Sarah Charlesworth: An Oral History in 40 Voices

S A R A H C H A R L E S WO RT H A N O R A L H I S TO RY I N 4 0 VO I C E S

1

2

SAR AH C HARLE S WORTH A N O R A L H I S TO RY I N 4 0 VO I C E S

Compiled by Bill Smith Written by Jim Rasenberger

Biography PARTNER

27 Great Jones Street | Studio 4E New York, NY 10012

4

CO NTR I B U TO R S

JO BONNEY LO N N I E C A RT ER AG NES (NANC Y ) CHAR LESWORTH ROMY CHARLESWORTH LIZ DESCHENES VER A DIK A NANCY DW YER ROSELEE GOLDBERG J AY G O R N E Y LO U I S G R AC H OS JUDITH HUDSON SUSAN INGLETT MEL KENDRICK M AT T H E W C . L A N G E LO U I S E L AW L E R K AT E L I N K E R GINA NANNI M A RGOT N O RTO N GLENN O’BRIEN AMOS POE LUC Y POE NICK POE J U D I T H O LC H R I C H A R DS M A R Y S A LT E R C I N DY S H E R M A N L AURIE SIMMONS KEITH SONNIER BETSY SUSSLER S A N D Y TA I T LY N N E T I L L M A N ANNE TIMPSON CHARLES TR AUB S A R A VA N D E R B E E K M AT T H E W S . W I T K O V S K Y W I T H E XCER P TS FRO M P U B L I SH ED WO R K S BY DOUGL AS EK LUND LISA PHILLIPS SUSAN FISHER STERLING

CONTENTS

Great Jones Street Street Dedication Dedication

8 8 10

II ..

13 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 32 34

SS TA TA R RT T II N NG G O OU UT T

Eight Generations of Sarah (1947) (1947) Two Families (1944) (1944) A House in Maine Maine Mermaids and Wildflowers Wildflowers The Fire Fire Sarah First First The Three Sisters­ with Brother Sisters— —with Brother Oklahoma (1964–1965) (1964–1965) The Day I Decided to Be an Artist Artist Douglas Huebler, Bradford (1966) (1966)

II II .. N N EE W W Y YO OR R KK

I’m On (1967) (1967)

Barnard, 1968 1968

Somewhere in the Winter of my First Year in New York York

Thesis Project

I’m Not Really Interested in Being a Promising

Young Photographer Photographer

SoHo in the Seventies Seventies Kosuth Kosuth

The End of The Fox (1975–1976) (1975–1976)

Modern History (1977, 1978) 1978)

Persona

One Night at the Mudd Club Club

6

37 40 42 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 58 60

I I I . T H E E I G H T I E S

Stills, Tony Shafrazi (February, 1981)

591 Broadway

Film Group

BOMB Magazine (Spring, 1981)

Coin Toss

Madras Shorts: “What the Fuck is This?” (1984)

An Enigmatic, Mysterious Time

Bird Story

Deeply Connected From the Start (1985)

Lucy, Lucy, Lucy! (1988)

I V.

T H E N I N E T I E S

Part of Something New The Galleries 31 Great Jones Street Being a Charlesworth Poe The Most Organized Person on the Planet The Drum Corps (1992) Fire, Air, Earth, Water SITE Santa Fe (1997) Simply, Beautifully This Extraordinary Thing

63 66 68 70 72 74 76 78 80 82 84 87 90 92 94 96 98 100 102 104 106 108

V . M I L L E N N I U M

A House in Connecticut (2004)

The Story of the Paint Chips

Falls Village

Continuum (2008)

Historicizing (2009) Connecting

In Tune with Her Instincts

Princeton, Full Circle (2012)

The Work That I’m Working on Right Now

Follow the Light (2013)

111 114 116 118 120 122 124 126 128 130 132

A L B U M

Morgan Charlesworth Genealogy Notes

Index of Names and Titles

135 146 148 149

Connecting the Dots

G R E AT J O N E S S T R E E T

BILL SMITH

Every time I look out my window I think of Sarah Charlesworth. For 15 years, the Charlesworth Poes were the family next door. From my kitchen I look over the rooftop skylight that illuminated Sarah’s Great Jones studio.

In 1999, I met a new neighbor, 11-year-old Lucy Poe, at her stoop sale of kids’ jewelry, sticky picture books, and cassettes. With fifth-grade charm, Lucy bamboozled me into upping my 25-cent offer for The Smurf’s Adventures Underground to a full dollar.

Lucy became our favorite neighbor. She babysat our kids, passing on stories of playing in the squatter and shelter scene of NoHo in the early ’90s. I got to know Nick after he sent Lucy by with a small portrait he had painted. Nick’s painting was an unexpected and generous gift. Later, as a 4AM riser, I sometimes crossed paths with Nick returning from a late-night jaunt on the town. I admired Amos and Sarah for having raised such spirited kids.

Every couple of weeks, I would collide with Sarah on Great Jones Street.

Coming, going, often with her car, Sarah was characteristically hurried and harried, but would sometimes stop for a sharp weigh-in on parenting or the neighborhood.

Sarah once scolded me for not paying enough when Lucy house-sat our dachshund.

In June of 2013, Great Jones Street was saddened by Sarah’s sudden death.

In 2015, after 30 years as a children’s books developer at the Bill SM I T H S T U DIO , I switched my attention to biography. In searching for a first subject, Sarah Charlesworth was the obvious choice.

In her essay, Rite of Passage, published for SITE Santa Fe in 1997, Lisa Phillips describes Sarah’s work as “crisp, smart, and gorgeous”.2 After hundreds of hours connecting the dots, I would add that Sarah herself was crisp, smart, and gorgeous.

It has been an honor to have assembled her history.

8

The corner of Great Jones and Lafayette.

9

D E D I C AT I O N

LUC Y AND NICK POE

We dedicate his book to our mother.

We would like to extend a second dedication to the many people in our mom’s life— both those who are in the book and the many who are not, who were so important to her story. The two of us feel that we have been taken into the hearts of all of you whom our mom loved. We are forever in your debt.

Thanks to each of the narrators for their memories and for the meaning that you offered for our mother, and thank you for the vision forward that you continue to offer to the two of us.

In gratitude…

10

11

12

I . S TA R T I N G O U T

AG NES (NANC Y ) CHAR LESWORTH ROMY CHARLESWORTH JUDITH HUDSON SUSAN INGLETT LUC Y POE NICK POE ANNE TIMPSON

13

14

I . S TA R T I N G O U T

Her full name was Sarah Edwards Charlesworth, but for most of her childhood she was simply “Sukie”. Born March 29th, 1947, in East Orange, New Jersey, she was the eldest of four children—two sisters and a brother­­—in a close-knit family. Hers was in many ways a classic mid-century American WASP upbringing, albeit more privileged than most. Her Princeton-educated father, the son and grandson of accomplished engineers, was an executive at Western Electric. Her Vassar-educated mother exposed the children to music and poetry. Summers were spent among uncles and aunts and cousins on the coast of Maine. Her mother’s lineage reaches back to Jonathan Edwards, the 18th century theologian who shepherded America to the First Great Awakening and served as president of Princeton. • Later, as an artist, Sarah would seem to draw inspiration from this Puritan heritage, creating works of “ruthless simplicity and surprising elegance”, as the Wall Street Journal phrased it. But from an early age, she also exhibited distinctly nonPuritan attitudes—assertiveness, inquisitiveness, rebelliousness—that served her well during her own generation’s great awakening of the 1960s, and made Sarah Charlesworth a leading figure among rising American artists of the 1970s. • Sarah’s childhood was interrupted when her father’s profession moved the family west, first to Buffalo then to Oklahoma City. In 1965, she returned east to attend Bradford College in Massachusetts. When she left Bradford two years later, she was alive to her time and destined to be a part of its art.

15

My Mother, My Father, My Grandparents

E I G H T G E N E R AT I O N S O F S A R A H (19 4 7 )

SAR AH

Everybody in my family is named after somebody. My mother was Sarah Edwards Morgan, and I’m Sarah Edwards Charlesworth, and my grandmother was Sarah Edwards Speir Morgan. We’re in a line of Sarah Edwardses that goes back to the son of Jonathan Edwards, Timothy Edwards, who married a woman from England named Sarah Hague.

I knew grandparents on both sides of my family. When I was a child, up till eighth grade, I lived in Summit, New Jersey, and my grandparents lived not far away in South Orange, New Jersey. My great-grandmother also lived in South Orange, and she had a big old-fashioned house with a kitchen in the basement and a staff, like in Upstairs, Downstairs. Her name was Agnes Speir.

My grandfather on my father’s side was Harry Prescott Charlesworth. He went to MIT and was an engineer. My father’s mother was named Anne Barnes. She died when he was in high school. My father always had a kind of sad heart about not having his mother, and my grandfather never remarried.

My maternal grandfather, George Morgan, was a treasurer for an aluminum company.

My grandmother was the kind of an old-fashioned lady they don’t really have anymore.

She was educated at a finishing school—she didn’t go to college. They had a big house, and my grandmother’s job was to tell the cook what to order—what to make for dinner, what groceries to get at the store, what things to pick in the garden—to sort of make sure everything was nice for everybody. She was like a fairy godmother. Every time she arrived she’d come with old-fashioned gallon packs of ice cream on dry ice, and boxes of candies that we liked or that she liked­—she had a real sweet tooth—and always quarters. We had money jars in the closet that we were supposed to put in the bank.

My mother had an older brother, two younger brothers, and a sister. They were all welleducated. My grandfather had gone to Princeton, my father went to Princeton, and all the uncles on both sides of my family went to Princeton.

16

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth

17

Debaters, Poets, Artists, and Engineers

T W O F A M I L I E S (19 4 4 )

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

The Morgan line exhibited typically Welsh and Scottish outspokenness: lively, constant intellectual discourse and a love of music and poetry. It was common for the Morgans to sit around the dinner table and debate almost any topic with great glee and competitiveness. Mom’s very dear grandfather, a lawyer, was also a published poet.

The Charlesworth family was different. They were understated, dry, humorous, imaginative, artistic, and fun. Dad’s sensibility was appalled at the Morgan argumentativeness. The Charlesworths brought a combination of design engineers and artists and creative fun.3 Dad’s Mom, Anne Barnes, came from a working-class background in the north of England. Her father died immediately after bringing his family to the U.S. As the eldest, she had to help care for her siblings and then work to support her family. I believe her family settled in Portland, Maine. She may have worked in one of the Haverhill mills—this wasn’t discussed. In Haverhill she became a seamstress and then a locallysought-after dress designer before she met and married Harry Prescott Charlesworth.

She encouraged the kids in a thousand spontaneous creative projects, and she loved the ocean.

SAR AH

My father met my mother because he was friends with one of her brothers, who was a pal at Princeton. When she met my father my mother fell in love, and then she married and became a housewife. She had a fabulous trousseau—six new suits from Lord & Taylor, fourteen sweaters, ten nightgowns, and handkerchiefs.

They had lots of fine things that they had inherited, but they were modest and conservative. My mother would preserve things and keep things and mend things. Both my parents had lived through the Depression. Their families survived the stock market crash, but they saw how scary it was.

When my father graduated, he ended up driving cars at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He had a degree in engineering from Princeton, but had difficulty getting a job.

When he eventually did get a job for Western Electric, he maintained that job the rest of his working life.

My mother was very, very bright. She loved music and poetry and math. She’d studied math at Vassar. She loved doing the puzzles of math and she wrote and read poetry.

When we were growing up she would quote John Donne to us. She loved to sing. She knew thousands of songs and would play a game where we would think of a word, and she’d sing a song based on that word.

When she became a housewife, she stopped doing her math and poetry and took on what she saw as her job, taking care of my father and then the kids. It was very typical of women of her generation. The husband would support the wife, and the wife would support the household. At any rate, my mother eventually did have economic power because of her love of math. She inherited some money in the form of stock, and became very good at investing—an old-fashioned kind of investing. She would read the annual reports of the company and decide what company was well-run.

She and my father stayed married their whole lives. She was very much in love with my father.

18

Top: February 12, 1944. Sarah Edwards Morgan marries Roger Barnes Charlesworth. Shown with the bride’s father George Orlando Morgan Jr. Bottom: The bridal party, Morgan family living room, East Orange, New Jersey. From left: James Timpson, Robert Charlesworth, Rosemary Charlesworth Timpson, the newlyweds, Richard Charlesworth, Francie Morgan, Robert Morgan, William Renwick.

19

The New England Landscape

A HOUSE IN MAINE

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

We started coming to Maine when we were little kids. We’d rent a cottage here and there, a tiny little cottage by the sea. Those were really happy times for our family. Our father was a lot of fun and our mother was a good sport, and we would go boating and picnicking. In 1958, my father got an opportunity to buy a little waterfront lot. He built a copy of a Sears kit house, a kind of A-frame.3 As we moved around in the years after, that cottage continued to be a place for continuity and good times.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

The summers in Maine were not a luxury. Dad would have taken us—and did—to any northerly access to the water so he could sail. He loved the ocean, and loved knocking around in boats. Off-season, he would take one or two of us on day trips to boatyards on the Jersey or Connecticut coast. We kids were always embarrassed to say we were going to Maine. Our Maine felt like a backwater—a lonesome, uncool exile. But we all loved the ocean.

ANNE TIMPSON

We spent our summers surrounded by uncles, aunts, and parents who took their sailboats as seriously as their cars. Sukie’s dad spent a whole year sanding and varnishing a Thistle, a sleek-looking vessel that, on its maiden voyage, hit the only rock in Nantucket Sound. Sukie said some of her sweetest moments with her dad were on sailing trips off the coast of Maine.

SAR AH

My father was a fabulous builder and inventor and artist. He drew beautifully. And he would build boats: he built boats in the garage, detail by detail, some fabulous.

He was very scientific and also very artistic.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

My father could build anything fast and beautifully. Dad built a little workshop for Nick alongside his own workbench. It was just tall enough for Nick. Nick was very good, too.

NICK POE

My grandfather was an engineer and a very skilled carpenter. He built two houses in Maine. The first house was more like a cottage than a proper house. It’s really beautiful and on a really great piece of land, on an island connected to the mainland by a bridge. When he retired, he built a more substantial home not too far away, with a dock that he built himself. Both houses were on the ocean. They’re still there, still in our family.

J U DY H U D S O N

I think it was important to Sarah to be connected to the landscape, the water. The New England landscape always spoke to her because of the summers in Maine.

20

Nancy, Sarah, and Roger Charlesworth at Kittery Point at the site of the future year-round house.

Lobster Cove, York, Maine.

All the uncles and aunts would load extra cars and drag all the equipment onto the beach to watch the sunset while they cooked on campfire grills. ANNE TIMPSON

21

Projects in Mind

M E R M A I DS AN D W I LDF LOW E R S

ANNE TIMPSON

Sukie and I were the oldest cousins, and we became very close and spent a lot of time together, both in New Jersey and in Maine. We were one year apart, but I don’t think we were ever conscious of that.

We thought up wonderful things to do every single day, and we hardly ever repeated ourselves. We woke up in the morning with projects in mind. We dug for China in the rocky backyard of the York Harbor house. My mom had tried to explain to us that the world was round, so we dug straight down. It was rough going, and that project was short-lived.

We rowed for miles and miles, often to a little summer café that sold fried clams off of a dock. We swam underwater for hours, holding our noses and pretending that we were having a tea party.

We found a comb in the water one morning with rhinestones. I was able to convince Sukie that there really were mermaids, and that this was one of their lost ornaments.

We collected long tails of green kelp and charged along the beach and into the frosty water as mini-mermaids. We spent whole days looking for other mermaid artifacts in coastal pools among the rocks along the coasts of Maine.

At night, my mom would take us out for rides and we would reach out the window of her old station wagon and cut wildflowers along the side of the road.

My mother found an antique toy theater. It was painted glistening ivory with gilt finials and pilasters, and came with a working curtain and fifty different chromolithographed stage settings. It had a trap door in the floor. Sukie and I hid a bowl of dry ice doused with red food coloring under the floor. It swirled out and surrounded a cardboard devil as the door slid open.

Along with my best friend, Judy Hudson, we put on plays in the basement. We loved the excitement of creating sets and story lines. Sukie was the actress. I was the director. We were perfect foils for each other. We were both fiercely independent and rebelled against any authority that slowed down one of our flights of imagination.

22

Sarah and Anne at Harborstow, York Harbor, Maine.

The adults are up on the front porch having cocktails after chopping down trees. ANNE TIMPSON

23

7:30 on a Summer Evening

THE FIRE

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

My memory of this is very vivid because my mother always made us go to bed early.

It was part of her regime so she would have some time with my dad in the evening.

It was not dark out. It was a summer evening. I was in my pajamas and it was probably, I’m going to say, 7:30. I was in bed.

All of a sudden, I hear these fire engines going up the street, and everybody’s running out and running up the street to the woods at the top of the street, and I was so embarrassed because I had my nightgown on and it was still light out. “Oh, I’m too embarrassed to go out,” but I was curious—I had to go look. So I ran up to the woods, and the woods were on fire.

Sarah and her friend had been playing with matches and lit the fire by mistake.

Right after the fire started, she ran home terrified and told my parents, who then called the fire department. I don’t think there was any sense of her hiding it. What I remember is that she had to come right out and say, you know, “I did this,” because the alternative was that the woods would have burned down.

It was very traumatic for Sarah that she had caused this horrible thing.

LUC Y POE

She hid in the attic for hours. When she finally came out she thought her mom would be angry. Instead, her mother gave her a hug and said your punishment is going to be to talk to your dad. My mom was so scared. But when she worked up the courage to talk to him, he said it sounded like she had already suffered enough.

The fire was possibly the most humiliating experience of her life.

24

Sarah; 1956.

25

The One in Charge

SARAH FIRST

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

Mom kept a beautiful blue leather photo album with a gold-embossed title, “The Charlesworths”. Most of it was Sarah. Rows and rows of Sarah at one week, Sarah at two weeks, six months, first steps, etc. Pages and pages with important captions and commentary. Then Nancy comes along and there are a couple of rows of photos, then the rest of the book is blank pages with random photos of us stuck in the leaves with no captions. As the first boy, Roger gets some play. I think this is typical in families.

ANNE TIMPSON

So much is expected of the first child, and parents are so conscious of the first child.

If they have three children, they don’t even worry about the third child falling off the boat or anything else. But they have high expectations for the first child.

Nancy and Romy looked up to Sukie. I think they looked up to both of us­—Sukie because she was the oldest sister, me because I was the oldest cousin. We had a clubhouse for the neighborhood kids, and Sukie and I ran everything. Romy and Nancy were included, but we ran the show.

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

Sarah was the oldest and wanted to be the one in charge. She aligned herself with my mother. For Sarah it was like, “Mom and me are reality—but what are you guys?”

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

One day Sarah got mad at Mom and recruited Nancy and me to run away from home. Nan and I were anti-authority so we were up for it. There was a woods at the top of our hill to hide out in, so that’s where we went. Nancy was four or five. Sarah put her in charge of bringing the food. Nancy’s job was the hardest because my Mom kept an eagle eye on the kitchen. Nancy just took the most practical thing as quickly as possible. We found a spot under the trees and Sarah said it was time to make supper. Nancy pulled out her little cardboard suitcase and in it were two neatly packed bags of spinach. Sarah was apoplectic. “Spinach! We can’t make supper out of spinach!” We all went home for supper. No one had missed us. Our big fear was that Mom might miss the spinach. Nancy had to sneak it back.

