masks out of brown paper bags and coloring them, smelling and feeling (tasting, no doubt) the white paste. I didn’t need playmates. I was an artist at 5. But there weren’t opportunities and encouragement at home. My mother took me to a drawing class, and I know I loved it, and did well, but I only remember one session. Then 7th grade, when girls in our school had a half semester of woodworking, I thrilled to the sensuous feeling of the sharp gouge sliding through the beautiful walnut, creating a bowl I still proudly display. In a 12th grade art class, an assignment combined geometry and color, which would become my mainstays. These moments laid the groundwork, and built my trajectory, once it got going much later, but in those early years, I had the longing but not the idea.
In college I majored in government, though I minored in art. I didn’t know that I could be an “artist”, that there was such a thing as a career as an artist. I loved my art classes, and after college took some when I could, but I didn’t yet make it the pivot of my life. I basically knew nothing about art, or the world of art, other than the joy of making it.
Several years after college, working in computer programming, I was encouraged by a friend to take a class at the Craft Students League. I was reluctant at first, but remembering that walnut bowl, I chose woodworking. I made furniture, and the act of constructing things with beautiful wood was the next crucial steppingstone, combining so many satisfying aspects: the beauty of materials, seeing a creation take shape, right-brain design, left-brain measuring and planning. I left my last full-time job in 1972 (paying my bills until 1997 with freelance programming). I went off to Peter’s Valley, an artisans’ community deep in the woods in northwest New Jersey for 10 months, first working for the chief woodworker there, then getting fired, but staying on and making my first sculptures. When I was back in NYC, I answered an ad and helped to organize a woodworking cooperative in a storefront close to home, where anyone with a bench and tools was welcome to move in. I loved the tools, the small hand ones like gauges and chisels, and the big ones like the bandsaw, the table saw, and the drill press.
No other women chose to join the co-op. I had by then a growing awareness of the difficulties women had, mainly because of the many times men (visitors, not members of our group) asked me what I was doing in a woodshop, why wasn’t I home with the babies. From 1986-1988 I lived in Boston while my partner went back for his masters at MIT, and I had my first “real” studio, a huge space in an old rum factory in South Boston, and there I became part of an active group of women artists.
Back in New York, I lucked into another large space close to home, and I found the boundaries of my work loosening. I started to take chances, to commit to building work that was very challenging, and developing the sense that I could meet the challenge. I carried one piece around in my head for months, to suspend 100 tennis balls from the 20’ ceiling with monofilament each exactly 14” from the floor, such that they all moved in unison with passing air currents. I was excited by that and by the geometry of it, that the tennis balls kept the monofilament perfectly perpendicular to the floor. When it was finished, 1993, I had an open studio, showing that piece and a dozen others. By then I was part of a group called Jewish Women Artists. One JWA artist who came to my studio was also a member of Ceres Gallery, a feminist artist-run gallery then in SoHo, and when she was asked at Ceres to curate a show in 1994 in the smaller of its two rooms, she invited me to build a sequel to “that tennis ball” piece, which I did, and called it “Elements of the Natural World”, as this one also included a woven hemp ceiling and bamboo and tree limb supports, along with its luminous yellow balls and forest of perpendicular monofilament. It was very well received, and by 1995, I was also a member of Ceres.
I am to this day a member of Jewish Women Artists, where there are 10 strong feminist artists, and of Ceres, where there are about 40 strong feminist artists, and New York Society of Women Artists with its long great history of great women artists. All the gaps in my knowledge about art and about the history of women in art have long been filled in and I’m solidly in that camp.
My art, though, has been mostly abstract. I got my MFA in sculpture at City College in 2002, at age 57, and I’ve had the great pleasure of building large works – if I imagine it, I can build it - and also a body of works on paper. Slowly my work started taking on themes important to my increasing social activism. My last room-size piece, “Doors Open/Doors Close”, 2017, while succeeding for me in formal terms, addressed domestic violence, an area where I’ve been volunteering as a mentor.
I’ve never been good at the business end of art, and my life is also full of other activities which are equally important to me. I taught art at the college level for several years, and I teach at a senior center in the Bronx every spring. I would happily accept commissions for large pieces, but I don’t initiate them. In fact, I’m now focused on printmaking. A current series of monotypes relate to the spoiling of the oceans, and I will incorporate these monotypes into small sculptures in an upcoming show “Endangered Earth”. This is the direction I want to be going in, both in combining 2D and 3D, and in addressing issues that upset me day after day. The work, then, helps me feel that I’m doing something, while also satisfying my aesthetic expression.