Oral History Interview with Michael A. Cummings, 2012 October 25-26
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Oral history interview with Michael A. Cummings, 2012 October 25-26 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Transcription of this oral history interview was made possible by a grant from the Smithsonian Women's Committee. 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 Michael A. Cummings on October 25 and 26, 2012. The interview took place in New York City, New York, and was conducted by Mija Riedel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Michael A. Cummings 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 MIJA RIEDEL: This is Mija Riedel with Michael Cummings in the artist's home and studio in New York City on October 25, 2012, for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, disc card No. 1. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. And we started our conversation with a tour of this magnificent collection of your work and your art collection, which has been wonderfully illuminating. Thank you for that. MICHAEL CUMMINGS: Well, you're very welcome. I'm very happy to participate in the archival oral history collection. MS. RIEDEL: Great. Well, we're delighted that you were willing to participate. Let's start with some early biographical material — MR. CUMMINGS: Okay. MS. RIEDEL: — and go through that, and then we can get more directly into the work. You were born in Los Angeles in 1945? MR. CUMMINGS: Correct, November 28th, my mother's birthday. MS. RIEDEL: Oh, really? MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. MS. RIEDEL: Interesting. Interesting. November 28th. And what was your father's name? MR. CUMMINGS: My father's name was Arthur Cummings. And that was supposed to be my first name as well, a junior, but my mother didn't want me to be a junior so she put his name in the middle and made me Michael. MS. RIEDEL: Interesting. MR. CUMMINGS: Yes. MS. RIEDEL: So she wanted you to have a name and a life of your own. MR. CUMMINGS: Right, because she said she had grown up with a lot of "Juniors" around her from her family and she didn't like that. MS. RIEDEL: Interesting. And what was her name — what is her name? MR. CUMMINGS: Her name is Dorothy — first name is Dorothy. Her last name is Goodson now because she remarried. And my stepfather died 25 years ago, so she's been on her own, primarily retired, lives in a house in L.A. She worked for Lockheed Aircraft and she did the interiors — the curtains, the chairs, and all that sort of stuff. MS. RIEDEL: Interesting. MR. CUMMINGS: And she went to work doing — what is it? I want to say Rita the riveter? What was that famous — MS. RIEDEL: Oh, right, right, Rosie the Riveter, I think. MR. CUMMINGS: Rosie the Riveter. MS. RIEDEL: Yes. MR. CUMMINGS: She went to work at that era when the men were at war and they were hiring women to work in factories and stuff. So she went to Lockheed and worked, and just stayed on and kind of moved up the ladder and eventually retired. So she's very detail-oriented when it comes to things around the house because of the work that she had over the years. And she's still very active. She's 89. She drives. She works in the yard. She says she's 10 pounds overweight. [Laughs.] And she had a minor stroke about a year ago but she came out of it, but she does say that she can see how that affected her overall balance a little bit. And the doctors warned her about food and then cholesterol and all that sort of stuff. She's doing Okay. MS. RIEDEL: Did she sew or work with her hands? MR. CUMMINGS: No. No one in my family — well, she says she did, but I don't remember her doing that, and I was the oldest of three. And she had an old Singer sewing machine in the house I remember when I was younger, but I never saw her on it. But she said she did work on it a little bit. But none of my grandmothers sewed, as far as I knew, and no one had a quilt in the house. And so I didn't know anything about quilts until I came to New York. And I didn't have any creative people in my family even though there were several great cooks in the family. And one of my grandmothers, my father's mother, she cooked from scratch, and all mental. And she was an amazing cook, but no one outside of that category of food was creative in any sort of way that I could remember. MS. RIEDEL: Interesting. MR. CUMMINGS: There was no role model to look at, at all — no musician, no anybody. MS. RIEDEL: That is interesting. You say you had two siblings? MR. CUMMINGS: Two sisters. I was the oldest, and the next one after me was five years younger, and then the other one was, like, I think — well, after Phyllis was Monica, and she was a year behind Phyllis, I think. Phyllis, the middle child, she died four years ago, so it's just myself and Monica. And they had aspirations of being somewhat creative, but their, sort of, hopes and dreams kind of got diverted into marriage and/or just sort of other I guess basic sort of human needs and requirements, whereas I kind of went down the road alone. And kind of looking at the history of art, is a lot of them were single and not married. I chose to embrace my art career as my partner and I kind of sacrificed a lot of stuff to be an artist. And I could see whereby I did have some relationships with women earlier on, and there was one I proposed to and stuff, and some proposed to me, but I kept saying no, no, no. But I see whereas if I had gone down that road, I would have, like, lost my dream. And I always considered art as something I wanted to do since I was about 5 years old. I wanted to be an artist. I didn't know how to define it. When I was small, I guess around that time, in kindergarten, my mother says the teacher raved to her about my watercolors and how great they were, and how I had talent and everything. And my mother, you know, it was sort of like, "Huh? What?" She didn't understand what the teacher was trying to express, but the teacher was totally excited. I don't know what I did to get her in that state of mind, but she was just raving about my artwork. But that door closed because I didn't really pursue it in any sort of overt sort of way. What happened was, as an asthmatic child I stayed home a lot from school, and in doing that I was in sort of a solitary sort of, like, state of mind. And I start to just kind of look around at what to do, and I started, like, making copies of the wallpaper — [laughs] — in my grandmother's houses when they had floral and different sort of patterns. And I would just kind of make copies of that. And then I did bubblegum wrappers because they were cartoons sort of things. And then I kind of expanded to floral and plant life around me. And people were kind of, "Oh, look at you. You can draw something like that." But all it was is that I was just focusing in on and developing a skill because I had the time to do it. It was my own sort of private self-taught way of kind of drawing. And I did that. But there was no one around, but because of the asthmatic condition, that led me into exploring the world around me as a child, like I think no one else — well, I think if you're a normal child you're kind of with a group and you're playing and all that, but as a solitary child and not really looking at a lot of TV, I had to find ways to entertain myself, and to entertain myself was in a creative sort of way, and I was very happy with that. It was a silent sort of communication with the world around me, and I just followed that. And so that kind of stayed with me as I grew into an adolescent, and it kind of, I guess, grew stronger a little bit. And one of my school trips to a museum or something — it had to be a school-related experience — I came upon the van Gogh painting Sunflowers, and that just kind of nailed me to the cross in terms of — I said, "That's what I want to do." And that was sort of like a guiding light. And from that point on, that was my wish, sort of more of a secret wish rather than expressing it to my parents or anything like that.