Oral History Interview with Judy Pfaff, 2010 Jan. 27-Feb. 4
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Oral history interview with Judy Pfaff, 2010 Jan. 27-Feb. 4 Funding for this interview was provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Judy Pfaff on Jan. 27-Feb. 4, 2010. The interview took place at the artist's home in Kingston, NY, and was conducted by Judith Richards for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Funding for this interview was provided by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. Judy Pfaff and Judith Richards have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview JUDITH RICHARDS: This is Judith Richards interviewing Judy Pfaff on January 27, 2010, in Kingston, New York, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disc one. So Judy, let me start by asking you to talk about your family, as far back as your wish, certainly your parents and your grandparents if you knew them, but just that whole piece before you were born. JUDY PFAFF: Well, this is short. I was born in 1946, post-war London. My grandmother was in the Royal Air Force. MS. RICHARDS: What was her name? MS. PFAFF: Her name was Jessie Mabel Langford. My mum, I never met my father, I never met. I was – right after I was born, my mother immigrated to Toronto, to Canada and there was – MS. RICHARDS: Was your father's name Pfaff? MS. PFAFF: No, no, no I was married when I was like 16. MS. RICHARDS: Oh, what was your mother's name? MS. PFAFF: Baldwin, B-A-L-D-W-I-N, Baldwin. MS. RICHARDS: What was her first name? MS. PFAFF: Joan, Joan Edna Baldwin. MS. RICHARDS: So your father's name was Baldwin? MS. PFAFF: His name was Baldwin, John, John, Judy, Joan, Jessie, I think – and my brother's name is Michael, so a lot of J's. MS. RICHARDS: So that's – Jessie Langford was your mother's – MS. PFAFF: Jessie Mable Langford was my grandmother's name. MS. RICHARDS: Your mother's mother? MS. PFAFF: My mother's mother. There are very few children. I have no sort of – I don't have relatives basically. MS. RICHARDS: And did she live in London also, your grandmother? MS. PFAFF: My grandmother did, yeah. She was a seamstress. I think she worked at Selfridges – not Selfridges. What was that? It was a kind of a fancy place. Anyway, she was a seamstress during the war. She worked with a group of women who sewed up the balloons, the dirigibles that hung over London. So she was a – my mum thinks that whatever I have came not from her but from my grandmother because she was tough, I think. She was a real crafts – you know, as a seamstress it was a lot of fine work really and she was a sergeant major in the Women's Royal Air Force in England. So she had some moxie I guess. MS. RICHARDS: And what about your grandfather? MS. PFAFF: I don't know. I don't know him, no grandparents. There was one grandmother and that was "nanny," you know. I didn't meet her or grow up with her very much. I think maybe in the last four or five years. It's a little sketchy. My family lost a lot of real estate, meaning their house was bombed or their apartment house was bombed. So there were there houses that were put together, makeshift places, and even if you weren't an orphan you might to go someplace where lots of kids were because there was no house, no -- MS. RICHARDS: What part of London had the house been before it was bombed? MS. PFAFF: I don't know. A lot of it is unknown to me. I didn't even know I had a brother until a little bit later. It's all a little sketchy. My mum just died a few years ago and I got more information then, you know, because – we were closer right before she was – when she was ill than any other time. We never really lived together. I was probably difficult. I think I was. She was not used to having – she was not used to being a mother exactly. She was trying to get whatever was left of the family together, organized. She was a young woman. She had my brother when she was a teenager. MS. RICHARDS: Your older brother? MS. PFAFF: My older brother. He was born during the war. He's a lawyer. He has children. MS. RICHARDS: And I'm sorry, you said what was his name? MS. PFAFF: Michael, Michael Baldwin, very nice, very good guy. Much more – he was much smarter than me. When we met, I don't know how old we were when we met. But he had a whole different accent. I was Cockney. I had – I spoke one way. He spoke another way. I was wild. He was tame. He was nice. I was not nice. I don't know "not nice" but I was feral [laughs] or wily or unstuck in the world, you know? I sort of made my own rules and I don't have very many – I have no good memories of England, of London, because I think of the politeness and the kind of culture. I don't know. I never – all artists have this feeling like where did I come from. Did I get shot out of a cannon or was I beamed down from some planet, you know. Somehow I was just way too physical and way too nervous or agitated or wanted to – I would be someone who might speak out of turn and jump up and down and raise my hand too much. In London, little girls – or in England or in most places, actually probably most places – you're supposed to be – MS. RICHARDS: Or you get diagnosed. MS. PFAFF: You get diagnosed. Now you get diagnosed. [Laughs.] I have a feeling I would have been diagnosable but then I was just unruly. So we came. My mum got it together. MS. RICHARDS: With just you two, your mother and you, not your brother? MS. PFAFF: My grandmother, my brother and I came over to America on the Queen Elisabeth and I heard – we were in different – we weren't in any – I think we were in steerage. But by the time we hit New York City where we landed, I had an Irish accent they tell me because I was with this Irish family. So I was – you could tell, I sort of had – MS. RICHARDS: What year was that? MS. PFAFF: I don't know. It's late '50s I guess. MS. RICHARDS: So you were over 10 years old? MS. PFAFF: Oh yeah, like 12 I think. MS. RICHARDS: So going back then to those early years, what kind of school did you go to in England, in London? MS. PFAFF: Just regular, I guess it would be called a public school. But I was also in trouble a lot. So I was sort of kicked out a little bit. I mean, I don't know if I romanticized some of this. But I was in trouble in school, yeah. MS. RICHARDS: So academically you were struggling? MS. PFAFF: Terrible, terrible. MS. RICHARDS: Can you figure out – did you have dyslexia or some other issue that caused you – MS. PFAFF: Yeah, I think yeah, but I didn't like school. I didn't like – I mean I liked if they told us stories. I liked sort of like running away. I think I hear stories now that I used to steal everyone's lunch and feed it to the geese and ducks in Hyde Park. I don't know. I think I was a little bit hard to educate. MS. RICHARDS: Did you have any encounters with art, either making it or seeing it? MS. PFAFF: England's not real big on that. No, I think my first experience would be coming to America. MS. RICHARDS: So going back to the ship then, you landed with an Irish accent. MS. PFAFF: Yeah, and then I met my mother, right. I met her then. She met the ship. We took a train from New York to Detroit [MI] in a really rough area. MS. RICHARDS: So she had come before? MS. PFAFF: She had immigrated right after I was born, to Canada, and she worked for Ford Motor Company of Canada. MS. RICHARDS: So I'm sorry. The years then that you were in London before you came, you weren't being taken care of by your mother at all. MS. PFAFF: No, no I never met her. MS. RICHARDS: You were in a kind of an orphanage? You said a place where children? MS. PFAFF: It's not an orphanage because that sounds too much like [Charles] Dickens or something. It was just a place that the – it's like – it's not like Haiti. It's not at all like Haiti but when something dramatic happens, if a place is bombed, and the English are pretty together. So they maybe put places together where, you know – MS. RICHARDS: But you didn't have any – you didn't have any family with you? MS.