26

Every year Christmas was celebrated at the Hartford Road House of Granddad Harry P. Charlesworth, H.P.C. ANNE TIMPSON From left: Anne Timpson, Sarah, Aunt Ro, Big Anne, cousins Susan, Mary, and Jenny in the white dress.

27

Sibling Roles

TH E TH R E E S I S TE R S —W ITH B ROTH E R

SAR AH

I’m the oldest child in my family. I have two younger sisters—one two-and-a-half years younger than I am, and one five years younger—and a brother who’s twelve years younger.

My sister Agnes—she was always called Nancy growing up—is a musician: she teaches music and writes music and does music for theater. My younger sister Rosemary, or Romy, is very artistic. My brother, Roger, is multitalented—he was always very creative from early childhood on. He’s very artistic—but also he’s a techie. He installs sound systems for recording studios and does television design.

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

We definitely followed the typical order of sibling roles. I was the second and very much in the mediator or peace-maker position, but I also think that I just sort of created my own world because Sarah was off in her own world. Romy was the youngest for a long time. Her role as the youngest was taken over by the prince arriving.

ANNE TIMPSON

When Roger Junior came along, Aunt Sally just fell in love with that child. He was the first boy and there was nothing that could be more exciting.

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

When we played house, Sarah was the mother. Even at a young age, she was, “I’m the grown-up. I’m the mom. I’m the boss.”

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

We played house in the basement. Sarah always made hamburgers out of Dad’s sawdust that she mixed with water. She would pretend to cook them in a pan. We had to sit around the work table and pretend to eat them. Once we made a snow igloo in the back yard. We were pretty excited cause you could go inside and sit and lie down and pretend to sleep and everything. But Sarah didn’t consider it a success until she went back in the house, heated a can of tomato soup and served it in bowls in the igloo. Hot red tomato soup in a white snow igloo. Cooking a meal was Sarah’s idea of making a place real.

28

Nancy, Roger Jr., Sarah, Romy; 1964.

29

I Had an Attitude

O K L A H O M A (1964 –1965)

SAR AH

My father worked for Western Electric. When I was in eighth grade, he was made manager of a Western Electric plant outside of Buffalo. We moved that fall from Summit, New Jersey, to a place called Orchard Park, which was just south of Buffalo.

I transferred during the year, so it was a little difficult. I left behind all my friends, all my aunts and uncles and family, and moved 400 miles away.

Then, in the summer between tenth and eleventh grade, my father was made manager of a Western Electric works in Oklahoma City; it had 20,000 employees. So we moved to Oklahoma City. That killed me—just killed me. I had fallen in love for the first time, and I was smitten with my boyfriend. It was heartbreaking to be wrenched away from this guy in Buffalo who was so cute and so nice and so sweet. I was just beginning to have an understanding of what “so sexy” meant—I just loved to kiss him.

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

My father had a career that gave him a place to plug into in Oklahoma. But the rest of us were really in the soup. Sarah and I went to high school. I was younger so I tried to assimilate. I think Sarah’s attitude was, “I’m just gonna do this until I can get out of here.”

ANNE TIMPSON

She was really angry with her parents for doing this to her and changing her life.

She rebelled hard. She longed to get back to the East Coast. She stayed with me on Cape Cod for a few summer weeks and we spent our days flirting with the boys on the beach and dreaming of glamorous futures.

SAR AH

I had an attitude toward Oklahoma. I didn’t want to be in the pep club. “Well, it’s required—we all have to go out and jump around because the boys are going to play football.” Even though the people were very gracious and warm—they had a party to welcome me before I even knew anybody—I was heartsick about leaving my friends and my boyfriend. I had taken on a mantle: “I’m an East Coast girl, and I don’t relate here; I’m going back East again as soon as I can.”

I was doing the covers of the art and literary magazine and smoking cigarettes and reading existentialism. I read Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Sartre and Camus, all that, because I was a Bohemian. Maybe I even had a beret.

I always had early curfews—9:00 in the ninth grade, 10:00 in tenth grade, 11:00 in the eleventh grade, 12:00 in twelfth grade—and so I’d come home from a date, or going out with my girlfriends, and my parents would be in bed. I’d say, “I’m home.

Goodnight.” Then I’d go upstairs, wait ten minutes, and go back down. My friends would be at the end of the block, and off we’d go into the night. My mother said later that she knew, but I don’t think she did at all. I think she was just trying to pretend that she did.

There was a lot of boy stuff going on. Those were the days of drive-in movies. In Oklahoma, everybody drove cars. You’d go out on the weekend evenings and the girls would drive around in their cars and the boys would drive around in their cars, and then they’d drive in circles around each other until they ended up on the golf course, drinking.

30

1965 High School Graduation.

31

This is for Me

T H E D AY I D E C I D E D T O B E A N A R T I S T

SAR AH

I remember the day I decided to be an artist. I must have been around five. The night before I had been with my cousin Anne Timpson to Barnum & Bailey Circus in New York. I was just awed by the tigers and the horses and the girls swinging from trapezes.

The next day I was at the kitchen table in our first house in Summit.

I was sitting in afternoon sunlight, and it was golden and warm in the room. I was thinking about the three-ring circus. I started to draw a picture. I could barely capture the awe that I experienced on paper. I was lost in this drawing. My mother came into the kitchen and looked down and gasped. “What a wonderful drawing!” I could not have been happier. I felt completely at one with that drawing. I literally said to myself, “This is for me; this is something that feels good to me.”

When I was in first grade, I got one of those mean old crabby ladies who liked to control children. She terrified me; just terrified me. She would let us draw from time to time. So she passed out paper and said everybody could do a drawing. I was trying to do a landscape with mountains. The girl next to me was drawing a couple ballroom dancing. The mean teacher came over and said, “That is an inappropriate subject for a drawing.” She took the paper away and told her that she had to change her drawing. I remember thinking, “What’s wrong with drawing people dancing?

That girl should be able to draw whatever she wants to draw!”

I already had a kind of attitude about art and what it could be, and how it shouldn’t be censored.

32

At the cottage in Kittery Point, Maine.

33

Smitten

D O U G L A S H U E B L E R , B R A D F O R D (1966)

SAR AH

I didn’t take academics very seriously in high school. I didn’t have particularly good grades. I didn’t pay attention to it, and my parents didn’t seem to pay attention.

I wanted to go east for college. Somebody said, “You’re not Ivy League, I don’t think Vassar’s for you. Maybe a junior college would be good—how about applying to Bradford and Pine Manor?” They were two-year programs where girls from good families would be sent. I ended up throwing a dart at the map. I knew I liked Boston, and I’d spent a lot of time on the Cape and in Maine. Bradford was in a town adjoined to Haverhill, Massachusetts. My grandfather, Harry Prescott Charlesworth, had a country house near there.

No sooner did I land at Bradford than I realized I’d made a big mistake. “These girls are all just puffballs,” I thought. “They’re pretty, they have nice clothes, they’re funny; but I am an intellectual and an artist.” I wanted to get to New York and get near the art world—and find out what’s going on.

But Bradford turned out to be a transformative experience. I had begun to be interested in ideas about art—what art was and what the role of an artist was in terms of exploring ideas.

I loved art history. I learned how Kandinsky discovered abstraction. He went to dinner and when he returned, one of his paintings was upside-down. He realized that the reds and the greens and the blues were doing something independent of what he was trying to do. So he began to explore abstraction.

What really had an impact there was an art teacher who I was smitten with, not in a romantic way, but in an “Isn’t he great?” sort of way. Doug Huebler became my mentor and my best friend for the rest of his life. I had an art history class with him—Introduction to Art History—Mesopotamia and Greece and Rome right on up to the Northern Renaissance, and then 20th Century, and then Modernism. He was a wonderful man, a wonderful artist, a wonderful teacher—he taught many of the important artists of my generation and other younger artists, specifically Mike Kelley and Christopher Williams.

My freshman year at Bradford, Doug had been doing very abstract sculptures, making boxes that he said had no associations. You would call it minimalism now.

During the time I was at Bradford, he ceased doing that work and started work that was conceptual.

SUSAN INGLETT

You start believing in this bigger picture—fate I suppose. Doug Huebler ends up at this little women’s finishing school outside of Boston. And then Sarah Charlesworth becomes his student. Talk about kismet. How lucky for all of us that he opened her eyes and showed her a path.

34

The coat was purple. ROMY CHARLESWORTH

35

36

II.

N E W YO R K

AG NES (NANC Y ) CHAR LESWORTH ROMY CHARLESWORTH VER A DIK A JUDITH HUDSON SUSAN INGLETT M AT T H E W C . L A N G E K AT E L I N K E R GLENN O’BRIEN AMOS POE KEITH SONNIER BETSY SUSSLER CHARLES TR AUB W I T H E XC E R P T S F R O M F R O M W O R K S BY LISA PHILLIPS SUSAN FISHER STERLING

37

38

II.

N E W YO R K

Sarah left Bradford College in the summer of 1967 and moved to New York to complete her schooling at Barnard. She arrived in a city in the throes of revolutionary fervor. Columbia students were demonstrating in Morningside Heights. Flower children were frolicking in Central Park.

Abbie Hoffman was rallying Yippies from his apartment on St. Mark’s Place.

Across the river, a violent protest had left the city of Newark wrecked and smoldering. Meanwhile, a kind of Holly Golightly glamour—half blithe, half decadent—animated New York nightlife. The autumn before Sarah’s arrival, Truman Capote hosted the epic Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel.

Edie Sedgwick had recently decamped to California but Andy Warhol was still making movies at the Factory on West 47th. The Cedar Tavern had given way to Max’s Kansas City. Farther downtown, SoHo was a frontier of dimly-lit cobblestone streets, vast raw spaces, and affordable—though often illegally occupied—artists lofts. These were the streets on which Sarah Charlesworth became an artist. Her first New York solo exhibition, Modern History, in 1978, established her reputation as a serious and original talent.4 As indelible as her art was the impression she projected: smart, beautiful, aloof; her hands famously clad in white gloves, and a long cigarette holder extending from her fingers.

39

Being in New York

I ‘ M O N (19 6 7 )

SAR AH

The first few times I came to New York I was just awestruck. I remember coming on the bus from Bradford, and when the bus would enter New York City I just couldn’t believe how big it was. And it would go on and on, street after street, block after block.

When I was visiting from Bradford, I came one weekend in the spring. Hippiedom had bloomed in New York. There was a be-in in Riverside Park. I went down there with my friends. People were tripping around in the park. The girls were wearing long skirts, the boys had long hair, and everybody had long beads on. They were being kind and sweet and smoking pot.

Barnard was up on 116th Street. There was so much going on there. They had boys at Columbia; they had basketball games; they had places where kids hung out in bars. They took the subways downtown, and they’d go out in Times Square or get dressed up and go eat at the Brasserie in the 50s; and I just thought this was all fabulous, wonderful. I began loving being in New York, and loved being around the art in New York.

NANCY CHARLESWORTH

I’d visit her from college in Vermont. She had this apartment up on 114th Street, and it was just so much fun.

One day, walking down Broadway, she said to me, “I think I’m on.”

I remember thinking, “You’re on?” I think I know what that means—I think I’m on, too.

That is how both of us were feeling: that stimulated turn-on to the world where you’re really feeling your creativity.

40

Fifth Avenue; 1967.

41

The Politicization of Our Generation

B A R N A R D , 19 6 8

SAR AH

The Summer of Love happened in 1967, and was followed almost instantly by all the political, anti-war stuff in San Francisco, New York, and all over Europe.

At Columbia, it was very, very intense. The police were on one side, and the students, faculty, and building occupiers led by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were on the other side.

I didn’t occupy the buildings but I had a boyfriend who was in SDS, and I did posters for SDS. All the teachers and students were sympathetic with the anti-war movement. Whether or not you were occupying a building, you were on strike against the university’s participation in, and support of, the Vietnam War. It went on for weeks in the sense of the literal shutdown of the campus. But it went on for years in the sense of the anti-war movement and the gradual politicization of our generation—which led to an involvement with Marxism and socialism and all kinds of leftist movements.

42

Mark Rudd, president of the Columbia chapter of SDS; May 3, 1968.

43

If This is the Edge

SOMEWHERE IN THE WINTER O F M Y F I R S T Y E A R I N N E W YO R K

SAR AH

Doug Huebler began introducing me to artists around New York. I met Carl Andre and Robert Rauschenberg and Joseph Kosuth. Doug said to me, “I’m going to be in a group show that Seth Siegelaub is organizing.” Seth had taken a temporary space, a gallery on Madison Avenue.

Somewhere in the winter of my first year in New York, I went over to see the show.

I walked in the door of the gallery and my world just changed on the spot. Lawrence Weiner had a brick taken out of the wall. Bob Barry had some invisible inert gas.

Joseph Kosuth had some thesaurus definitions published in newspapers—the newspaper page was ripped out.

I looked at the work and I went, “I can’t go on with my painting anymore.” It made me nauseous. I was just shocked. I had no idea how extreme some work was.

I had already assimilated the kind of ethic, the esthetic, of vanguardism, so I believed that if this is the edge, if this is the cutting edge right here, then I better get right up there on the edge and see what happens next. Whether I liked this or not, this was the challenge: to figure out what this meant and what my role was.

I found it actually really scary. I couldn’t go back and be comfortable with my paintings—it was having painting die on me. Like having God die on you, which God was doing all the time in those days.

44

The Xeroxbook, December 1968. One of 21 exhibitions, books, catalogues, and projects organized by Seth Siegelaub between February 1968 and July 1971.

45

John Cage, Barbara Novak, the Guggenheim

T H E S I S P R O J E C T (19 6 9 )

SAR AH

I was constantly rebelling against the art department, trying to overthrow my teachers or challenge them. I thought I knew what was the cutting edge. I would be over in the Columbia library studying Indian stupas and nodding out thinking, “They really don’t know what’s going on, and there’s so much happening in New York right now, and they should know.”

In an art history class the professor would assign a one-page essay. I’d hand in a blank piece of paper. “John Cage says that music is sound and silence,” I’d tell the professor. “So writing can be type and no type. Here’s the no type.”

I was taking a course with Barbara Novak. It was a senior seminar, and it was for people who were art history majors. There were a lot of artists, or people who really liked art, in the class—probably about 12 of us, including Laurie Anderson. Barbara Novak assigned a thesis paper. “It’ll be 30 pages, and it’ll be due on May first.” Laurie raised her hand and said, “Ms. Novak, do you want our name on the left-hand side of the page or on the right?” And I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding.” I decided right then and there that I wasn’t going to write a paper.

I went to Barbara Novak and said, “I don’t agree with this whole way of approaching learning. Art is art and not what you say about it. I want to make art. I want to do a photographic essay.”

“Well, that’s never been done before.”

“Well, that’s what I’d like to do, and I’m going to do it.”

The first thing I had to do was learn photography. I had a camera, but I didn’t know diddly shit. I had never been particularly interested in photography. But now I had a reason to be interested. I went across the street to Columbia School of Journalism, where they had a darkroom. I said to some guy, “I want to learn photography. What do I do?”

I started going to the Guggenheim day after day after day. I studied the shape of the building. I started taking pictures and developing my own film, and I started making prints. I ended up making something like 20, 21, 25 prints. I decided to do an installation: the part of the Guggenheim that was highest up, looking into the skylight from below, would be the highest print on the wall. I’d dry-mounted the prints. Then I re-photographed them all, and made them into slides.

I made an installation in the hallway of the art history department at Barnard. I put a little label on the wall: “Sarah Charlesworth, May, 1969, Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright.” And then the little statement said, “Art Is. It’s Not What You Say About It.” And that’s all.

They ended up giving me an A+. I graduated and got honors. Columbia University and Barnard College and some other college bought the slides. I charged $50 for the set, which probably cost me $48 to make. That was the first time that I actually made money from doing photography.

46

At the Guggenheim; 1969.

47

$2 Prints

I ’ M N O T R E A L LY I N T E R E S T E D I N B E I N G A P R O M I S I N G YO U N G P H O T O G R A P H E R

SAR AH

I was raised to think that, sooner or later, you’re going to marry some guy and run a house and have dinner parties and send your children to schools. In fact, when I first came to New York, I met a guy who had just graduated from Yale and worked on Wall Street. He was funny and I had a good time with him, and he was a good person. 5 But I was beginning to get the creeps. That whole model that our mothers had been surprised to find themselves in wasn’t working for me and my girlfriends. But we hadn’t thought about having a career. That wasn’t part of our experience.

Every once in a while I applied for something at an ad agency on Madison Avenue.

The very smell of those buildings would send me running. I was more scared of a job even than I was of having a husband and living in Westchester.

I was supporting myself doing photography. I started going around the neighborhood with my camera. Say Fellini would be coming to Casa Italiana at Columbia; I’d go and take pictures of Fellini giving a talk and then I’d ask Fellini if he’d come out in the sun and sit on the bench and take another picture. At night I’d develop my film and the next day call the Casa Italiana. “Hey, I’ve got some great pictures. Would you like to see them? $2 each for the prints?”

Around that time—’70–’71, or maybe ’71–’72—Lisette Model taught at the New School. She was a fun, nutty old lady. She had recently been Diane Arbus’ teacher.

You had to show your portfolio to get into her class, so we met at Howard Johnson’s on Sixth Avenue. We became friends. She came many times for dinner and we’d meet for tea. She’d look at my photographs and say, “This is coming along nicely.”

She thought I was a promising young photographer, and I thought, “I’m not really interested in being a promising young photographer.”

Then I took a silkscreen course. The very first artwork that I did in the early ’70s was a silkscreen blow-up of a tiny detail in a daguerreotype of the first human being to be photographed. He was somebody who had stopped on the street long enough that so that the super-long exposure times recorded the human figure. I showed it to Lisette Model. She said, “This is you. This is really you.” And I knew she was right.

One day, Doug Huebler picked me up to take me to the newborn SoHo. SoHo wasn’t anything then; it was just a bunch of empty warehouses. I remember walking down the cobblestone street—maybe Mercer Street. We were going to something—maybe to FOOD for supper and then to a loft party. I had on a nice pair of red suede heels— going-out-on-the-town shoes—and was feeling happy about being in SoHo and thinking, “You know what? I’m going to be an artist.”

I’d been thinking I was an artist since I was five, but it took me till I was 20 to say, “Yep, I’m going to do it.” It was such a breakthrough. It was like, suddenly I was in charge of my life. It was like coming out to myself.

48

In her mother’s vintage Lanz coat.

Photo by Romy Charlesworth.

49

Downtown

SOHO IN THE SEVENTIES

SAR AH

I went out briefly with a guy who was in Columbia in architecture school. He took me to a dinner party, in SoHo. We came downtown on the subway and got off and walked through these dark streets, cobblestone streets, and into some kind of old warehouse building. The hallway is dark but there’s some kind of little light bulb dangling somewhere. You can just barely see to get up the stairs, and you walk up to the third floor and you go into this huge raw space. Brick walls and wood floors, so big and so barren. The table was an old board, and there were candles on it. And I went, “Whoa, this space is really cool.”

