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Oral History Interview with Avram Finkelstein, 2016 April 25-May 23

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Oral History Interview with Avram Finkelstein, 2016 April 25-May 23 Oral history interview with Avram Finkelstein, 2016 April 25-May 23 Funded by the Keith Haring Foundation. 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 recorded interview with Avram Finkelstein on April 25-May 23, 2016. The interview took place in New York, and was conducted by Cynthia Carr for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. Avram Finkelstein has reviewed the transcript. His corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview CYNTHIA CARR: There. So okay. This is Cynthia Carr interviewing Avram Finkelstein at his studio/home in Brooklyn, New York, on April 25, 2016 for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and this is card number one. So Avram, again, say your name and spell it. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Sure, it's Avram Finkelstein. A, as in apple, V, as in victor, R, as in Robert, A, as in apple, M, as in mother. F, as in Frank, I-N-K-E-L-S-T-E-I-N. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. And when and where were you born? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I was born in 1952. My mother thinks I was born in Brooklyn, my sister thinks I was born in Queens. CYNTHIA CARR: And your birth certificate doesn't solve the problem? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: The hospital was in Queens, but when I—we were right on the border of Queens anyway, so I don't—and when I asked my mother once when we were driving around Queens could she show me the hospital, she said, "Oh, it burnt down." Like you'd think I was born in Soviet Russia and the village was burned to the ground. [They laugh.] CYNTHIA CARR: Right, right. Okay, so somewhere on the border between Queens and Brooklyn. And then the names of your parents, and if you could spell those. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. My mom was Frances, F-R-A-N-C-E-S, and do you need her maiden name? CYNTHIA CARR: Yeah, that would be good. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Schmilowitz: Yea, S-C-H-M-I-L-O-W-I-T-Z, is I think how it was spelled. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And my dad was Joseph Finkelstein. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And he was born in—she was born in New Jersey, and he was born in Philadelphia. CYNTHIA CARR: Okay. And what did they do for their jobs? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: My mom was, I can tell you a much more organized version of this now. My mom was a lab technician. She worked at National Starch Products in New Jersey, and in order to get out of the house she decided, "Well I can do this and this is kind of fun," so she decided to become a career scientist and eventually got her doctorate in biochemistry and she did cancer research. I think she minored in microbiology, and she did cancer research throughout the '60's and then did pediatrics research in Meadowbrook Hospital until she retired. And my dad was kind of a little lost; he had the soul of an artist but he didn't finish high school. And he, with a friend from the army, he started a lefty—he represented lefty show business acts. And he represented Professor Irwin Corey and Russian puppet troupes, but he lost a lot of money when a Russian puppet troupe that was booked cancelled the entire tour. His father owned a dry cleaning store in Harlem, which I totally forgot to tell you, and they had a second store in Freeport, so for a while my dad did that; he managed the store in Freeport. And I used to go up to Harlem with him sometimes and go to Freeport with him, and then for a while—then he sold that business to his manager. He hated it. And then he bought—he didn't buy art, he was actually, like, the leg person. He did studio visits on behalf of two designers, one of whom worked at Knoll, who was one of our closest family friends. So he basically did studio visits and got Czechoslovakian circus posters for hospitals, stuff like that. But that business never really got off the ground and he didn't make very much money. He loved it, but he didn't make very much money. And then he became a salesman in the men's department at A&S [Abraham and Strauss Department Store] in Hempstead. And eventually, the wife of the man who hired him to buy art hired him to be this business manager for a school for emotionally disturbed kids that I, when I was a kid, I sometimes worked at. Working with autistic kids. CYNTHIA CARR: Oh, mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] Okay. And you started doing art at a very young age, drawing. You were drawing right? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: When I was a kid. Yeah, I remember my dad took me to see the Matisse show at the Museum of Modern Art, the cut paper show. Which, I was a little kid, I can't—I know the show just recently came back, so I think it was there in '56, and I was so influenced by it, he used to bring shirt cardboards from the dry cleaning store for me to use as canvasses. CYNTHIA CARR: Oh. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: So I drew a painting of a—I was so influenced by Matisse, and I drew an outline of a woman, a nude, and I was so embarrassed that I had done it that I started painting inside and outside her— these lines to sort of obscure it. CYNTHIA CARR: And how old were you at that point? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: I must have been 4 to 6 years old, somewhere in there. CYNTHIA CARR: Wow, okay. [Laughs.] AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I did these sort of vertical strokes to try to obscure it and my father came over and said what is that, and I said, "That's death walking in the forest." [Laughs.] CYNTHIA CARR: Death walking in the forest? Wow. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. They took me to see a—you know; we didn't have babysitters—they took us to see The Seventh Seal when it was first out. CYNTHIA CARR: Oh my god. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And I was so—you know how you bring a kid and you think, "Oh, they won't understand it." I had never heard of Christianity, I didn't know about self-flagellation, I didn't know about witch burning, I didn't know about any of this stuff. I was so traumatized by that film that I became somewhat death-obsessed. CYNTHIA CARR: And you had seen that at age 4 or something? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: When was that film out? Yeah, I was a little kid. I have a really very vivid memory. I can quote people from like 1956. CYNTHIA CARR: That's great. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: No, it isn't. [They laugh.] CYNTHIA CARR: For someone interviewing you, it's great. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Perhaps. So yeah, so I was very precocious. My dad took me, when my mom was going for her doctorate, to get us out of the house on the weekends so she could study, he took us to a different museum every Sunday. So I pretty much knew the permanent collections of the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of American Indian; by the time I was a young, you know, a tween, I knew every painting and would go straight for the ones I loved. CYNTHIA CARR: Oh boy, that's great. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: And Stravinsky was a huge—I was a real big fan of atonal music. So he really loved to encourage it. I think everyone in the family leaned towards science and I was the only one who leaned towards art. And he wanted to be an artist I think, in his soul, so he encouraged it. And he took me to see every Stravinsky ballet and performance. So I became obsessed with atonal music when I was like 10. CYNTHIA CARR: Wow. And by this time you were living on Long Island, in Jericho? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah. But I think because we—our apartment was right across from the Brooklyn Museum, it was one of my dad's favorite places to come. And it was closer to Long Island, if you didn't feel like driving all the way to the city, so we went to the Brooklyn Museum all the time. CYNTHIA CARR: Ah, okay. AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: In fact, that Frasconi woodcut there we bought together as a family in the gift shop of the Brooklyn Museum when they had a Frasconi show. He was a huge fan of Frasconi, and there's another one in the kitchen that was his. CYNTHIA CARR: Right. So he was encouraging you in your art thing, and you had told me before that they even arranged for you to have a teacher, a special teacher? AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: Yeah, because I went to public school and it was Long Island, there wasn't really a very strong art department when you were young.
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