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Cynthia Carlson Audio Transcript Invisible City Sid: Today is July 22, 2015 and we're conducting an interview in New York at Cynthia Carlson's loft for the project Invisible City: Philadelphia and the Vernacular Avant- Garde funded by PEW Charitable Trusts for Arts and Heritage. I am going to ask you a series of questions. Cynthia: Okay. S: You were born in Chicago? C: Right. S: What did your parents do? C: My father was a laborer. He came from Sweden and he did a number of things. He was a farmer and a laborer. He ended up working for Western Electric on the night shift making a particular screw for the telephone for 25 years. My mother was a housewife who occasionally cleaned our dentist's office until he committed suicide. S: So did you have art in the house? C: No. S: What was your first art experience? C: There was a painting in our church which I thought was pretty amazing. It was Jesus walking on the water. It was a real painting and I have never seen a real painting before. I was pretty amazed by that. Outside of that I suppose it was comic books. But it wasn't until I was a little older that I started taking some classes at the Art Institute. They were like little scholarships for grade and high school kids. S: You went to the Art Institute of Chicago? C: I went to school there. S: You went there is the 1960s, what was it like then? C: It was a very lively time because that was the time that the Hairy Who people, they weren't the Hairy Who then, but Jim Nutt and Gladys Nilson, although they were not in my immediate circle, I was very good friends with Art Green. We hung around together and so it seemed like a lively place. The major influence on that whole sort of aesthetic was Ray Yoshida. He was a funny teacher because he was very enigmatic. I don't remember anything he said I just remember lots of turgid looks. I should backtrack a little in terms of my parents because the truth is that I was also adopted. There was no art in the house I grew up in, subsequently a number of years ago I have found my mother, father, and my siblings. It turns out that my mother was a pretty decent amateur painter which surprised me. S: Well it is bred in the bone. C: Yeah. S: Interesting. So when I was talking to John Ollman he said Yoshida would take people to the Field Museum? That was as important as the collection above in the Art Institute, above the school? C: That is probably true. There was a great deal of interest not only in vernacular art vis- à-vis The Harry Who but also in just sort of natural history. I don't remember any of those trips I went on with him but I was certainly a regular visitor to the museum since I was a child. I mean I remember the dioramas with cavemen, they were so real and the mummies. The animal cages with the animals and painted backgrounds, it was very real. S: Did you know Bill Schwedler back in Chicago? C: Yeah. We were friends at the Art Institute. He is the one that brought me to New York when I came after undergraduate school. He, Art Green, I, and a number of others were good friends. Bill Schwedler, Art Green, and two other people were all roommates at this big storefront near us. They had wonderful parties. S: In New York or Chicago? C: Chicago. S: So after the Art Institute of Chicago you went to Pratt? C: Yeah I applied to New York to go to graduate school and Bill Schwedler was at Pratt. So I thought I should go there too. It wasn't that interesting of a school. I thought the graduate department was pretty uninteresting relative to what I had known in Chicago. But I didn't care. I was in New York and I was so excited about being there. The school could have been some tiny university with no art department and I wouldn't have cared. S: Did you live in Brooklyn? C: Yes near the school. S: What was Brooklyn like in 1967? C: In that day Pratt was in a pretty decent neighborhood. It went really downhill a lot sometime after in the 90s when New York was really a dangerous place to live but an interesting place to live. The subway started to get all the graffiti, dark ominous graffiti. There was razor wire everywhere and the subway stations were only open certain hours. It was scary as hell to go there. I'm glad those weren't my years. S: Bill Schwedler got a job at Tyler. C: Yeah. S: You got a job at PCA right out of graduate school? C: Yeah. S: Which is kind of amazing to me because by the time I went to undergraduate and grad school it seemed that all of the teaching jobs were sort of taken care of. You came to Philadelphia in 1967 but you commuted from New York? C: Yeah, I never moved there. When I got the job in Philadelphia it wasn't because of Bill Schwedler. It was a different school and Bill Schwedler didn't have any clout at PCA. A teacher that I had in graduate school put in a word for me with one of the teachers in Philadelphia, Walter Erlebacher. I think he said a good word for me which he may have regretted because we clashed completely. He was a kind of artist that I really didn't have much interest or respect for. S: It's really interesting because I had always heard that Rafael Ferrer and Walter were at fisticuffs. When we were talking to Mark Campbell in one of the interviews he said that they got a long at first, which I was surprised. I can't even imagine two people diametrically and aesthetically different. C: I can imagine that they would get along at first because they were both very powerful, passionate people. They were both pretty well-informed in their areas. I can imagine that falling apart pretty quickly because they were on opposite ends of the pole. Rafi went to great lengths to be very avant-garde and Walter, of course, was very much of the traditionalist. So they would've locked horns pretty quickly. S: When you're hired at PCA in 1967 were you in the painting department or foundation department? What department did you work in? C: I was in foundation and it was a part-time job for three or four years. It gradually became a full-time job. I was in painting too. I can't remember exactly what years or what but I was in painting. S: Who were your colleagues? C: Boris Putterman, David Kettner, Jerry Nichols, and Gerald Herdman. In the sculpture department, of course, Ree Morton and Rafi Ferrer. It was a small school and everyone knew everyone. That doesn't mean we were all friends and it didn't mean we weren't friends either. It just meant that you had a certain number of people that you sort of hung out with or had a good relationship with. Doris Staffel, I loved Doris. Harry Soviak, he was wonderful. S: So Ree probably came in 1970 or 71? C: I was there in '67 and it must've been a few years later. S: Because she was still in grad school. C: She was. Bill Schwedler, if my memory serves, was the one that introduced us because I needed a place to stay over night. I was teaching a couple of days a week and the woman that I had been staying with didn't work out for some reason and I was looking for someone to stay with. Bill Schwedler said he would talk to Ree. She said sure. So I stayed with her... S: in Elkins Park... C: and she got a job at PCA too and we became friends almost immediately. S: So you were in Elkins Park? C: Yes, to sleep. S: When did Barbara Zucker get to PCA? C: Never. S: Never? C: No. S: Wasn't she teaching there a little bit? C: She might have came as a visiting artist but she never taught there. She was from Philadelphia. She had a show not so many years ago in the gallery but she went to school in Michigan. She never taught in Philadelphia that I know. But she was a Philadelphia artist. Louise Fishman is a Philadelphia artist. Never had much to do with the city. S: When you came to PCA in '67 was Dennis Adrian still teaching there? C: No. Was he there? S: Yeah. He was there before he went to Chicago. C: Really? No kidding. He was in Chicago. You don't know when he came there? I don't either. S: Yeah I don't have the exact dates. C: That is so interesting. S: Well there is this Chicago Philly connection with John Ollman and interest in outsiders. C: I have to say that I take, at least from the time I was there, some credit for that because I introduced Joseph Yoakum and Marcy Hermansader to my students. I had collected his work and I knew him from Chicago.
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