I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to move downtown. I was very scared, but I thought, “That’s where the artists are: they’re hidden away in these warehouse buildings.” If I really wanted to deal with this art thing, I should get downtown to meet other artists, get some workspace, and get a darkroom of my own.

KEITH SONNIER

You’ve got to remember this is the ’70s. The art world was very small. In a funny way the art culture was a joke. Art-making was not necessary in America. The big money had not happened yet. It’s not until art becomes associated with money that it becomes part of the American culture.

Vito was jacking off underneath the staircase in the gallery; Chris Burden was shooting himself; Gordon Matta-Clark was buying 18-inch spaces between buildings in SoHo and making shows there. We all lived in these early inexpensive places, $60 a month. We all hung out together and we would go out at night. Artists showed more than they sold at that time. The art world was a very free and open culture.

SAR AH

What transpired at those bars was that all the artists downtown would go out almost every night. Every table was taken up with conversations. One night you’d be sitting with Carl Andre, another night you’d be sitting with Hans Haacke, and another night you’d be with Anthony McCall. So you were constantly meeting new people and meeting their friends. The word that people use to describe what was going on is that it was part of an art-historical discourse, and it really was part of an arthistorical discourse. It was based on conversation.

BETSY SUSSLER

The first time that I met Sarah I was dating Gordon Matta-Clark. She was sitting in an armchair by the fireplace, dressed perfectly with white gloves and a cigarette holder. Lawrence (Weiner) turned to Sarah and said, “Sarah, do you want to meet Betsy Sussler?” And Sarah said, “No, I already know too many people.” I burst out laughing because I knew exactly what she meant.

CHARLES TR AUB

Everybody knew everybody. They were buying these buildings collectively: “I’ll buy a floor, you buy a floor.” They were living together, they were fucking each other, whatever.

50

View looking south along Greene Street; October, 1969.

51

One Day in the Summer of 1973

KO S U T H

SAR AH

I met him in an elevator. Somebody said, “Sarah, this is Joseph Kosuth.” I gasped.

“Joseph Kosuth—you’re a famous artist!”6 Joseph was unknown at the time. He had lots of ideas and he knew a lot of artists, but he was unknown. He liked being recognized as a famous artist before anybody knew who he was.

After we met, he would call me from time to time. I would go to dinner with him every few months and just thought he was brilliant. But he had another girlfriend and I wasn’t going to interfere with that.

One day in the summer of 1973 I got a phone call; it was Joseph Kosuth calling from Europe. He said, “Christine and I have broken up and I’ve just bought a farm in Italy and I want you to come and visit. You can pick up money and an airplane ticket from my assistant in New York. Can you come next Saturday?” And I said, “Sure.”

I rushed around, trying to get some clothes together and jammed everything in an old suitcase and picked up the ticket from the assistant and flew to Rome.

Joseph met me at the airport all dressed in white: in a white jacket, white vest, white jeans. He took me into Rome, where he stayed at the Hotel Raphael, right over Piazza Navona. We dumped my bag and we went off to Piazza Navona. I had the most heavenly lunch I’d ever had in my life. It was tortellini with truffles and some kind of fabulous chicken thing and nice white wine. And we ended up going to Tuscany and staying in his farm and just falling madly in love.

J U DY H U D S O N

She was really attracted to his mind—Joseph was, “This is what I want, this is the way I want to approach art.” And she was right there with him.

GLENN O’BRIEN

Joseph had an aura about him. He had blond hair and his black clothes and his cigars. He only wore black, and Sarah only wore black and white. They had this sort of slightly severe John and Yoko act. They were great together because Joseph was very full of bluster. Sarah had just the right sense of irony and put herself above that.

She toned him down and made him more human instead of an egomaniac. Because Sarah was—I hate to use the word ladylike—but in the way that a man could be a gentleman, she was a lady. She was extremely proper and ethical.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

In the ’70s, many people just knew Sarah as Kosuth’s girl. The only thing they knew was that she was with Joseph Kosuth. But she wanted to be recognized for her own work. She wanted them to know her as the artist that she was and not for any other affiliations. She was insistent on that. And she was right.

SAR AH

Joseph was represented by Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome. I remember going out to lunches and dinners with Gian Enzo. I would ask a question, and Gian Enzo would answer it to Joseph. I’d say, “What do you think of your next show?” And he’d say, “Well,” and then he’d turn to Joseph and give him the answer. I was used to being an appendage to Joseph. You know, “Joseph has this cute girlfriend who’s pretty smart, who collaborates with him a little bit, but he’s the prime mover.” I was trying to get on with figuring out what my own artwork was.

52

Sarah and Joseph Kosuth in Italy.

53

Artists’ Movement for Cultural Change

T H E E N D O F T H E F O X (19 7 5 - 19 7 6 )

SAR AH

Joseph and I began to study together at the New School. You could pretend that you were enrolled by just showing up and sitting down with your notebook. I started by taking an economics course, then Joseph and I took critical anthropology and a structuralism course.

That’s how we began to get interested in critical practice—the idea that you didn’t have to go along with the conventions of a capitalist, bourgeois culture; that there could be a critical art practice thinking outside the loop and accounting for your relationship to your subject or your culture.

Joseph said one day, “Let’s start a theory magazine together.” We asked the people in Art & Language, an art theory group in England and New York, to work with us.

They were very well-read and very articulate. And we asked different young artists to write. We weren’t going to have illustration—we didn’t want to illustrate theory.

I wrote the first article in the first Fox, “A Declaration of Dependence”.

Philip Pilkington wrote “For Thomas Hobbes”. Joseph wrote “The Artist as Anthropologist”. And there were articles by Michael Baldwin and Adrian Piper.

SUSAN INGLETT

Kosuth and Sarah seemed to have a fraught relationship—it was built on a lot of back-and-forth, which they both seemed to enjoy. So it was a productive relationship.

The Fox was a very influential Marxist theory publication, until it imploded.

SAR AH

From volume one to volume three of The Fox, the art world was getting more leftist.

Joseph and I began attending meetings called “Artists’ Movement for Cultural Change”—twelve people at Nancy Spero and Leon Golub’s loft. Lucy Lippard was there, and Carol Duncan, who was a leftist art historian. Each week more people came. We started meeting in Artists Space, and more and more people came until it was a room of 300 people.

The people in Art & Language worked collaboratively. By then, Karl Beveridge and Carole Conde had joined in, and Kathy Bigelow of all people. They felt as though Joseph was a big art star, an egomaniac, which he was. They didn’t want Joseph to continue to practice on his own. “The only kind of practice that we find acceptable is collaborative practice with no individual names on artwork.” They wanted to vote that everybody had to give up using their own name and give up their own practice.

I was just out of there. Joseph was out of there. And that was the end of The Fox and of our participation with Art & Language.

54

The Fox, Volume 1, Number 1. New York; 1975. $2.00.

55

President Who, King Who, General Who

M O D E R N H I S T O R Y (19 7 7, 19 7 8 )

SAR AH

I was raised in a kind of linear, progressive, modernist tradition where one art movement would supersede the next. After Abstract Expressionism came Pop, then Minimalism. And after Pop and Minimalism came Conceptualism.

And then what? Conceptual Art points to the idea that art can be about ideas, but it doesn’t really engage ideas in a serious way. I wanted to be able to use art as a platform for trying to understand and look at the world around me in a very contemporary sense.

The very first work in the Modern History series was a fairly simple, straightforward work that used the International Herald Tribune. I was traveling a great deal in Europe, and that was sort of my newspaper. I was noticing that the main picture at the top of the page every day was some male authority figure—a king, a president, a general, a pope. And down below were various missiles and rockets and bombs and military hardware.

There was this consistent pattern, day after day after day, where the primary image was of a male power figure, almost always white, occasionally black—Idi Amin appears in one of the papers—but never any women leaders at the top of the page.

I recognized that you didn’t need to know President Who, King Who, General Who— that there was a pattern even more deeply rooted, both of a power structure but also of a visual culture. If you took away all the text and didn’t worry whether it was General So-and-So, you could see that there was some big guy with a big gun and lots of badges telling us what’s happening every day; and down below, various unpleasant skirmishes going on in. I decided to make a piece based on that recognition.

I made the September 1977 piece by deleting all the text, all the captioning, all the information—What battle? What rocket hitting what country? Bombed out where?

To me, the pieces seemed kind of funny when you saw all these guys huffing and puffing at the top of the page, and all these rockets blasting and bombing down below. This work was revealing physically that formal choices carry meaning; they are significant choices; they position us in different ways to information.

LISA PHILLIPS

News doesn’t just happen. Who is presenting it and how it is presented sends a variety of messages. One of the most striking observations to be made in Modern History is the astonishing scarcity of women represented as players in the “news”.7 SUSAN FISHER STERLING

This extended body of work marked not only a decisive break from her previous life as a painter and photographer, but also distinguished her art from that of Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, and the Art and Language group. It was through photography—through its primacy as a language of our time—that Charlesworth sought to explore and challenge the cultural landscape she encountered. Rather than using photographs to document her artistic activities as the Conceptualists had done, she saw photography as key to the way in which we see and imagine the world. 8

56

Installation view: April 21, 1978, from the series Modern History. 45 black and white prints reproduced the same size as original newspapers, varying sizes, approximately 16” x 22” each. Exhibited at The Pictures Generation, Metropolitan Museum of Art; 2009.

57

People Cultivated an Image

PERSONA

KEITH SONNIER

The look shifted after the sixties. It was no longer a hippie look, a slum look. We shed our identities. Sarah recreated her identify from the college girl—the Breck Girl—to Marlene Dietrich. Her hands were always in bad shape from the photo chemicals.

She started to wear white gloves, because the gloves hid her hands, and she carried a cigarette holder.

She mixed her persona and her life. She was a beauty. She was smart in how she used it. She’s not the kind of woman who’s gonna have her ass patted in the bar. There was an aura of protection and defense. She demanded distance, and then of course there was a literal distance—that fucking cigarette holder was almost two feet long. It was all about containing one’s persona. Some of her persona may been un-self-conscious, but I doubt if anything was unconscious with Sarah.

J U DY H U D S O N

She was no bullshit. Her approach was the opposite of self-effacing. At the same time, she was very attractive to men.

BETSY SUSSLER

Sarah and I were like the girly girls. It was a thing; it was a statement. We liked being good looking; we liked being attractive.

GLENN O’BRIEN

Nobody wore designer clothes—that was all later. It was before fashion took hold of the world. That was kind of at the end of the punk rock time. People just dressed like themselves. People cultivated an image.

Sarah wasn’t a disco girl. She was more of a café girl, sitting in a banquette with a martini and a cigarette holder, and having a really smart conversation and some laughs. She was really solid, really straightforward. The one thing is that she could be difficult and scare people.

VER A DIK A

The first time I met her she came to my loft on Church Street. We lived upstairs from La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. I’ll always remember how impressed I was with her style. Style, after all, was defining at the time. Sarah, with her blonde hair and red lipstick, a black skirt and white blouse, a white coat, white gloves, and smoking her cigarette in a long, elegant cigarette holder. She told me black and white were Chanel colors. When years later I reminded Sarah of this first impression, she dismissed it with a tilt of the head. “What a conceited little shit,” she said disparagingly of herself.

K AT E L I N K E R

Sarah had some work up—it might have been OK Harris Gallery or someplace on West Broadway—and she breezed in one day, straw-blonde hair, stunningly hip and together. She wanted to see how her work was exhibited. After she left, an older man said, “It’s so interesting that this girl who is such a doll is such a tough person.”

Sarah was not a doll. She was the hippest, smartest chick of the time period. She was so acute, and she was able to enter these male ranks and really show them that they were entirely wrong at their own game. Sarah was one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever met, in the degree to which she defined every aspect of her identity and it became so truly hers. The way that she dressed. The cultivation of the black and the white. The cigarette holder. I have never met anybody who had such total integrity in defining and standing true to these different aspects that she felt were important to her life.

58

Sarah Charlesworth in her studio. New York; 1982.

59

“Who’s That Blonde Chick?”

O N E N I G H T AT T H E M U D D C L U B

SAR AH

There were a succession of bars owned by a guy named Mickey Ruskin. The Ninth Circle in the West Village, Max’s Kansas City, the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, and one on University Place, called Chinese Chance. The Local was the one on Waverly where Julian Schnabel was the chef. Julian liked to mingle with the clients when he was supposed to be making fried zucchini in the back. I remember him coming out one night and saying, “I’m going to have a show with Mary Boone and it’s got to be the best show!”

GLENN O’BRIEN

When Max’s wasn’t cool anymore, the Mudd Club was the place to go.

AMOS POE

The Mudd Club was this downtown crazier version of Studio 54. “54” was for celebrities, the Mudd was for artists. Still—a lot and I mean a lot—of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. I owned 1% of the club and had to show up every night at three or four in the morning for my cash—of course I was there anyway.

So around 2AM in early ’79 I was dancing with a girl. Suddenly this very pretty blonde woman, wearing all black, with a cigarette holder in one hand and a glass of vodka in the other, started dancing with me, pushing the girl that I was dancing with away. We stopped dancing and went to the bar. A few minutes later we started dancing again. The pushy blonde did the same thing. I noticed she was looking off to the side where this blond heavy-set guy, also dressed head-to-toe in black was talking to another girl. A friend of mine, James Nares was at the bar. I said, “Who’s that blonde chick?”

James said, “Oh that’s Sarah Charlesworth. Joseph Kosuth’s girlfriend.”

“Who’s he?”

“He’s an artist.”

“Any good?” I asked.

“Very ’60s, rather boring,” James said.

That was Kosuth she was trying to get jealous. So my first impression of Sarah was not a very nice one.

60

I went to the Mudd Club every night. I went to a lot of other places, too, but I always would stop in at the Mudd Club. GLENN O’BRIEN

61

62

I I1.

THE EIGHTIES

A N T H O N Y B A R B OZ A JO BONNEY ROMY CHARLESWORTH VER A DIK A ROSELEE GOLDBERG JUDITH HUDSON MEL KENDRICK M AT T H E W C . L A N G E LO U I S E L AW L E R K AT E L I N K E R GLENN O’BRIEN AMOS POE LUC Y POE M A R Y S A LT E R C I N DY S H E R M A N L AURIE SIMMONS BETSY SUSSLER M AT T H E W S . W I T K O V S K Y

63

64

III.

THE EIGHTIES

Even by its own excessive standards, New York in the 1980s was a city of extremes. Wall Street created lavish new wealth. The crack epidemic raged.

Murder rates soared. The art world exploded with irreverent East Village galleries, clubs, bands, performance art, and film. The parties were intense.

But a shadow was falling. By mid-decade, AIDS—the plague—had begun its assault on the city. For Sarah, the decade began with the successful exhibition of her second major series, Stills. The title suggests motionlessness, but the images were anything but frozen. They showed bodies in free fall, tumbling through the air, shirts and hair billowing, each “a singular, undefined ephemeral event ripped from the narrative continuum”.9 Sarah was now recognized and much discussed. Stills was followed quickly by In-Photography (1981) and the all-white Tabula Rasa (1981). Sarah spent much of the ’80s with her 4½-part extended series, Objects of Desire (1983–1988). The decade closed with Academy of Secrets (1989). Sarah became close with a number of women artists during this period, including Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Judy Hudson, Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Jenny Holzer, Elizabeth Murray, Louise Lawler, and Nancy Dwyer— to name just a few—whose friendships would be important to Sarah personally, artistically, and politically. Sarah also fell in love with the New York filmmaker Amos Poe. For a time, in a complicated arrangement of real estate and romance, she and Amos cohabitated with Joseph Kosuth in a vast loft at 591 Broadway. In 1984, Sarah and Amos moved to Great Jones Street and married. In 1985, at the age of 38, Sarah became a mother when Nicholas Tiger Poe was born. In November of 1988, at the age of 41, she gave birth to Lucy.

David Salle, Sarah Charlesworth, Bruno Bischofberger, Jacqueline Schnabel, Julian Schnabel, and Brice Marden holding Mirabelle Marden; 1978.

65

Put the Furniture in Storage

S T I L L S , T O N Y S H A F R A Z I ( F E B R U A RY, 19 8 1)

M AT T H E W S . W I T K O V S K Y

There was a movement toward calculated and subversive subjectivity in Europe in around 1970 in the form of antics, cavorting—or just cutting up. The tongue-in-cheek photo works of Ger van Elk or Sigmar Polke, Annette Messager’s slyly feminist albums, or Christian Boltanski with his invented stories of childhood—a grand gesture of refusal of the seriousness of art. Sarah didn’t address subjectivity that way at all. She thought that it should be a fully serious theme. It was a new move in art and one that countered all this other (“objective”) seriousness that had reigned in New York from the early 1960s: the Green Gallery, Don Judd boxes, to Kosuth and his grand philosophical ideas. Sarah deeply understood that tradition and its contents, but she said there needs to be a different voice. Part of that was the feminist voice, part was a way to reintroduce the human subject at the most profound level of a conversation about what art can be in our time.

SAR AH

I was looking at newspaper images for two years. I wanted to get closer to the image— how do images affect us psychologically, emotionally, politically? I was interested in exploring the narrative capacity of photography—the fact that you can’t tell looking at these people in mid-air whether they’re trying to save themselves or they’re trying to kill themselves. You don’t know what happened; did they live or did they die? And you can’t tell because there is no textural caption included in the artwork.

M AT T H E W S . W I T K O V S K Y

Sarah was a great writer. She helped found The Fox. She was hanging around with very logorrheic people, people for whom a long discourse is what you do in the morning before breakfast. She could work with that. At the same time, Sarah could see the meaning that just grabbed you before you even got to it.

SAR AH

I showed Stills in a temporary gallery that Tony Shafrazi had on Lexington and 28th.

I don’t know where he was sleeping—he put all of his furniture in storage and just turned his apartment into an art gallery.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

Shafrazi saw the work in progress and invited her to show with him. It was a very casual approach and he gave her a quick deadline to meet. Moreover, he had real space limitations. Sarah decided to make the prints six and a half feet tall.

M AT T H E W S . W I T K O V S K Y

The conceptual generation was preoccupied with having things at actual size. Actual size was a phrase in the early ’70s, and had to do with whether an image could be the thing that it purported to represent. In Stills, the works are not the size of the “original”—the newspaper picture—but instead more or less the actual size of the viewer, and of the falling subject as he or she would have been in life. A six-foot-tall image is like a person.

This equivalence between the beholder and the falling person is physical—it pulls at you in a visceral way. Sarah would never stop being intellectual, but she saw and exploited the power of the visceral reaction, of an emotional and intuitive response. Verbalization wasn’t your first thing. That is a really key, signal development in art making at the tail end of the 1970s.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

Stills was made at a point where her relationship with Joseph was coming to an end and her relationship with Amos was beginning. I would imagine it was a tumultuous time; a little bit of a free fall.

66

Installation view: Stills, 1980; exhibited at Tony Shafrazi Gallery in February, 1981

67

Boundaries

5 91 B R O A D W AY

AMOS POE

A few months after that scene at the Mudd Club I had an open screening of a film at Broadway and Twelfth Street. It was six flights of stairs straight up. You could look down at a half mile of stairs. The screening started at eight o’clock. It was jammed to the rafters. It was like $3 to get in. The guy (Rafik) that ran it and I were counting the money.

I heard this loud clomping. It was Sarah climbing the stairs. Clomp-clomp-clomp. I was still pissed off from her using me to make her boyfriend jealous. “Sorry”, I said when she got to the top of the stairs. “No more tickets.” So she started clomping back down the stairs. I felt bad, so I called after her. “Hey, a bunch of us are heading over to the Mickey’s later, maybe you want to join us?”

Later on that night, she was there. We started talking and somehow we ended up going home together to her place. It was a loft at 591 Broadway, this 10,000-square-foot loft.

This loft was like a whole city block. I was just blown away. I saw her art, a newspaper series. I was blown away. She not only had beauty, she had brains too. Smitten.

SAR AH

It ran from Broadway to Mercer and was 6,000 square feet. And we paid $550 a month rent. I had a 2,000-square-foot studio, and so did Joseph. And we had a 2,000-square-foot living area in between.

AMOS POE

She was leaving the next week to meet Joseph in Italy. She went and we corresponded over the summer. When she got back in the fall we started going out surreptitiously, and it went on like that. The next summer, 1980, she decided not to go to Italy. She was going to stay in New York for the first time in ten years. I lived in the loft and hung out with her all summer. When Joseph came back in the fall I moved back to my own apartment. But now we were a couple. The next summer, in 1981, Joseph went to Italy again. I moved into the loft again. This time, I decided not to move out.

And the three of us lived there. Joseph had the front with all the windows and Sarah and I had the back. Joseph and I were friends. Sarah would cook for both of us.

GLENN O’BRIEN

Joseph was a terrible boyfriend. He was such a womanizer. I don’t know if they ever discussed the boundaries of their relationship, but Joseph wasn’t very discreet. But then when she took up with Amos, I guess the idea was that it was her loft, too—so Amos could stay there. That was really an awkward and uncomfortable situation. At one point, Amos was living in a closet in that big loft. There was a really small room.

It was basically a closet, and that was Amos’ room.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

Joseph was hot, hot, hot in the Conceptual Art world. The loft was huge and the walls were spray-painted white like a gallery. The wood floors re-finished regularly. No door on the bathroom—no respectable loft had that. There was a black rabbit that roamed around. Amos came from the underground film world. When Sarah stayed at Amos’ in the East Village, she took candles because inevitably Con Ed had shut the electricity off.

SAR AH

For a while, it was sort of complicated. Joseph and I were very, very fond of each of each other and very committed to each other as working artists, but I was beginning to be romantically involved with Amos. Eventually I had to move out, and Amos and I got a loft together on Great Jones Street.

68

Sarah and Amos on the roof, 591 Broadway.

69

Gretchen Bender, Jo Bonney, Sarah Charlesworth, Vera Dika, Nancy Dwyer, RoseLee Goldberg, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Barbara Sukowa, Sandy Tait, Lynne Tillman

F I LM G ROU P

JO BONNEY

Over several decades, starting in our twenties, we came together with a group of amazing female friends to talk, eat, and share stories and support in between watching and discussing films.

C I N DY S H E R M A N

I don’t know how we decided to do this. Maybe we just all wanted to go out dancing.

We never got into the clubs we wanted, so we decided to throw our own dance party.

We had meetings about it. We found a space. Then some of us continued meeting. We wanted to make film together and we all expressed interest in the history of film. In the beginning, we rented the film from the Donnell Library with the projector and screened them in my loft on Walker Street. That became the Film Group.

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

So many incredible conversations go on when we get together. Sarah and I were fairly intense with one another. My conversations with Sarah were always based on work, hers and mine. Always very focused. Lots of questions, especially from her, that often sounded more like statements—definitive and querulous—but they did the trick and caused strong responses.

VER A DIK A

Sarah could be caustic—you could sense the wry New England humor beneath it. One time, at one of her shows, I approached her with my critical explication of her work.

I mentioned Deleuze. Sarah quipped, “Oh Vera, just because you read a book…”

But when my mother died it was Sarah who called to ask how I was. And it was Sarah who offered to meet for coffee to talk so that I could feel better. When I came back from L.A. after 15 years in 2002, I remember when the doorbell rang—I opened the door and there she was—arms extended.

JO BONNEY

I am not a naturally easy host. Sarah decided that she should come to my rescue. I was grateful although a little intimidated. I always loved that she was so smart and funny but she was also a strong, opinionated individual. Sarah turned up with an entire kitchen’s worth of utensils and produce in three huge bags and proceeded to take over with the joy and vigor of Julia Child. Sarah’s creativity and perfectionist eye is clear in her art, but that combination was really something to witness in my kitchen. In those two hours I kind of fell in love with Sarah.

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

The Film Group made each strand of friendship solid and concrete. We look carefully at the threads and understand how each of us—so different—has a particular place in the group. There is extraordinary love and generosity, clear-eyed analysis as to what each of us is doing, will do, and—at the beginning and the end of it all—each one of us is incredibly analytical and perceptive about what we singly and as a group mean to one another.

LO U I S E L AW L E R

To quote Peanuts: “Friends are to multiply your joys and divide your sorrows.”

Sarah did.

70

I took this picture at Leo Castelli’s 20th Anniversary party. Jackie Winsor is standing in the back. I’m pretty sure that is the back of Liza Béar’s head, Alice Weiner, Poppy Johnson, and Sarah. LOUISE LAWLER­

71

Chanel No.5

B O M B M A G A Z I N E ( S P R I N G , 19 8 1)

BETSY SUSSLER

We talked about BOMB for a year before we made it. And when I say we, I mean everybody in downtown New York. We weren’t quite sure how to do it, but Glenn O’Brien was part of the conversation. So were Liza Béar and Michael McClard. And Sarah. We were talking about what kind of magazine and what we would cover. I had been thinking about a magazine centered around film and theater, with music and literature and visual arts.

GLENN O’BRIEN

I think the first meetings for BOMB were in Terry Winters’ place, which was in 591 on a different floor. Betsy at some point forgot that I named the magazine. It had to do with BLAST. Wyndam Lewis was the editor of BLAST and published it.

BETSY SUSSLER

Before BOMB, only critics talked about visual art. They weren’t that interested in what artists had to say about their own work. BOMB gave the visual artist a voice. Sarah was the champion of that.

She was very adamant about including the visual arts. Not that anyone was against it— we all came from that milieu—but there were conversations about whether it would be part of the mix or not. Sarah was very adamant in Sarah’s way of being very adamant.

After many conversations, over many nights, everyone realized she was right.

BOMB just took over. I was doing it out of my house—out of my apartment, out of my loft. We didn’t know how to design a magazine.

When we were figuring out BOMB’s dimensions, I wanted it to be classic, so I wanted it to be the same dimension as the Golden Ratio. We could not remember what the formula was. So we’re sitting at her desk, and there is nothing on the desk but a ruler and a bottle of Chanel No.5. And I said, “Sarah, Chanel used the Golden Ratio.” So the first BOMB was the same proportion as the Chanel bottle.

72

BOMB, Volume 1, Issue 1; Spring, 1981.

Cover by Sarah Charlesworth.

73

March 21, 1984: Sarah marries Amos

CO I N TOS S

AMOS POE

I was on drugs at the time. I was starting my heroin period. Sliding down.

In January of 1983 she helped me get off it. She actually saved my life. But then once I was clean, I met a French girl, I fell “in love” and left. I made “Alphabet City”. Sarah meanwhile had another boyfriend, Bill Wegman, the dog photographer.

In January, I was living in an apartment on Third Street and I went to a party, and lo and behold Sarah was at the same party. I think both of us got bombed. Very bombed. I don’t remember anything that happened between the party and the next morning. All I remember is waking up in my bed and feeling someone next to me, not knowing who it was but that she felt familiar. As Keats said, “Touch has a memory.” I woke her up, she turned around, I turned around. Sarah. We were both looking at each other, hung over and incredulous.

“What are we doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is crazy.”

“Yeah, this is crazy.”

And Sarah said, “Well, this is either the greatest thing that ever happened or the worst thing that ever happened. There are no grays here. We either really love each other and we should get married or we should never see each other again.”

I said, “Yeah, I think the same.”

She said, “What do we do? Get married or never see each other again?”

I thought about it, there seemed no rational answer. “Let’s flip a coin.”

And she said, “Okay.”

So I reached down for my pants on the floor, and pulled out a quarter. “I’m going to flip a coin. You call it.”

Sarah said, “Heads we get married. Tails we never see each other again.”

It was heads.

We got engaged on Valentine’s Day 1984, got married on the spring solstice, March 21, in the loft I inherited from Bryan Hunt at Great Jones Street, with our wedding party at the Odeon.

74

Sarah and Amos pictured with John McNulty, John Lurie, Danny Rosen, Evan Lurie, Arto Lindsay, Bill Rice, and Johanna Heer.

75

Going Up to Meet the Family

M A D R A S S H O R T S : “ W H AT T H E F U C K I S T H I S ? ” (19 8 4 )

AMOS POE

We were just married, so we planned to drive up to Kill-A-Jew-Port, Maine on a Friday afternoon. I was going up there to meet the whole family. It would be the first time.

We were living downtown on Great Jones Street and I was working on a music video in midtown. I told Sarah that I would come back downtown to pack early in the afternoon, and then we were gonna drive up.

Sarah called around noon and asked, “How’s it going?” I told her that the editing was taking a long time and I still had to come down to pack. Sarah said, “I’ll pack for you and drive up to meet you. I’ll call from the corner and you can just come down.”

At 3:30 or 4:00, she called. “I’m on the corner, come down.” I wrapped up what I was doing, came downstairs, got in the car, and we started driving. We got to Maine really late; I think we got there at midnight. We were in the same room but in twin beds.

The next morning, I woke up and went downstairs for a cup of coffee. I had on this house robe that Sarah brought me. Then I went back upstairs to get dressed.

I opened the bag and I’m like—“Ah, Honey—where’s my clothes?”

And she says, “That’s your clothes.”

It’s madras shorts, striped button-down shirts, moccasins, and white socks with stripes on them.

“These are not my clothes! What the fuck is this?”

“Oh, no, it’s okay. They are all your size. I did a little shopping at Brooks Brothers.

You want to fit in.”

I do not wear madras shorts. I do not wear socks with stripes. I felt like I was in WASP drag.

And she said, “No, no, you look great. You’ll get used to it.”

“I’ll wear it for you ’cuz it’s your family, but when we drive back and go over the bridge, this all goes in the river.”

“No,” she said. “We’ll keep it up here.”

76

Back when we first had cordless phones, not cell phones, we put one in on Long Island. Amos was always talking on this cordless phone in the kitchen, and he’d walk out on the deck as he was talking.

And Sarah would always say, “That’s how Amos pictures himself. You know, connected, making deals.”

MEL KENDRICK

77

AIDS

A N E N I G M AT I C , M Y S T E R I O U S T I M E

AMOS POE

It was the end of an era. A lot of our friends were dying of AIDS. People who stayed in that world versus people who got out of it. It’s hard to say why people like myself never got sick.

SAR AH

Denial is a group of figures that I originally drew from a deposition painting—a Raphael painting. There’s a figure of a dead—it would have been Christ in the original painting, but I wasn’t making a piece about Christianity or Christ or anything like that; I was making a piece about death. Death was quite present at this time in the 80s. This was in the heart of the AIDS crisis. Friends were dying all around us. We were just having to face ... not mortality, but death of peers. It was a very painful period.

AMOS POE

It was sort of an enigmatic, mysterious time, a transitional time. People are dying.

And a lot of our friends are having kids. Richard Price and Judy Hudson on Great Jones and Broadway. Mel Kendrick and Mary Salter. Laurie Simmons and Tip Dunham. RoseLee Goldberg and Dakota Jackson. Alba and Francesco Clemente. I don’t think we ever spoke about children. But if there was ever anyone I was going to have children with, it would be Sarah.

It was difficult. Leaving the dark side and getting into the family life. Both of us were struggling with our work and art. We were both relatively self-involved as artists, but at the same time we both tried our best. The children, home, stability, there was time for that.

I don’t look back on it like we could have done anything else. I look back on it and I wonder myself how we got through. But we did.

78

Denial; 1991, from the series Renaissance Paintings, cibachrome print with lacquered wood frame, 34” x 44”.

79

The Day She Found Out She Was Pregnant

B I R D S T O RY

AMOS POE

On the day that Sarah found out that she was pregnant, a bird flew in our back window on Great Jones Street. The bird flew all around our house and finally stopped to sit on a high beam. She went out and found a birdcage and she coaxed it down and got the little bird to go into the cage.

80

31 Great Jones Street.

81

A Revelation

D E E P LY C O N N E C T E D F R O M T H E S TA R T (19 8 5 )

J U DY H U D S O N

I met her when she was six years old. Her cousin Anne Timpson was my best friend.

Then we lost touch and I didn’t see her again until 1980. I went to a party with Robert Longo at his parents’ house on the North Fork. Sarah and Amos were there.

I remember I looked at her and said, “You’re not Sukie Charlesworth?” We were instant best friends. She was pregnant and I was pregnant at the same time. We had our children together.

She was able to pursue a career and assemble a group of work that had meaning and a cohesive idea in a way that was always attributed to men. She was incredibly selfassured. She didn’t worry about what other people thought if that got in the way of her own ideas and values. Sarah was incredibly focused on her work and career, but she always wanted children. And then she had these children and you saw this whole earth mother emerge.

MEL KENDRICK

You couldn’t have imagined her having children, all the black and white clothes and the long cigarette holder. Being a mother changed Sarah immediately. It really humanized her. Even though we were acquaintances, we weren’t close until we had children. Our relationship started on a family-based thing more than on an art thing. Our oldest son, Max, was the same age as Nick. It was Amos and Sarah, Richard Price and Judy Hudson, Laurie and Tip Dunham, and us at that point.

Mary, Sarah, and Judy were all pregnant at the same time.

M A R Y S A LT E R

There was a big show at the Whitney where we were all together. Sarah and I were both pregnant. It was quite funny. We would just be these sort of beach balls bumping around.

We were all different. But I think officially in everyone’s mind we were families together.

There was a sense of a familial community. These families of children were close. They played with each other and, as life in New York would have it, they bounced up against each other.

We all drift apart because as we grow older our lives change. Our children run their own shows now. But in hard times, we still look to each other.

L AURIE SIMMONS

She had become tame and more conventional by then. She liked her girlfriends, wanted to do her work, wanted family. Everyone had transitioned into a more stable place in the interest of making priorities in life about what was important. For me, it was my work, my relationship, and my children, and I feel like Mel Kendrick and Mary were right there, Judy was there, Sarah was there.

J U DY H U D S O N

Sarah loved being a mother. She was deeply connected right from the start. It was a revelation to her how happy it made her. She was completely blissed out talking about nursing and how it was a great experience of her life.

82

Nicholas Tiger Poe; April 25, 1985.

83

November 11 at 11pm

L U C Y, L U C Y, L U C Y ! (19 8 8 )

LUC Y POE

My mom was going into labor and my dad was driving her to the hospital. She was in the passenger seat and my brother was in the back.

My mom had decided to name me Sarah after her mother and the ancestors all the way back to Sarah Hague—eight generations ago—but she hadn’t decided whether she would call me Lucy or Charlotte—which would be my middle name?

She said, “Amos, we have to decide. Is it going to be Lucy or Charlotte?”

And Nick’s in the backseat and he yelled “Lucy, Lucy, Lucy!”

So I was named Sarah Lucy Charlesworth Poe. J U DY H U D S O N

Lucy was an adorable baby—I’m talking about two, three, four, five years old. She was a movie star kid because she had this halo of ringlets, beautiful bouncing curls.

And the longest eyelashes. The biggest eyes. The chunkiest cheeks. The rosiest lips.

It was like walking down the street with Madonna. Everybody would stop. You couldn’t get a block without people going, “Oh, what a gorgeous child!” And she worked it, too. Nick was no slouch either.

84

Sarah Lucy Charlesworth Poe.

85

86

I V.

THE NINETIES

ROMY CHARLESWORTH J AY G O R N E Y LO U I S G R AC H OS ROSELEE GOLDBERG JUDITH HUDSON SUSAN INGLETT MEL KENDRICK M AT T H E W C . L A N G E K AT E L I N K E R GINA NANNI M A R Y S A LT E R C I N DY S H E R M A N L AURIE SIMMONS GLENN O’BRIEN AMOS POE LUC Y POE NICK POE LY N N E T I L L M A N ANNE TIMPSON CHARLES TR AUB

87

88

I V.

THE NINETIES

As the ’90s opened, HIV/AIDS held the New York art world in its grip.

But for Sarah, the ’90s was also a time of completion. Now in her forties, mothering two young children and partnered with Amos, she began to draw from internal sources in both her life and work. After Renaissance Paintings & Drawing (1991), Sarah stopped creating with pre-existing images.

She began making images of her own. Natural Magic (1993) was followed

by Text (1993), Doubleworld (1995), and 0+1 (1999–2000). In 1997, SITE Santa Fe mounted a 20-year retrospective of Sarah’s work that traveled to San Diego, Washington DC, Cleveland, and Waltham, Massachusetts.

Untitled (Voyeur) was featured on the cover of Art in America in July of 1998.

As the ’90s progressed, artists took to the streets. ACT UP confronted the hate surrounding HIV. The Women’s Action Coalition (WAC) battled the repression of women. Sarah and her Pictures Generation friends had led a movement that subverted male dominance of the art world. Sarah continued to disrupt as she marched in the frontline the WAC drum corps. She juggled this activism with a deep commitment to teaching, beginning a twenty-year relationship with the graduate department of photography at the School of Visual Arts. Sarah brought the same exacting standards that she practiced in her art to the details of living—family, household, friends, and teaching. She described one piece from 1992, Control and Abandon, as a consideration of the interplay between the elements that one “controls or pretends to control” and “chance and happenstance”—a soulful duet between determination and chaos in a life fully lived. In the ’90s computing became personal. By decade’s end, the Internet was dominant. As the world became virtual, Sarah’s work was ever more central. At the dawn of the Millennium, Sarah had heralded the culture to come.

Sarah Charlesworth in the studio with Transfiguration; 1991.

89

The Camera

PA RT O F S O M E T H I N G N E W

SAR AH

I remember being invited by Douglas Crimp to be on a panel in Philadelphia called something about postmodernism. I had a lot of disdain for the word. I just didn’t think it was very useful. But I began to realize that there was something fundamentally different about the practice that my friends and I were engaged with that was different than painting.

C I N DY S H E R M A N

In those days, there wasn’t the network of female artists that there is today, because there wasn’t a support structure. I guess we were beginning it—for those of us who used different mediums, like photography, whenever we met someone whose work related to ours, the bonds came naturally. The more women we bonded with, the greater our network of friendships grew.

We didn’t want to be pushed aside, and this was a way for us to reinforce what we did, and our thoughts, and friendships, and our work. We weren’t competing with the guys, like trying to make big paintings, or big sculpture, or big, macho anything.

We were doing something different. We were aware of that and that’s kind of why we chose it, because it wouldn’t be dismissed. Because we were doing something that’s not painting, it would have to be looked at in a different way. I don’t remember having any conversations—I think it just happened naturally, intuitively with us...

L AURIE SIMMONS

I really think Sarah understood that certain women artists were separating themselves from the pack in terms of their seriousness and their priorities. I don’t want to put thoughts in her mind or words in her mouth, but I think that was a big light-bulb moment for her.

Sarah and I met in 1982, through Cindy. I remember the moment because it felt like Sarah was almost like, “You are going to be my friend.” I felt like, “Do I have any say in this at all?”

I perceived her as a “real” conceptual artist, and at the same time it seemed as if she wanted to start over. Perhaps she felt as we did, that as women we might commandeer the camera in a new way—not as photographers, but as artists using new technology, thus extricating ourselves from the weighty and male-dominated history of painting. With Gretchen Bender, Nancy Dwyer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and Cindy Sherman, there were informal gatherings and shows where we felt, at least loosely, like we were part of something new.

SUSAN INGLETT

For women artists it was a very different landscape than it is today. Not different enough, unfortunately, but different. They all came up together, and they made their mark. They are probably the first generation of women to move the needle in terms of the art market, in terms of being recognized as important figures, as contenders.

J AY G O R N E Y

I remember referring to Sarah, Laurie and Cindy as the Three Graces. Sarah was very linked to her colleagues.

90

Laurie Simmons, Cindy Sherman, Sarah Charlesworth.

Photographed by Jay Gorney; 1995.

91

She Was Always Right

T H E G A L L E R I E S 10

J AY G O R N E Y

Jay Gorney Modern Art opened in the East Village on 10th Street in 1985. I opened the gallery at that moment and in that space because I’d become friendly with Peter Nagy and Alan Belcher at Gallery Nature Morte, and with Meyer Vaisman and Liz Koury, plus the always-absent Kent Klaman at International with Monument, which was Sarah’s gallery. International with Monument closed around the time I moved from the East Village to SoHo. I ran into Sarah. I don’t remember if I said it or if she did, but one of us brought up the possibility of her showing with me. I remember a very brief conversation and then getting her “Sarah Edwards Charlesworth Poe” card, and we formalized it.

We did six solo exhibitions: Academy of Secrets; Renaissance; Natural Magic; Neverland; 0+1—the white ones; and Doubleworld. It’s hard to convey the complexity of the artistdealer relationship. It’s an organic, daily relationship that encompasses finance, aesthetics, and art. She would take advice—or not—but I always gave her my opinions. We had a dialogue. It wasn’t a collaboration. You couldn’t say to Sarah, “Change the green.” I would never—one would never—say to Sarah Charlesworth, “Change your piece.”

SUSAN INGLETT

She took floor plans and she knew where everything was going before she walked in the door. She was never wrong, thank God, because I would never want to go head-tohead with Sarah. The first show—we hung the work and she said, “I think it should be half an inch lower.”11 We lowered it half an inch and it was better—she was right.

K AT E L I N K E R

I would say, “You’re going to be having this show. Have you reached out to some people?” She wouldn’t know how to do that. She was sufficiently old-school to believe that the merchandizing and promotion was not part of the process. She simply made serious work of the highest level. That was enough for her.

SAR AH

My work is difficult; it’s not easy work. I think work that engages complex conceptual questions is much harder for people to write about, for people to understand and for the market to assimilate. That’s okay with me… I mean, what’s “understanding” mean?

Who cares whether work is understood?

LY N N E T I L L M A N

She didn’t hold back. She was definite about what she thought. It was bracing to talk with her. Just as looking at a work of hers is bracing. It doesn’t hold back. Sarah knew what she was making, she knew what she wanted viewers to look at. What we’d see, well, that was our business.

J AY G O R N E Y

Sarah was fearsomely intelligent and concise. Some collectors found her a little too much to handle. The collectors who could handle it appreciated it. I remember wanting prices to be higher. Sarah was always very conservative and wanted lower prices.

GLENN O’BRIEN

Sarah was ahead of her time, but she certainly deserved ten times more recognition than she got in her lifetime. Sarah should have been with Leo Castelli, you know.

We hear a lot about the boys’ club of the art world, but a lot of it’s really true. When women artists made it, it was against the odds. Maybe Sarah would have done better if she wasn’t so proud. She felt that if the work was good enough, the work would do the work. That’s really not the way it works in the art world.

92

She was very passionate about whatever she was doing and was the same with the shooting. I found through my 50 years of photography that when you photograph a person of talent and they are one with self and their art they project the beauty of themselves in their personality. ANTHONY BARBOZA

93

Pulling It All Together

31 G R E AT J O N E S S T R E E T

M A R Y S A LT E R

We were invited for a Sunday dinner at Sarah’s house with the kids. It was when the boys, Max and Nick, were about eight. And Lucy—how much younger was Lucy, three years? So Lucy was a little thing.

We came for dinner and we walk in and Sarah’s roasting a leg of lamb. It was really a proper leg of lamb, and just walking into that house with the kids, my boys were just thrilled, totally thrilled. The smell was unbelievable. It was heavenly.

It was always remarkable to me when I’d walk into that space how they lived there.

Because her working space was the heart of the home. It was that whole central piece of it. It was always in perfect order. I remember seeing a television over maybe towards the window, and a place to sit, but the rest of it was always pristine. How you could have four people living essentially without rooms, without walls? They had their little bedroom spaces, but where they existed was all one room. There wasn’t a bunch of junk hanging around. It was completely pure. I always thought about that when I looked at Sarah’s work. There was always that sense of purity, of clarity.

The space was clear and open and neatly set up on the table with all of the things that the kids could draw with and play with. And then I walk into the kitchen where Sarah is pulling it all together. In my mind, I’m going, “I am so glad that somebody is serving me meat.” That’s my first thought: “Sarah is my kind of girl.” And she said, “I want to get it out of the oven. I don’t want it to get overdone.” And I’m going, “Someone is serving me rare meat—yes!”

So I help her do whatever little thing in the kitchen needs to be done, because it’s all perfectly put together. And then I hear this little tap-tap-tapping on the kitchen wall.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap. I go, “What is that?” And Sarah says, “Oh, Lucy is practicing somersaults in her bed and she is tap-tap-tapping to let me know that she wants to come in and play with the art.” They had had this little code.

We went in and there was Lucy. She was just this boil of curls and giggles.

That was a magical moment. It really was a heavenly moment in the heart of her family on a Sunday night. It was a beautiful thing. I think that that was part of the Great Jones saga. There would be those pockets of incredible warmth, those moments of warmth and comfort from the order that she created.

94

With Nick and Lucy; 1989.

95

Responsibilities and Freedom

B E I N G A C H A R L E S WO RT H P O E

MEL KENDRICK

Aside from all the soft, warm, and wonderful things that came out—and she let them come out more and more as she got older—it has crossed my mind that it would be very difficult to be Sarah’s children. She struck me as very strict.

M A R Y S A LT E R

I think she was certainly strict. Sarah was a person who really appreciated structure.

She appreciated tradition. That was the interesting part of Sarah. She brought that mentality, that structure, that solidity of a culture with her. She was committed to giving the children some rules and regulations and that was quite an exciting decision to make.

She was constantly pushing them into thinking about the world in a very specific way.

There was a certainty to Sarah. I think she experienced a lot of uncertainty in her life, but not in her actions and in her beliefs—her formalized beliefs. I’m not speaking about religion—but in her formalized beliefs, there was a sense of real direction and certainty. There was a sort of clarity and straightforwardness of vision and opinion that we all very much loved in Sarah.

MEL KENDRICK

Intellectual rigor is what she had. Really, you felt you had to be on. At least in the art sense you felt you had to be very on and focused when you talked—no bullshit. She could tell that a million miles away.

M A R Y S A LT E R

You know what she demanded? She demanded integrity in the rapport, in the relationship.

She craved an understanding of the transcendent quality in the relationship. Maybe the nature of her relationship with Amos was that it was the integrity of contradiction— who knows? The Charlesworth Poe children had an interesting blend of­…

MEL KENDRICK

...responsibilities...

M A R Y S A LT E R

...and freedom. Amos is this free spirit, kind of crazy, kind of wonderful. Amos was all about injecting chaos into everybody’s lives. I think she really had a gigantic love of the impishness and the rules-breaking quality of Amos. I think she was attracted to that and it somehow fed something within her, because she was really much more pristine in her approach. She was engaged in those more traditional parental activities. Amos was always encouraging them to push the envelope.

MEL KENDRICK

That’s what made it interesting.

M A R Y S A LT E R

For a while we had a tradition of getting together for weekends or summer weeks. We had this beautiful carriage house. It looked like a Russian dacha on a pond. We had some lovely times there with the children playing on the lawn and doing all kinds of things.

I remember—it must have been when Max and Nick were three or four—and Nick had gotten himself up in the middle of the night. Nobody noticed. He just got up and walked out into the kitchen, and took an apple and put it into the toaster oven and turned it on. There was a fire. The next morning, Amos was so thrilled about how Nick had gotten himself up on the counter all by himself. I don’t think Sarah was thrilled…

96

Summer, 1991.

97

Getting on With Her Business

TH E M OS T O RG A N IZE D PE R SO N O N TH E PL A N E T

NICK POE

It was part of her artistic practice. It was not just about making something, but about preserving and keeping it, and about editing it, too. She was an artist and she cared about the way things looked. She worked really hard to have things a certain way.

She was always trying to keep things out of the house. My dad is really the opposite: he didn’t really care about that—it wasn’t his thing. He’s a pack rat. Everything had some sort of significance to him. They really clashed over that. He was allowed to have his desk area and there was a spot kind of tucked away behind a wall where she couldn’t really see it. He could do what he wanted with that area.

J U DY H U D S O N

Sarah was the most organized person on the planet. The IRS audited her. She showed them who not to fuck with.

CHARLES TR AUB

She was organized to a fault. She wasn’t going to miss a detail. And, frankly, intimidating in that way.

GINA NANNI

She would put her mind to something and she would just do it. She was one of those people that had no idea when she was offending someone, and it was very, very easy for someone to take her intent completely the wrong way. I remember running into her with my husband—we were dating then. Sarah walks right past me, says hello to Glenn and gives him a great hug. He said, “Sarah, I hope you’ve met my girlfriend, Gina.” She said, “Yes,” and walked away. She was just very matter-of-fact and getting on with her business. It just didn’t occur to her. I didn’t like her for a long time.

L AURIE SIMMONS

Sarah and I were going to a party and we were charged with bringing the beer.

I don’t drink beer; I don’t know anything about beer. So we stopped at this place on Spring Street that I think was called the SoHo Market and they were known for having a variety of European and Mexican, all these exotic beers. We needed two six-packs, two of those whatever you call them. Sarah started taking the beer and putting them in and arranging them: one from this place, two from that place.

“Okay, that’s good, let’s go,” I said. And she was like, “No, I’m not quite sure if it should be this or it should be this.” She would pull more beer out and put the sixpack down and look at the beers next to each other. I was like, “I think that’s good now. Okay, let’s go.” And she’d say, “What do you think about this dark German beer next to this light German beer?” And I was like, “Great, let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later—thirty minutes later!—we left the store with these two sixpacks of perfectly choreographed, arranged beers.

I would tell her that story throughout our entire friendship, to the point where she would say, “I don’t want to hear about the beer story again.”

98

Allegory of the Arts; 1995, from the series Doubleworld, cibachrome print with mahogany frame, 51” x 41”.

99

WAC is Watching—We Will Take Action

T H E D R U M C O R P S (19 9 2 )

SAR AH

As a young artist, I felt like I was entering a territory that had been primarily owned by men in previous generations, with a few exceptions. I had a book called The Artist in His Studio. It was photographs by Alexander Liberman. I remember turning the pages and seeing Mondrian and the skinny guys in his studio and Picasso in his underpants and, Calder and Miró, and on and on. I’d turn these pages and I’d look at these artists in their studios—his studio. And I’d just get blue. I didn’t know why.

It took me years to go, “Wait a minute.” I was looking for a role model. I had no idea that there weren’t women artists. There were, like, two of them. There was Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin. The art world in those days was guys, guys, guys, guys.

Every art gallery was filled with guys, guys, guys, guys.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

It is important to note the degree of recognition that she did receive in the ’70s and ’80s—it was a big deal that women should get just as much or more than men. She did a lot to make sure that they did. She promoted women artists, she fought for women artists. That was big for her. It was important for her and there was a sisterly approach to making work.

SUSAN INGLETT

When I think of what her generation did for women in the arts and in the larger world, she is a remarkable figure. She has had an impact on younger artists today who have a lot of respect for her. Given what Sarah had to push against, she had to be intellectually rigorous and demanding—she had to do her homework to be taken seriously.

K AT E L I N K E R

WAC was born out of a sense of great urgency, and it became a very powerful group that was, for a brief time, a huge force in the art community. Women were examining their identity as women—their needs and their rights in the home and in the workplace. In this context, Sarah was stunning. She looked at this group and recognized that it was made up of truly cool women who were asserting their right to define their own identity and their own conditions of existence. WAC was largely formed of professional women who were demanding the kind of recognition for their work that had not been available to previous generations of women.

The Drum Corps was by far the coolest group in WAC. In marches, they were the leaders, right at the head of the whole, huge, moving contingent. Sarah thought she would give it a try—and then she got so involved that she drummed the whole route, all the way down Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum to Eighth Street. She loved every minute.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

Nancy and I thought, “Oh yeah? Really?” We raised our eyebrows because she wasn’t into rhythm and music. Sarah had no rhythm at all. I think she really got into the power of the pure percussion. She kept her drum on the wall at the foot of her bed like a sacred symbol.

J U DY H U D S O N

It was time. It had an energy that the 60s did. Sarah was almost crazy when she was drumming.

L AURIE SIMMONS

I thought it was phenomenal. I thought it was great. Sarah did get carried away, but in the very best way.

100

The Women’s Action Coalition.

101

Exactly Apart

F I R E , A I R , E A R T H , W AT E R

LUC Y POE

My dad describes our family as the four elements. He said that the four of us were perfectly opposite. My dad is a Libra. My mom’s an Aries. Nick’s a Taurus, and I am a Scorpio. We are all three months apart: fire, my mom; air, my dad; Nick is earth, and I am water.

AMOS POE

When we were connected, we had great chemistry. But we were also so different. We were astrologically exactly apart, almost diametrically opposed. She was war, I was peace. Power, love. It was this constant thing.

NICK POE

My first memories were we would make these picture books cutting out pictures from National Geographic, making alphabet books together. I found them as we were moving out of Great Jones Street. She kept them. She kept everything. She kept pretty much every one of my childhood drawings.

LUC Y POE

Nick was really good at art. He was a natural. He was good at markers; he was brilliant with a pen and a paper. When he was in ninth grade, he took a marker and started drawing circles all over this huge canvas. Then he took up the pen and drew one line, just one sweep, and it turned into a thing, an old man drinking tea in the corner, and trees, and birds. She wanted me to make my own path. I was searching for a place in the world of my own. It was hard to find a place next to her.

ROMY CHARLESWORTH

Lucy was “still waters run deep”. Sarah was just the opposite: what you see is what you get.

LUC Y POE

We butted heads when I was younger. Mom would tell the story of me putting my hands in the toilet bowl and my mom yelling, “No, Lucy, no!” and me yelling back, “Yes, Mommy, yes!” My dad would say that she was a little bit afraid because I didn’t accept being controlled. I also really wanted to make her proud, though, and to fit into her model.

I think the problem was that she would hurt my feelings when I was little. I’m very sensitive and she would go on and on about something and when I’d contribute she could be dismissive. I really hung onto my dad then. He got upset when she was hard with me and he coddled me. Actually, my interest in talk therapy comes out of this interaction with my dad. I’d say my dad and I have much higher EQs, while my mom and brother have more technical skill as artists. My brother is a storyteller though, and so is my dad. I got cooking from my mom.

My dad was anti-authority. You weren’t allowed to ask my dad for permission because he would say yes no matter what it was. He wouldn’t even listen to the question—he would just say yes. Permission had to come from my mom.

Our mom taught us about being responsible about money. She said if we wanted money, there was always work. She made it seem that we could have anything we wanted, anything—but we had to work for it. “You want to buy a $2,000 bike? You know how many hours of work that is going to be? You can have it but you have to work for it.” We lived minimally but comfortably. I think I would spoil my kids a little bit more if I could.

102

On the set of Subway Riders.

103

Sarah at 50

S I T E S A N TA F E (19 9 7 )

LO U I S G R AC H OS

I discovered Sarah’s work at International with Monument, that great East Village gallery that had all these incredible people. I was captivated by her work and started to follow it. When I became director of exhibitions at the Queens Museum, I wanted her to do one of my project spaces. I was a very young curator in a venue that wasn’t the MoMA or the Whitney so it took a lot of courage to call her.

Sarah was intimidating in the sense that so many artists of that generation were so intellectually rigorous and so prepared. She expected people to pay attention to her ideas and make the effort to understand her work. She was a really toughminded artist.

I called and said, “I’d like to talk about a potential project.” I felt she needed more exposure in the museum culture. I asked her about the possibility of doing a midcareer survey. That was probably 1990, 1991, something like that. Finally, after four years, it got to the stage where we said, “Okay, let’s see if we can get this to happen.”

By that time, I was at SITE Santa Fe, and I found a great partner to work on the project, Susan Sterling. The way Sarah worked became pivotal to how this show evolved, specifically the strong and determined linking of the different series as she progressed. It was important that the exhibition not just be, “Let’s select a few things from different eras and put together a show.” We wanted the show to evolve physically. The format revealed the complexities, the evolution of her work, the progression and relationship between her ideas.

After we finished, she came into my office and said, “I’m really happy. The show really works beautifully.” It was a wonderful moment, the kind of thing you hope you achieve when you’re working with an artist.

SAR AH

That show went from Santa Fe to San Diego,12 and then to Washington, where Susan hosted it at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. And because Washington was near New York, all my friends from New York—Cindy and Laurie and Lisa Phillips and Kate Linker and many of the women who were writers or curators or artists, friends, my family—all came to the opening in Washington. My mother, who lived in Maine and was getting to be an older lady, and my two young children, came to Washington together, and I had a chance to show them what I do.

Then it went to the Rose near Boston at Brandeis. And my father and mother and uncles and everybody came to see it at the Rose. That was a lovely experience for me.

104

SITE Santa Fe. Curated by Louis Grachos and Susan Fisher Sterling; November 1, 1997–January 25, 1998.

105

A Home-Cooked Meal Every Night

S I M P LY, B E A U T I F U L LY

SAR AH

I loved to cook from the time I learned how to make a Béchamel sauce in third grade. Starting in about fifth or sixth grade, I asked to become the family cook during the summer. I loved it—I just loved it. I got what seemed to me like a serious salary, $4 a day. My mother would take me to the supermarket. She would allow me to choose what we were buying. I didn’t really have cookbooks. I just made stuff up or saw how things were done.

I had heard of lobster bisque, so I decided to make it. We were in Maine. Why not? I knew how to make a cream sauce, I knew how to cook a lobster, and so—let’s see— how would I do this? I’d cook the lobster so I could get it out of the shell and then make a little cream sauce, and then dilute it with milk and broth and my mother would say, “Well, maybe throw in a dash of sherry.” And I’d throw in a dash of sherry, and I made delicious lobster bisque.

I always cooked. I cooked from early childhood on, and I cook like a maniac to this day.

LUC Y POE

It was one of the only times she helped me with my homework. If I came to the table while she was cooking, she gave me as much attention as I wanted. There was no other time that I got that. That stuck out for Nick and me.

NICK POE

She always had a window box hanging out of our kitchen. She grew herbs and stuff there. She cooked all the time, every single night. I think we ate out at a restaurant maybe two or three times growing up. If she was too tired to cook, which was rare, we would order in Chinese food or Indian and eat on a blanket. But she almost always cooked. We would eat with a candle. Simply, beautifully. She took a lot of pride in that.

LUC Y POE

My mom taught us manners. We put our napkins on the left side, folded in a triangle. You put the fork on top, you put the knife on the right. It was someone’s job to set the table and someone’s to clear it. Someone’s job to pour the water. The TV had to be off. The lights were all off or dimmed and we had candlelight. You put the water glass on the top right. You say grace—we would say grace almost every night growing up.

And my dad, who was so absent for so many things, would be at dinner at seven o’clock every night. No matter how different our lives were, we gathered every night for dinner. Us four, no matter what. Being an adult now and seeing what people’s lives are like, it is so surprising that was our reality every single night.

K AT E L I N K E R

There was a time when she needed a new stove and she said, “Amos has to understand that if he doesn’t get me a proper stove, I’m not going to make the Portuguese fish stew that he likes. I will not be able to make it.” Portuguese fish stew is always in my mind when I think of her and Amos and Great Jones Street.

106

Teacups; 2002, from the series Neverland, Fuji Crystal Archive Print, with lacquer frame, 41.5” x 31.5”.

107

Raising a Family

T H I S E X T R A O R D I N A RY T H I N G

SAR AH

Women of an older generation frequently had to make a choice between being artists and being mothers—the struggle was so difficult. Around the time I started working there were a few women who decided to have children—women slightly older than myself. Elizabeth Murray had two children; or Pat Steir.

These are women that I turned to to find an anchor … how can I be a woman, how can I be an artist, how can I make this work? I remember calling Pat Steir up in the night around 1981. I didn’t even know her. I said, “Help! How can this be done?”

But, you know, our generation is borderline. We’re the first generation out there being able to make these choices and these calls. Women make different choices for themselves and juggle different issues, but the possibility of having a family and children and a career and an income, an independent income, and being fulfilled in a multitude of different ways, is now a possibility for women. And we’re really, really lucky.

ROSELEE GOLDBERG

We were rigorous in our work and had no doubts about our place in the world, and in the art world, but I don’t think we went in very deeply to the total wonder of having children. I thought it was the most radical thing one could do as a woman.

Our art community still found it rather odd, though. The two of us went through our pregnancies together­—her first, my second—pre-natal exercise classes, on our backs between leg lifts catching each other’s eye, disbelieving that here we were, doing this extraordinary thing.

L AURIE SIMMONS

I don’t fight a lot with friends, but she and I would spar a lot. We had this expectation of each other that we were going to be fierce, however that fierceness manifested itself. We were all trying to do something that was really tough.

K AT E L I N K E R

These young women artists went through having their children, and raising their families, with a sense of community and commonality. They wanted motherhood and their relationships with their children on their own terms. As a group of women who were making and writing about new forms of art, all of us shared an intimacy and a sense of the promise of motherhood that were quite unique.

Sarah approached her two children with the same seriousness and love with which she approached her art. This is the key to Sarah: she did everything with passion, integrity, thoroughness. That fact and the idea of having a family were so important to her that she was able to handle incredibly tough times and experiences. Her relationship with Amos, however dark at times, was one of great passion and love, and her deep desire for children grew out of that relationship.

ANNE TIMPSON

She surmounted any difficulty that she ran into, or she ignored it and moved forward. I call it prioritizing. You can be taken down by something or you can just climb over it and keep going.

We wanted perfection. And it’s possible that our childhoods were so magical that we created perfect families in our minds. That’s why Sukie put family so high on the list.

That’s why she valued it so highly.

108

Great Jones Street; January, 1996.

109

110

V.

MILLENNIUM

LO N N I E C A RT ER LIZ DESCHENES NANCY DW YER J AY G O R N E Y JUDITH HUDSON M AT T H E W C . L A N G E LO U I S E L AW L E R K AT E L I N K E R GINA NANNI GLENN O’BRIEN LUC Y POE C I N DY S H E R M A N L AURIE SIMMONS S A N D Y TA I T ANNE TIMPSON CHARLES TR AUB S A R A VA N D E R B E E K W I T H E XC E R P T S F RO M F RO M WO R K BY DOUGL AS EK LUND

111

112

V.

MILLENNIUM

Sarah entered the Millennium on the brink of momentous personal and professional change. Her father died in 2000; her mother died in 2005. Nick and Lucy were beginning to find their own ways. Sarah and Amos parted.

Younger artists increasingly admired Sarah for her work and for having subverted the boys’ club of the art world. Liz Deschenes put it plainly, “If Sarah and her generation hadn’t made the marks that they made, it would be impossible to have the career and practice that I’ve managed to have.”

Image was the language of the new Millennium and the century’s first iconic images—the bodies falling from the twin towers—mirrored the figures in Sarah’s Stills twenty years earlier. Her 1969 vow to figure out “what this meant and what my role was”— continued to position Sarah on the edge of a culture that in many ways she had prophesized. As Sara VandDerBeek noted, “Sarah challenged her medium’s rapid absorption and disposability through her mediation of truth and fiction, myth and the actual, the imagined and the observed, as well as the abstract. All of the things that we are discussing now.” Her students became influential as artists, journalists, and commentators. At the age of 65, Sarah was given charge of the re-formation of the photography curriculum at Princeton. The Princeton appointment brought her full circle to her family’s roots. In 2004, Sarah acquired a house of her own. In a Berkshire village, not far from where Jonathan Edwards had preached, she found new ground. Sarah continued working from her Brooklyn studio to produce Neverland (2002), Concrete Color (2006), and Figure Drawings (2008). Working with nature and light from her new Connecticut studio, she went on to create Work in Progress (2009) and Available Light (2012). Sarah dedicated herself to her work, her career, her house and garden, her kitchen, and her relationships—old and new. There was even talk of a dog.

113

At the Bottom of the Berkshires

A HOUSE IN CONNECTICUT (20 04)

LO N N I E C A RT ER

Falls Village is the second smallest town in the third smallest state in the Union. I found that I could start my life over again, reinvent myself. I think that was a quality that Sarah saw immediately and liked as well.

SAR AH

I have a house in Connecticut. My house was built in 1830, and it’s all made of chestnut. It’s a lovely colonial house. I bought it in 2004, just before my mother died in 2005. It’s sad that neither of my parents saw this house because it’s the house they would have wished for me my whole life.

I’d been wanting a house of my own ever since I was a little girl. My uncle was an architect, and I learned how to do architectural drawings—how you draw a door, how you draw a window, how you do a wall. When I stayed home from school, if I had a cold or something, I’d always have a drawing board, and I used to design my dream house. I’d say, “The living room will be there, and there’ll be a studio there.”

I went to visit my friend Laurie Simmons, who had a house up in the northwest corner of Connecticut at the bottom of the Berkshires—beautiful farm country.

I woke up that morning and said, “I want to buy a house today.” Betsy Little, the realtor—a long-time friend of Laurie’s and my doctor, Elizabeth Beautyman—took us to see this house that she thought I would like.

I remember when we came to it, Betsy drove past because the parking space was a little further down the street. And I said, “Why is it never a house like that one?” But it was that house. It was the house I’d been looking for my entire life.

I had been looking for a house. I never ... I don’t own my loft—I rent it on Great Jones Street. I never had a lot of extra money, never had really any extra money. I just sort of did what I needed to do and raised my kids and got them through school. But I wanted a house for a really long time.

L AURIE SIMMONS

Sarah woke up that day and said, “I’m in the mood to buy a house!” I think we looked at four or five that day. My little daughter Grace, who was twelve, was with us. Sarah said that Grace was one of the reasons she bought that house, because Grace really encouraged her and told her that it was a good house and that the spaces were good.

She cried when she got the house. She cried at the closing. She was so emotional about this house. I felt like it was the first thing she ever had outside her work that was totally, utterly 100% hers.

K AT E L I N K E R

I said, “God, Sarah—I heard you found a house and Laurie said it’s really beautiful.”

Sarah said to me, “It is not beautiful. It is exquisite.”

114

The house—not beautiful, exquisite.

115

White Was a Real Experience

T H E S T O RY O F T H E P A I N T C H I P S

S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

Sarah was incredibly committed; she just couldn’t do anything that she wasn’t wholly committed to. She couldn’t do anything half-assed.

LO U I S E L AW L E R

… there is something consistent with her intense and open involvement with the everyday, her attentive friendships, well-nurtured family, fabulous garden, and her well-considered work. Her engagement with all aspects of its production and reception was fierce. Pushing our sometimes-shared printer or mounter for more perfection, I was glad they also had to deal with Sarah.13 SAR AH

When I made the white-on-white prints, I had to hand-touch the prints. If there was a speck of dust, I had to go in and burn it out with retouch bleach and re-clean it and re-archive it. Things are always in process.

L AURIE SIMMONS

She had about 20 different shades of white paint chips taped to the walls. It took her months to decide what color white to paint the wall. She made Monet look like a real hack, because she would wait to watch the sun go across the room. We finally just said, “Can you paint the damn walls already?” White was a real experience—it was really a color for her.

I found her deliberations obsessive and told her to just get the job done, but afterward I relied on her for advice about all things white. Master printers at photo labs have told me that Sarah’s fixation on the “right white” was “memorable” and among the most challenging artist projects they had undertaken.

GINA NANNI

She purchased this house with garish colors in every room—marigold in one room, turquoise in another­—and wanted us to look at her paint colors.

GLENN O’BRIEN

She called us. “Can you guys come over and look at some paint swatches?” We went over a bunch of times. We’d have dinner and drinks and stuff, and then we’d go on for a long while about the paint swatches. All the colors that she showed us were whitish gray. She would show us two chips and I’d be like, “Are those different?”

116

Bowls and plates in Falls Village.

117

Rearranging

FA L L S V I L L AG E

L AURIE SIMMONS

When I tried to convince Sarah that she should a) move here and b) get this house, I said, “You’re going to make work here; you’re going to find a whole community of new friends here; you’re going to find a boyfriend here.” I crossed my fingers and put them behind my back because I was making it up. I was totally lying. It was a very inappropriate thing to say and I said it like it was going to be a fact. I was promising her all of this stuff and I thought, “I can’t deliver any of this.”

LO N N I E C A RT ER

I met Sarah in the library, literally bumping into each other. I didn’t know anything about her. I like to say that when I met Sarah I knew less than nothing about the art world, and after I knew her, I knew nothing about the art world. And she knew nothing, less than nothing, about the theater. And then, after being with me, she knew nothing about the theatre. We didn’t understand anything about what the other person did.

I went to her house. She had made a snack of mozzarella and tomatoes. She made a point of saying that when she put out food everything had to be in a certain pattern.

It was quite lovely. I’m more of a messy person, where she was meticulous—had to have everything in order. She told me right up-front, laying down the ground rules: “If you want to have anything to do with me, you have to realize that this is the way I am—either put up with it or get out.” I put up with it quite happily.

That was the end of 2006. I think it was December 23rd, a little bit before Christmas.

I know by New Year’s Eve, meaning seven days later, we went to a party and... we were so happy. We were just gliding along. It was a marvelous feeling. We became immediately devoted to each other.

She rented a small studio two buildings away from her house. Often she’d be in the studio at one or two o’clock in the afternoon and I’d knock at the door and come in, and she’d make a place for me to sit. I would read the paper and she would continue working, moving photographs and various colors and shaping them and rearranging them. Sometimes I’d be there for an hour, two hours—I loved it. I loved the sense of her being near. Neither of us was going anywhere else. We would have spent the rest of our lives together. No matter what happened, no matter where we were, if we were on different continents, we trusted each other completely. And we always yearned for each other.

We played quite a bit of tennis. She loved playing tennis. Wasn’t all that good, I used to think, but she loved it and loved sort of examining how to swing a racket and how high to throw the ball—all the minutiae of the mechanics. I remember reading something about Arthur Ashe one time. He was having trouble with the serves and he went and hit a thousand serves and decided after hitting a thousand he’d throw the ball one inch higher. His actions were meticulous. Sarah absolutely loved that.

118

Lonnie and Sarah.

119

Guild & Greyshkul

CONTINUUM (2008)

S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

I had admired Sarah’s work for some time but had not seen it in person until 2007 when we interviewed each other for North Drive Press. At that time, I found an opportunity to see Fear of Nothing, which to this day is my favorite piece.

In one part of the work there is a glossy black void. It was like a divination mirror or a portal to the foundations of our collective psyche. The accompanying image was a still life that involved a horror vacuui mask from antiquity with primary geometric forms resting beneath it. Within this work was everything that interests me. I was enthralled and impressed. It was perfectly executed. As I looked more closely I realized—through a fine-cut edge running along the side of one of the objects—that this was a photograph of a photograph. With this succinct gesture my understanding of this work was completely shifted. It became even more remarkable.

I was intimidated to meet Sarah. She had made this incredible work that did many of the things I would like my work to do but she had done it twenty years prior… As I’m walking up the stairs of her apartment on Great Jones Street, I’m thinking about this while balancing a notebook and two coffees. I get to the top, Sarah opens the door, and immediately I spill the coffee down the front of my shirt.

Sarah had me take my shirt off. She removed the coffee stain—the shirt was perfect.

Then we had the interview. There I was—half undressed wearing a tank top, with this graceful, attentive, and formidable woman. From that moment on I was completely in awe, and completely enamored.

The project at Guild & Greyshkul came out of this and other conversations over the course of many months. I learned from Sarah’s remarkable attention to detail that making is also defining, editing and focusing. I spin around in my words, taking a lot of words to get to where I want to go. Sarah was willing to listen intently and interpret, to pull out the important points, make them succinct and ground them in theory and structure.

One of the things we talked about was the inundation of images in our current visual environment—the taking and sharing hundreds of images. Sarah impressed me with her astute reading of media. We shared the belief that this abundance of imagery was strengthening the impact of contemporary photographic practices.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

Guild & Greyshkul was run by Sara VanDerBeek, her brother Johannes, and Anya Kielar. They were organizing a show of six women artists, mostly younger, including Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Dana Hoey, Anya Kielar, Martha Rosler, and May Wilson—and they contacted Sarah and asked her to participate in the show. It wasn’t a Gagosian show or a Zwirner show, but it was an important moment. She was now an older artist being rediscovered by a younger generation.

S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

Each image of Figure Drawings depicts an autonomous figure—from ancient to contemporary societies in various states of being. One strength of Figure Drawings is Sarah’s arrangement of these moments together to create a larger network—which, in its movement through time, seems to be striving towards an understanding of human existence.

The day of the opening was amazing. Many of her friends and peers came, all women that I had admired gathering in one place to celebrate her, and to celebrate this continuum of creation and image-making among generations. It was a significant and lasting moment in my life.

120

installation view: Figure Drawings in the exhibition The Human Face is a Monument, Guild & Greyshkul, New York.

Photographed by Brigitte Lacombe for The Glamour Project.

121

The Pictures Generation

H I S TO R I C IZI N G (2 0 0 9)

DOUGL AS EK LUND

They were part of the first generation to be born into the swarm of images spawned by the rapidly expanding post-war consumer culture—movies, magazines, and music—which was, seen from our perspective today, still in its infancy. It was precisely this transformation of the American economy—from one based on need to one of desire—that shaped their outlook of the world.14 SAR AH

I guess our generation is now being called “the pictures generation” ever since Doug Eklund’s show at the Met. We’ve officially become the pictures generation, which is sort of derived from Metro Pictures and the whole postmodern shtick about representation and all the things that it was about.

L AURIE SIMMONS

For any period of time there are 100 different stories, depending on who you speak to. I can assure you that every single artist in that show had their own story about that show.

It was just another museum show that was bringing together a story that we knew that was being told from a different vantage point. If it was our story, we would have told it from our vantage point, not from the pictures generation’s story. We would have started from the point where the women met, not from the guys in grad school in CalArts.

C I N DY S H E R M A N

It was a lot of people to be thrown into one time period of our history … crossing LA, and New York, and also film and visual art and performance and theater.

That’s what that time was about. You weren’t just painting or being a photographer.

You also happened to be in a band or did stand-up comedy—everybody was experimenting and nobody thought they were going to make any money from their work, so they might as well try other stuff…

J AY G O R N E Y

Generally artists make their work, and then critics, writers, gallerists, and curators package it into movements. There are cultural “Big Bang” moments when diverse artists make work with strong relationships—Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, for example. Sometimes it’s actually a manifesto, as with Dada, but generally it’s a zeitgeist moment. Then critics spin it one way and curators spin it another way and dealers spin it another way. In terms of the Pictures group, it became clear that there was a diverse group of artists working with popular photographic imagery. But when you look at more carefully at artists as different as Cindy Sherman or Sarah Charlesworth or Richard Prince or Jim Welling, the differences become far more pronounced. Sarah looked so good in the Pictures show. But Doug Eklund, who did a great job on the exhibition, also acquired the work for the Met. That was really meaningful for Sarah.

122

The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

123

SVA, NYU, Hartford University, RISD, and Princeton

CONNECTING

SAR AH

I’d taught a class with Joseph in 1975 called “Theory of Art Workshop”. I loved teaching from the beginning. I loved it more and more and more. I’ve studied so much. I’ve read so much, seen so many shows, thought about art and thought about photography so much. Teaching is an opportunity to share that. I shouldn’t even say this­—but it’s a little bit like mothering: you’re helping older kids figure out who they are and what they want to do. It’s a supportive role and it requires a lot of giving, but good giving; fun giving, rich giving.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

Sarah was intimidating at first. She had a presence; you’d see her walking around the department with quite deliberate movements. There was a sense that you should have something important to say if you were going to approach her.

She could be a little off-putting in terms of how direct she was. She would ask questions that would seem blunt, but she always had a good reason. You would hang pictures next to each other and she would say, “No. Absolutely not. You can’t do that!” Sometimes it was practical—“that one is orange and that one is a slightly different shade of yellow and it’s just not right.” Or sometimes it was, “The concept of this picture is totally at odds with the concept of the other.”

Sarah was very careful and deliberate with her language. When a student talked about photographic tropes, Sarah said, “You’re not talking about tropes, but conventions—a convention is not the same thing as a trope.” She wanted students to choose their words, to weigh words as a way to clarify their ideas. Sarah believed that for your work to be successful, you should understand precisely what you’re doing. It goes back to her approach to making work, the connecting. It was always about asking, “How do these connect?” How can you bring these things closer to one another?” Always an insightful comment or an idea that would be incredibly productive. Her approach was rigorous, but done with very obvious concern.

CHARLES TR AUB

Once Sarah connected, she was fiercely loyal. She always went to her student shows.

She always remained loyal to her people—even if she fought them. “I don’t agree with you. I’m not gonna do it your way. But you’re still my colleague.”

Her students were in awe because she was so unblinking about being an artist— being a well-known and important artist. She saw everything and she made her students do it. She would test you. “Did you see this show? What was it? Where was the so-and-so picture?”

She was unabashed about addressing her opinion. I really admired her for that; we all did. Many times I would think, “She’s a pain in the ass. There is no give.” Then I would walk away and think, “Well, she might be right.” She had clarity of thinking.

She was a very fine thinker.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

After she was hired at Princeton, I was at Princeton, too. As we drove back to the city, there was always conversation about the student’s work and how their project was progressing. If somebody was not up to standard, or was faltering, Sarah was always very concerned. She’d see students on the edge of a good idea and wonder what she could do to help, to guide them toward making the work that they really wanted to make.

124

Sarah at SVA photographed with Vera Lutter.

Sarah with Princeton class; April, 2013. Zwirner Gallery.

125

What Made It Beautiful

IN TUNE WITH HER INSTINCTS

CHARLES TR AUB

One of her famous sayings was “Work backwards.” Meaning if you’ve got an idea, figure out what you have to do by working backwards. And that’s what she did all the time—she worked backwards.

Sarah wasn’t interested in pattern, and wasn’t associative, but the way she worked was logical. Completely logical. Which seems antithetical to an artist, but it isn’t necessarily. She was very willful and very exacting about getting from A to B to C to D. She had laser focus.

M AT T H E W C . L A N G E

Sarah couldn’t create something that wasn’t beautiful, but for her the idea behind it was more important than the beauty. The beauty was in her workmanship. If it’s 30” by 40” and blue, there is a certain expression and certain communicative power in that picture. And if it’s on glossy paper, it says something different than if it’s on matte paper. Sarah had an innate sense of what made it beautiful, but she never did it frivolously—I don’t think she ever said, “It has to be a certain size because that will sell for more or it will look great on a wall.” It was, “If it’s going to be this size it’s going to change its relationship to other pictures or it’s going to communicate in a different way, so it has to be this size. That’s the only size that makes sense.”

There are rules that we all follow, whether we like it or not. Sarah was trying to articulate what those rules are and what they mean. They may change and evolve, but we can also use them to different ends. If you look at later series, her saturated red color may be less sexual and violent than in her earlier work but it derives from the same set of rules that govern how we perceive images. She built from a place where we perceive red as a passionate color. She was always bringing in motifs from a set of rules that we actually employ—trying to pick apart the visual language that is already at play.

Sarah needed an external logic. But she ultimately operated in tune with her instincts. The result is that despite her great explanatory powers something about her work defies explanation. She was very clear about her operating structure—but then the work had to provide an emotional response for her to accept it as valid.

J U DY H U D S O N

The beauty in Sarah’s work was inherent. She was born with it. But she was also staunchly intellectual and pushed that hard. She combined beauty and mind in an alchemical way to produce a metaphysical other-worldly image. It moved me in a spiritual way.

S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

Sarah’s works have the quality of a sacred object. Maybe that is because they feel timeless. They are perfect objects—seamless and perfect—but within them she often included a key or an entry point. She made works and exhibitions that were incredibly generous and generative.

CHARLES TR AUB

Her work had a kind of presence about it, a kind of finish that transcended even the picture that was being made—that gave it a kind of object beauty that just knocked me out.

126

Half Bowl; 2012, from the series Available Light, Fuji Crystal Archive Print, mounted and laminated with lacquer frame, 41” x 32”.

127

The Visual Arts Program in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University is pleased to announce that Sarah Charlesworth and James Welling will join the photography faculty.

P R I N C E T O N , F U L L C I R C L E ( 2 0 12 )

GINA NANNI

She was going to have the prestige of starting this program, heading up this department—it was a split position with James Welling. She only had to do it for half of the year. She would have the other half of the year to do her own work. She talked about it a lot and would say, “I’m excited about this. I’m afraid to talk about it.” And then she’d talk about it.

LIZ DESCHENES

Without question, the appointment to being a tenured Professor at Princeton was of significant prestige and arrived at completely meritoriously; Sarah had been an esteemed faculty member at SVA for over 20 years, helping to make a department of rigor with strong faculty and students. It—Princeton—also came with a tremendous amount of responsibility: there was, of course, teaching and curriculum development.

She and Jim Welling were building something there that Princeton had not invested in before—a strong contemporary Photography Department. From my vantage point of being an artist and a teacher, I believe that if Sarah had been a man there would have been a different conversation about that position. Developing a department in an Ivy League University was a major undertaking. Teaching impacts artists’ time for their work. Of course it is rewarding, but it can also be a sacrifice of time, missed events of one’s own work and career, and friends and colleagues. Teaching is a commitment and Sarah was remarkably conscientious and exceptionally skilled at being an educator.

SAR AH

It’s going to be a challenge to figure out what a photography program at an important Ivy League college could be. It’s not an art school. So it’s a different story than kids in graduate school that decide they want to be artists. These kids may want to be anthropologists or Eastern religion majors. So what does photography mean to them? I like the conceptual challenge. It’s curious to figure out the relationship between analog and digital photography and how to put together a facility and a program that teaches visual literacy, technical literacy, and challenges ideas and imagination. It’s a changing world.

NANCY DW YER

I remember a dinner at Jo Bonney’s house not long after Sarah took the position, and how clearly pleased she was, especially because her father and other family members were alumni. It was uncharacteristic for her to show open enthusiasm, so I noticed.

S A N D Y TA I T

I live in Princeton. During Sarah’s first year as a professor there, she would sleep over at my house once a week. I’ve chosen the words sleep over intentionally—it was a wonderful adult reinvention of a pajama party. She would arrive around seven, exhausted, but inspired after a long day of meetings and teaching. I would cook dinner, she would sip vodka, comment on my culinary skills and together we would laugh and talk—trying to solve the problems of our personal worlds and the world at large, too. Her counsel as a friend was direct and honest and I miss it. After dinner we would get into our pajamas, sit side by side on the couch and watch a movie.

Sound fun? It was.

128

With Princeton students.

129

Getting Older

T H E W O R K T H AT I ’ M W O R K I N G O N R I G H T N O W

SAR AH

I like the work that I’m working on right now. Available Light to me is not just about spectral light, but it’s also about illumination or spiritual light. To me, they’re very close. They’re very, very close.

I realize that getting older, there are a lot of other kinds of challenges—a new teaching job, health issues, difficult emotional transitions.

My parents are both dead now. Thank goodness my siblings are still alive and my dearest friends. But we’re already at the point where we’ve lost friends and probably will lose more.

And so, mortality looms increasingly. I’m hoping that I get some grandchildren. I’ve become clearer in the recent years about what I’d like to really accomplish—how I would like to feel about myself. I worried as a younger woman about career or recognition or money. I’m less concerned with those things now … It is what it is, and it’s coming if it’s coming, and it’s not if it’s not. I think what I would really like is to have some kind of wisdom, to feel resolved with my children and my choices and be at peace with myself and my life and be okay about that.

One of the joys is having my children begin to be adults. It’s fun having a son who’s a young artist. He wants to see stuff and talk about stuff, and he has interesting ideas.

And my daughter just graduated from NYU and she’s excited—she’s interested in science and wants to go to graduate school. She might want to go to medical school … It’s a lovely period for me getting to that point with my children.

I am looking forward to a point—and I hope that I live this long—where more and more and more of the work is brought into the public sphere. There is substance there that still remains to be explored and appreciated.

130

Lucy and Nick at Doubleworld, the New Museum; summer, 2015.

131

On June 25, 2013, Sarah died at her house in Falls Village

F O LLOW TH E LIG HT

LUC Y POE

From a very young age my mom insisted that Nick and I be independent and make ourselves happy and find our own way. I remember going to her room when I was little because I was scared of my nightmares and she would say, “Just follow the light.

Just think if you have the choice between lightness and a way with less light, you’d be best to choose the light.”

My mom passed in what felt like a second to Nick and me. The whole world was coming together for her. She was at this really happy place. She was so alive, and then she didn’t wake up the next morning. I remember going downstairs at the house in Connecticut on the 26th. We were all together—Nick, my dad, my aunts, and Lonnie. And I thought, “I am not afraid.” I remember feeling that this is all the work that she did raising Nick and me—it was for this moment.

Now, in her absence, all the words and phrases that my mom had spoken our whole lives, that hadn’t made sense, now they made sense. Nick and I both knew that we shouldn’t be afraid. “Follow the light.” For her, the answer was light. To be able to throw light into your thinking, and to use that was what my mom was teaching us.

She said that when you don’t know what’s right or wrong and you need to make a decision, when you need a path—feel the light. Move toward that light. There is an innate sense that can lead us in the right direction.

Nick and I have made a pact that we will spend the rest of our lives addressing and negotiating our mom’s favorite expression. “Follow the light.” It seems right.

132

Self-portrait with Shadows, taken by Sarah Charlesworth at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; 2013.

133

134

ALBUM

LO N N I E C A RT ER LIZ DESCHENES NANCY DW YER JUDITH HUDSON MEL KENDRICK K AT E L I N K E R M A RGOT N O RTO N AMOS POE L AURIE SIMMONS LY N N E T I L L M A N CHARLES TR AUB S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

135

Romy, Sarah, and Nancy; 1951.

Nancy, Romy (in red), and Sarah with basket; 1952.

Sarah with her father.

Oklahoma; 1962. Taken by Romy Charlesworth.

Birthday with Roger B. Charlesworth, Jr. Sarah, New York City; 1968.

136

Sarah in Maine.

Oklahoma boyfriend, Bill Cooke, Texas holiday; 1965.

Sarah, holding the cards, with Bill Cooke and friends.

137

A Part of Her

TH R E E C A R S TO R I E S

LO N N I E C A RT ER

We decided to go to a movie at the Angelica on Houston. She was crossing the street to go to the parking lot. I said, “Sarah, where are you going?” She said, “To get the car.” I said, “The Angelica is three blocks away. It’s a beautiful night.

Let’s walk.” “We’re taking the car.” Off we go. All three blocks. We get there and guess what, there’s no place to park.

Are you kidding? So then starts the trek, round and round to find the non-existent parking spot. She finally settles on a dubious spot that is certainly illegal and leaves the car jutting out into the street.

Seven blocks away from the Great Jones loft. By now, even though we had left in plenty of time, we’re about to be late.

We start running to the Angelica, she in heels, of course. We see the movie and here’s the thing: I can’t recall even a frame. I was so in the thrall of this car-crazed broad.

138

L AURIE SIMMONS

I said to Tip, my husband, “I don’t think I can ride with her anymore.” Because we’d get in the car and it’s like she’d give me her bag. “Laurie, can you get me my sunglasses?” I’d find her sunglasses.

“Laurie, where is my wallet?“ “I can’t find your wallet.” “Oh my God. Can you get the grocery bag and find my wallet?”

I’d find her wallet. The phone would ring. “Can you get the phone and set up my headset? Hi, Lonnie.” The phone would ring again. “Laurie, get my phone.

Hi Lucy, Hi Nick. Make the plans.” I’d make the dinner plans. We would stop at Judson’s to pick up her vegetables. We’d stop at Wineology to get her wine. “I have to stop uptown at Laumont to check some prints, can you wait in the car?”

On the train, I would have been reading for two hours and 15 minutes. Instead, five hours later, 11 stops later, 22 arguments later, I would be home in New York. I could have gone to China for what I went through.

LY N N E T I L L M A N

Her station wagon seemed a part of Sarah—practical and efficient. When the film group ended she would offer me a lift home, always.

Sarah sometimes had a wry smile, enigmatic. That’s what I saw after she dropped me off. She’d look out from the driver’s seat, her head turned in my direction. The smile said something generous, sort of, “Okay, this is our life, isn’t it funny?”

With John Auerbach, “who had just graduated from Yale and worked on Wall Street,” page 52.

Art & Language, Theory/Practice Workshop, Inc. Guide, Suzy Harris, Joseph Kosuth, Sarah, Keith Sonnier, and Jackie Winsor. Photographed by Tony Shafrazi. Tehran; February, 1978.

139

March 21, 1984, Wedding Day. Roger, Jr. with Sarah.

(Back row) unknown, Amos, Bryan Hunt.

Newborn Nick; spring, 1985.

Natal charts; 1985.

140

31 Great Jones Street. Robert Rauschenberg lived across the street. Jean-Michel Basquiat was painting from an apartment six doors east. From the back, you could see into the windows of Robert Mappethorpe’s apartment and Chuck Close’s studio.

From Sarah’s studio, looking into the kitchen.

Sarah’s studio, under the skylight.

Sarah’s studio, west wall, looking into the living room.

The living room, looking into the studio.

The living room.

Sarah’s kitchen.

141

Hell-Bent on Winning

S T U F F I N G T H E B A L LOT B OX

L AURIE SIMMONS

Sarah really wanted to win the 2011 Falls Village scarecrow contest. When we arrived at the fall festival, I spotted Sarah in the crowd bending forward and looking through a large-format camera with a black focusing cloth over her shoulders. Her blonde hair hid her face, and she was in her casual weekend outfit: blue jeans, white quilted Nikes. Only, wait! It wasn’t Sarah, but rather, Sarah’s scarecrow.

You know why Sarah won? She was so hell-bent on winning that I just went and bought every ballot I could. And I gave Lena like twenty bucks and I said, “Buy the ballots. Get your boyfriend. We’re stuffing the ballot box.” I threw so much money at that project. I just kept sending all these different kids back to buy the voting tickets.

We stuffed the ballot box.

That is true, by the way. Sarah didn’t care. She just wanted to win. She kept a snapshot of her prizewinning Doppelgänger on her computer desktop, alongside her work.

In front of her Falls Village studio window.

The Scarecrow Contest; October, 2011.

142

The sisters. Nancy’s wedding in Kittery Point, Maine.

Fourth of July. Parents, Kittery Point, Maine.

With Judy Hudson and Nick Poe, at Genevieve Hudson-Price’s pop-up, 7eleven Gallery; October, 2011.

With Elizabeth Murray.

143

MEL KENDRICK

The last time I saw Sarah, we were at the Metropolitan. We were talking in one of those echoing rooms, and after a while she said, “You’re having trouble hearing.” And I said, “Well, yeah. How do you know?” And she said, “I can see you, the way you turn your head to hear people speak. You can do something about that.”

She pulled her hair back. She’d gotten a hearing aid. She said, “This has changed everything. I researched it. I know who you should go to. You should really do it. It’s changed my life.”

She had stood there while we were talking in a little group observing how I was turning my head—she knew exactly what was going on.

K AT E L I N K E R

She’d started producing a whole body of work. It was her best work. You look at a range of artists and many produce less interesting works in their late years or they duplicate themselves in some ways. But this work was just extraordinarily beautiful. Exquisite, in her terms.

“There was sort of a B.C. and an A.C., and that art—after this transformation in the practice of photography­by artists—was irrevocably altered.”15 LO N N I E C A RT ER

I’ve read that Sophia Loren’s feet are quite beautiful. Whoever wrote that had not seen Sarah’s.

144

NANCY DW YER

I knew Sarah for many, many years and I always admired her work. I think the last two shows were her best ever. She was really at a high point in her life.

LY N N E T I L L M A N

Sarah had her own way of seeing. Her exquisite sense of proportion, color, and shape made its own space in my mind.

M A RGOT N O RTO N

LIZ DESCHENES

Sarah was one of the more social human beings I know. Let’s put it down to really simple terms: I think Sarah was invested in being an asset in people’s lives. Those are conscious decisions. There’s no way that a human being can be so benevolent toward others and not have really thought about it. It doesn’t happen accidentally.

S A R A VA N D E R B E E K

We had dinner about ten days before she died. I will always remember Sarah talking about her new body of work.

She had gotten a field camera. She was working outside. She was actively pursuing a new way of taking pictures.

She was not in any way done. Just to imagine someone leaving this life in such a moving and poignant and wonderful way. She ended with energy.

CHARLES TR AUB

Charlesworth played a crucial role in expanding and illuminating the possibilities within photography as a universe—stretched from the found image taken from the media to culture at large. She worked privately, and almost obsessively, but that’s the paradox of an artist who demonstrated that photography is first and foremost a social phenomenon, in which we are all immersed, whether we like it or not.16 J U DY H U D S O N

At the end, Sarah was Sarah squared, Sarah to the Nth power. She knew her work was true and singular and would abide and endure. She said to her kids, and to me, “I think I will be more successful after I die.” She knew that her work had lasting resonance and she was confident about that. When I saw the New Museum show, I was thrilled.

Because she knew. She knew that that would happen, and that gave me comfort.

I was up at the house two days before she died. I was up there fishing with Luigi Ballerini, the Italian Poet. Sarah AMOS POE insisted, she just insisted, that we come I have no idea what love is, but whatever to lunch. The house was immaculate, just it is, looking back, it was there. fucking gorgeous. The garden was in full bloom. Sarah was radiant. The food was incredible. The Chicago show was in the works. People were buying her work. And she had this Princeton job. You don’t think of Sarah being a relaxed person, but she was so relaxed. I thought, “Oh my God, I could fall in love with this woman.”

145

M O RG A N C H A R L E S WO RT H G E N E A LO GY

Harry Prescott Charlesworth

Rosemary (Ro) Charlesworth 1911–1998

Robert (Sandy) Charlesworth 1921–2010

Richard (Dick) Charlesworth 1923–

m.— James Timpson 1910–2003

m.— Anne Holloway

m.— Anne Royal (Big Anne)

Anne Timpson 1946

146

Anne Barnes

James Timpson 1950

Roger Barnes Charlesworth 1913–2000

Sarah Pierpont 1710–1758

Jonathan Edwards 1703–1758

DIRECT LINE

Agnes Edwards Forbes

Francis Speir

Sarah Schuyler Speir

George Orlando Morgan, Jr.

Sarah Edwards Morgan 1918–2005

Sarah Edwards Charlesworth 1947–2013 m.— Amos Poe 1949

Nicholas Tiger Poe 1985

147

George Orlando Morgan, III 1916

Agnes (Nancy) Charlesworth 1949

Sarah Lucy Poe 1988

Frances Morgan 1920

Rosemary (Romy) Charlesworth 1952

Robert Morgan 1922

Thomas Morgan 1924

Roger Barnes Charlesworth, Jr. 1958

N OTE S 1. Lisa Phillips. Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective. SITE Santa Fe; 1998. Page 45.

I.

S TA R T I N G O U T

2. ROMY CHARLESWORTH. A Family of Engineers: My grandfather, Harry Prescott Charlesworth, was of one of the first graduating classes in electrical engineering at MIT 1905. It may have been the first. Before that, MIT was big for chemical and mechanical engineering. Electrical Engineering was new. He was brilliant, knew what he loved, and got work with American Telephone and Telegraph immediately. He became a pioneer in long-distance telephone engineering.

His work led him to become vice president of Bell Labs. This is a link to his bio: http://ethw.org/Harry_Charlesworth.

Granddaddy’s father was one of Haverhill’s first fire chiefs (important because of the great fire that wiped much of the mills in 1882), and partnered to start the first turbine electrical power company in Haverhill, Mass.

3. ROMY CHARLESWORTH. The kit Dad built our house from was the 1959 “Techbilt” Deck House that later became Acorn Deck House of Acton, Mass. It was a new concept featuring prefabricated post-and-beam design, tongueand-groove wood walls, glass panels and a deck, linking outdoors to indoors in an environmentally pleasing way.

Uncle Dick also used this plan to build his summer house in Southport, Maine.

II.

N E W YO R K

4. Modern History: Herald Tribune; September, 1977, at C Space in New York; March 19–30, 1978.

5. John Auerbach, who Sarah dated in the late ’60s. See photo, page 143.

6. One week before his death in October, 1968, Marcel Duchamp selected 23-year-old Joseph Kosuth to receive the prestigious 1968 Cassandra Foundation Grant.

7. Lisa Phillips. Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective.

SITE Santa Fe; 1998. Page 42.

8. Susan Fisher-Sterling. Sarah Charlesworth: A Retrospective. SITE Santa Fe; 1998. Page 75.

III.

THE EIGHTIES

9. Linker, Kate. Art in America, Sarah Charlesworth: Artifacts of Artifice; July, 1998. Pages 74-79, 106 + cover (feature).

148

I V.

THE NINETIES

10. Sarah showed with a number of Galleries in New York and Europe. In addition she was represented by S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Canada (from 1986); Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (from 1987); and the Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, CO (from 2003).

11. Work in Progress, Susan Inglett Gallery; 2009.

12. The SITE Santa Fe Retrospective traveled to: The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; The National Museum of Women in the Arts, in Washington, DC; The Cleveland Center for the Arts, Cleveland, OH; and The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Sarah Charlesworth, A Retrospective, curated by Louis Grachos and Susan Fisher Sterling.

V. M I L L E N I U M

13. Louise Lawler, Traveling to LA Together, Art Forum; November 13, 2013.

14. Douglas Eklund, The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Page 16.

ALBUM

15. Kate Linker, “Challenged To Encompass Everything”: Friends Remember Sarah Charlesworth at the Art Institute of Chicago. Art News; September 18, 2014.

16 . Margot Norton from correspondence with the authors; June 2015.

ACK NOWLEDGEMENTS

17. All comments included in this book attributed to Sarah Charlesworth are adapted from a 2011 interview conducted

by Judith Olch Richards for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art’s Oral History Program: Oral history interview with Sarah Edwards Charlesworth; 2011, November 2–9, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.

INDEX OF NAMES AND TITLES A

Academy of Secrets, Series, 65, 91 Acconci, Vito, 50 ACT UP, 89 AT&T, American Telephone and Telegraph,

Bell Labs, 148 Amin, Idi, 58 Anderson, Laurie, 46 Andre, Carl, 44–45, 50 Arbus, Diane, 48 Art & Language, 54, 139 Art in America, 65, 89, 146 Artists Movement for Cultural Change, 54, 56, 146 Artists Space, 54 Ashe, Arthur, 118 Auerbach, John, 48, 139 Available Light, Series, 113, 130

Half Bowl, 127 B

Baldwin, Gallery, 146 Baldwin, Michael, 54 Ballerini, Luigi, 145 Barboza, Anthony, 93 Barnard College, 39-40 Barnes, Anne, grandmother, 16, 18, 22, Barry, Robert, 44–45 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 141 Béar, Liza, 71–72 Beautyman, Elizabeth, 114 Belcher, Alan, 92 Bellamy, Peter Sumner Walton, photographer, 59 Bender, Gretchen, 70, 90 Beveridge, Karl, 58 Bigelow, Kathryn, 54 Bischofberger, Bruno, 64 Blast Magazine, 72 Boltanski, Christian, 66 BOMB Magazine, 72–73 Bonney, Jo, 70, 128 Boone, Mary, 60 Bradford College, 15, 34, 39–40 Brandeis University, The Rose Art Museum, 102, 146 Brasserie, The, 40 Burden, Chris, 30 C

C-Space, Gallery, 146 Cage, John, 46 CalArts, California Institute of the Arts, 122 Calder, Alexander, 100 Camus, Albert, 30 Capote, Truman, 71, 92 Carter, Lonnie, 102, 114, 118–119, 132, 138, 144 Cassandra Foundation, 146 Castelli, Leo, 71, 92 Cedar Tavern, 39 149

Chanel, 58, 72 Charlesworth, Agnes (Nancy), sister, 14, 20–21, 24, 26, 28–30,

40, 100, 130, 132, 136, 143 Charlesworth, Ann (Big Ann), aunt, 27 Charlesworth, Annie, cousin, 27 Charlesworth, Harry Prescott (Granddad, “H.P.C.”),

grandfather, 16, 18, 27, 34 Charlesworth, Mary, cousin, 27 Charlesworth, Richard (Uncle Dick), 19 Charlesworth, Robert (Uncle Sandy), 19 Charlesworth, Roger Barnes, father, 15–22, 24, 28, 30, 113, 136, 143 Charlesworth, Roger Barnes, Jr., brother, 26, 28–29, 130, 136, 140 Charlesworth, Rosemary (Romy), sister, 14, 18–20, 26, 28–29,

49, 68, 100, 102, 130, 132, 136, 143 Charlesworth, Susan, cousin, 27 Child, Julia, 70 Chinese Chance, 60 Circus, Barnum & Bailey, 32 Clemente, Alba, 78 Clemente, Francesco, 78 Cleveland Center for the Arts, 146 Close, Chuck, 137 Columbia University, 39–40, 42–43, 46 Concrete Color, Series, 113 Conde, Carole, 54 Cooke, Bill, 137 Connecticut, Falls Village, 104, 115, 117–118, 132, 142 Crimp, Douglas, 90 D

Dada, 122 Deleuze, Gilles, 70 Deschenes, Liz, 113, 128, 144 Dietrich, Marlene, 58 Dika, Vera, 58, 70 Donne, John, 18 Donnell Library Center, 70 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 30 Double World Series, 89

Voyeur, 89

Allegory of the Arts, 99 Duchamp, Marcel, 146 Duncan, Carol, 54 Dunham, Grace, 114 Dunham, Lena, 142 Dunham, Tip, 78, 82, 138 Dwyer, Nancy, 65, 70, 90, 128, 144 E

Ecklund, Douglas, 122, 146 Edwards, Jonathan, 15–16, 113 Edwards, Timothy, 16 F

Factory, The, 39 Fellini, Frederico, 48 Figure Drawings, 113, 120–121 Film Group, The, 65, 70

591 Broadway, 65, 68–69, 72 Food, 48 Forbes, Agnes Edwards, great-grandmother, 16 Fox, The, 54–55, 66 G

Gagosian Gallery, Larry, 65, 120 Gallery Nature Morte, 92 Goldberg, RoseLee, 65, 70, 78, 108 Golub, Leon, 54 Gorney, Jay, 90–92, 122 Grachos, Louis, 102–103 Great Jones Street, 8–9, 65, 68, 76, 78, 80, 94, 106,

108–109, 114, 138 Green Gallery, The, 66 Guggenheim, The, 46–47 Guild & Greyshkul Gallery, 120–121 H

Haacke, Hans, 50 Hague, Sarah, ancestor, 16 Harris, Suzie, 139 Heer, Johanna, 75 HIV/ AIDS, 65, 78, 89 Hoey, Dana, 120 Hoffman, Abbie, 39 Holzer, Jenny, 65 Hudson, Judith, 20, 22, 52, 56, 65, 78, 82, 84,

98, 100, 126, 143–144 Hudson-Price, Genevieve, 143 Huebler, Douglas, 34, 44-45, 48, 58 Hunt, Bryan, 74, 141 I

In Photography, Series, 65 Inglett, Susan, 34, 54, 90, 92, 100 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 98 International Herald Tribune, 56 International with Monument Gallery, 65, 92 J

Jackson, Dakota, 78 Jay Gorney Modern Art, 92 Johnson, Poppy, 71 Judd, Donald, 66 K

Kandinsky, Vasily, 34 Kelly, Mike, 34 Kendrick, Max, 82, 94 Kendrick, Mel, 77–78, 82, 96, 144 Kielar, Anya, 120 Klaman, Kent, 92 Kosuth, Joseph, 44–45, 52–54, 56, 60, 65–66, 124, 138, 146 Koury, Liz, 92 Kruger, Barbara, 65, 90 L

Lacombe, Brigitte, 121 Lange, Matthew C., 52, 66, 100, 120, 124, 126 Laumont Photographics, 138 Lawler, Louise, 65, 70–71, 90, 116 Leavin, Margo, 148 Levine, Sherrie, 65, 90 Lewis, Wyndam, 72 150

Lewitt, Sol, 45 Liberman, Alexander, 100 Lindsay, Arto, 75 Linker, Kate, 58, 65, 92, 100, 102, 106, 108, 114, 144, 148 Lippard, Lucy, 54 Little, Betsy, 114 Local, The, 60 Longo, Robert, 82 Lower Manhattan Ocean Club, 60 Lurie, Evan, 75 Lurie, John, 75 Lutter, Vera, 125 M

Maine,

Harborstow York, 22–23

Kittery Point, 33, 143

Portland, 118 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 141 Marden, Brice, 64 Marden, Mirabelle, 64 Martin, Agnes, 100 Marxism, 42, 54 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 16, 146 Massachusetts,

Cape Cod, 31

Haverhill, 34, 146

Nantucket Sound, 20 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 50 Max’s Kansas City, 39, 60, 146 McCall, Anthony, 50 McClard, Michael, 72 McNulty, John, 75 Messager, Annette, 66 Metro Pictures Gallery, 122 Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pictures Generation,

122–123, 133, 146 Miro, Joan, 100 Model, Lisette, 48 Modern History, Series,

April 21, 1978, 54

Herald Tribune, September, 1977, 39 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), 102 Mondrian, Piet, 98 Monet, Claude, 116 Morgan, Francie, aunt, 19 Morgan, George Orlando Jr., grandfather, 16–19 Morgan, Robert, uncle, 23 Morgan, Sarah Edwards (Sally), mother, 15–16, 18–19, 24, 26, 28, 30, 32, 102, 108, 109, 113, 143 Morgan, Sarah Schulyer Speir, (Morgan/Granny), grandmother, 20 Moro, Aldo, 56 Mudd Club, The, 60–61, 68 Murray, Elizabeth, 65, 108, 143 Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 102,146 N

Nagy, Peter, 92 Nanni, Gina, 98, 116, 128 Nares, James, 60 National Museum of Women, Washington DC, 102, 146 Natural Magic, Series, 89, 92

Control and Abandon, 89 Neverland, Series, 92, 113

New Jersey,

Newark, 39

South Orange, 16

Summit, 30, 32 New Museum, The, 131 New School, The, 54 New York, Buffalo, 15, 30 New York University (NYU), 130 Ninth Circle, The, 60 North Drive Press, 120 Norton, Margot, 144, 148 Novak, Barbara, 46 O

Objects of Desire, Series, 65

Fear of Nothing, 120 O’Brien, Glenn, 52, 58, 61, 68, 72, 92, 98, 116, The Odeon, 74 OK Harris Gallery, 58 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 100 Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, 15, 30 P

Phillips, Lisa, 8, 56, 104, 146 Picasso, Pablo, 100 Pilkington, Phillip, 54 Piper, Adrian, 54 Poe, Amos, 8, 60, 65-66, 68, 74–84, 89, 96, 98, 102–103, 106, 108,

113, 132, 140, 144, 144 Poe, Nicholas Tiger, 8, 10, 20, 65, 81–84, 94–98, 102, 104, 106, 108,

113, 130–32, 138, 140, 143 Poe, Sarah Lucy, 8, 10–11, 24, 65, 84–85, 94–97, 102, 104, 106, 108,

113, 130–132, 138 Polke, Sigmar, 66 Price, Richard, 78, 82 Prince, Richard, 122 Princeton University, 15–16, 18, 124–129 Q

Queens Museum, 102 R

Rafferty, Sara Greenberger, 120 Raphael, 78 Rauschenberg, Robert, 44, 141 Renaissance Paintings & Drawings, Series, 78–79, 84, 88–89, 92

Denial, 79

Transfiguration, 88 Renwick, William, 19 Rice, Bill, 75 Richards, Judith Olch, 146, 153 Rosen, Danny, 71 Rosler, Martha, 120 Rudd, Mark, 43 Ruskin, Mickey, 60 S

Salle, David, 64 Salter, Mary, 78, 82, 94, 96 Schnabel, Jacqueline, 64 Schnabel, Julian, 60, 64 School of Visual Arts (SVA), 89, 124–125 Sedgwick, Edie, 39 Seigelaub, Seth, 44-45 151

7eleven Gallery, 143 Shafrazi, Tony, 66–67, 139 Sherman, Cindy, 65, 70, 90–91, 104, 122 Simmons, Laurie, 65, 70, 78, 82, 90–91, 98, 100, 104, 108, 114, 116, 118, 122, 138, 142 Simple Text, Series, 89 Simpson, S.L. Gallery, 146 SITE Santa Fe, 89, 102–103, 146 Sonnier, Keith, 50, 58, 139 Spero, Nancy, 54 Sperone, Gian Enzo, 52 Steir, Pat, 108 Sterling, Susan Fisher, 56, 102–103, 146 Stills, Series, 65–67, 113 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 42–43 Studio 50, 70 Subway Riders (film), 103 Sukowa, Barbara, 70 Susan Inglett Gallery, 92, 146 Sussler, Betsy, 50, 58, 72 T

Tabula Rasa, Series, 65 Tait, Sandy, 70, 128 Tehran, Iran, 139 Text, Series, 89 Tillman, Lynne, 70, 92, 138, 144 Timpson, Anne, cousin, 20–23, 26–28, 30, 32, 108 Timpson, James (Uncle Jim), 19 Timpson, Rosemary Charlesworth (Aunt Ro), 19, 22 Tolstoy, Leo, 30 Traub, Charles, 50, 98, 124, 126, 144 V

Vaisman, Meyer, 92 VanDerBeek, Johannes, 120 VanDerBeek, Sara, 113, 116, 120, 126, 135, 144 vanElk, Ger, 66 Vassar College, 15, 18 W

Wall Street Journal, 15 Warhol, Andy, 39 Wegman, William, 74 Weiner, Alice, 71 Weiner, Lawrence, 44–45, 52, 56 Welling, James, 122, 128 Western Electric, 15, 18, 30 Whitney Museum, The, 82, 102 Williams, Christopher, 34 Wilson, May, 120 Winsor, Jackie, 71, 139 Winters, Terry, 72 Witkovsky, Matthew S., 66 Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), 89, 100–101 Work in Progress, Series, 113, 146 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 46 X Y Z58

Xeroxbook, The, 45 Young, La Monte, 58 Zazeela, Marian, 58 0+1, Series, 92 Zwirner, David, Gallery, 120, 125

Compiled by Bill Smith

Photographs

Biography PARTNER

Jim Rasenberger, Author

9. Mabel Smith

Marius Muresanu, CEO • Creative

Judith Olch Richards, Content Adviser

38. Manhattan; 1968. Photo by Wernicke/

Bill Smith, Publisher

Emily Peterson, Design

ullstein bild via Getty Images

Michael Dyer, Remake, Creative Consultant

43. Photo by Archive Photos, Getty Images

Scott Rosen, Photo Editor

51. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah,

Color Space Imaging, Image Optimization

Getty Images

27 Great Jones Street | Studio 4E New York, NY 10012

Eric Goeres, Digital Published by BiographyPARTNER. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced,

57. Courtesy of the Sarah Charlesworth

distributed or transmitted in any form or by means,

Studio

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

59. Photo courtesy of Peter Sumner

recording, or any informational storage and retrieval

Walton Bellamy 61. Photo by Allan Tannenbaum/Polaris

system, without permission in writing from the publisher and copyright holder.

67. Photo courtesy of the Sarah Charlesworth Studio

Copyright © 2015 by Bill Smith

71. Photo courtesy of Louise Lawler 73. Photo courtesy of BOMB Magazine

Printed in The United States of America

79.

Renaissance Paintings/Denial; 1991.

Cibachrome with lacquered wood frame

ISBN 978-0-9965160-0-6 –Biography Partner

34”x44”. Edition of 5+2 Aps. Courtesy of the Sarah Charlesworth Studio 88. Anthony Barboza, photographer 93. Anthony Barboza, photographer 95. Anthony Barboza, photographer 99.

Doubleworld/Allegory of the Arts; 1995.

connecting the dots

Cibachrome print with mahogany frame 51”x41”. Edition of 6+2Aps. Courtesy of the Sarah Charlesworth Studio

Biography PARTNER

107. Teacups/Neverland; 2002, Fuji Crystal

New York, NY 10012Biographies Contemporary

Archive Print, with lacquer frame,

27 Great Jones Street | Studio 4E

Oral Histories, Images, and Media

41.5” x 31.5”. Courtesy of Sarah Charlesworth Studio 121. Brigitte Lacombe, photographer.

123.

New York, NY 10012

Getty Images

BiographyPARTNER.com

Crystal Archive Print, mounted and laminated with lacquer frame. 41”x32”.

Edition of 8+2 Aps. Courtesy of Sarah Charlesworth Studio 129. M. Teresa Simao for the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University

152

27 Great Jones / Suite 4E

Courtesy of Brigitte Lacombe 127. Available Light/Half Bowl; 2012. Fuji

131.

Authorized Biography, LLC

Marius Muresanu

AC K N OW L E DG M E NT S

BILL SMITH

Thanks to Nick and Lucy who let this book happen. Also to all of Sarah’s family and friends particularly Romy Charlesworth for her patience and humor and Nancy Charlesworth who treated me like family.

I owe a life debt to Judith Olch Richards for the Smithsonian interview series with Sarah conducted on Great Jones Street from 2–9th November 2011.17 It is impossible to imagine this biography without the authority of Sarah’s voice as provided in those interviews. Not surprisingly, Judith confided that Sarah was the single most prepared subject of any interview she ever conducted.

Special mention is noted for the kindness of Judy Hudson, Gina Nannni, Laurie Simmons, Anne Timpson, and to Matthew C. Lange.

Thanks to Laura Barnett, Daniel Chess, Mike Dyer, Eric Goeres, Tom Houston, Marius Muresanu, Emily Peterson, Jim Rasenberger, Scott Rosenberg, Mark Silver, Leyla Vural, and to my wife and family.

This book would not have been possible without the support of my teachers at the Department of Oral History at Columbia University; Mary Marshall Clark, Amy Starecheski, and Jerald Albarelli.

My intention is that Sarah Charlesworth would have been delighted by the photographs and histories presented here. The book is another testament to her remarkable life.

153

connecting the dots...

Biography PARTNER

27 Great Jones Street | Studio 4E New York, NY 10012

Contemporary Biographies Oral Histories, Images, and Media Biography Partner Authorized Biography, LLC Marius Muresanu CEO • Creative Bill Smith Publisher Eric Goeres Digital

Available in Print and Digital.

Archiving, Cataloging, and Annual Updates.

Film, Video, and Digital Long-Form Media.

154

4