Oral history interview with Lisa Gralnick, 2007 October 29-30 Funding for this interview was provided by the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. Funding for the digital preservation of this interview was provided by a grant from the Save America's Treasures Program of the National Park Service. 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 Lisa Gralnick on 2007 October 29- 30. The interview took place at Gralnick's home in Madison, WI, 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. Mija Riedel has reviewed the transcript and has 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 Mija Riedel for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2007 MIJA RIEDEL: This is Mija Riedel with Lisa Gralnick, interviewing the artist at her home in Madison, Wisconsin on Monday, October 29, 2007, for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and this is disc number one. So we've agreed to start at the beginning. LISA GRALNICK: Okay. MS. RIEDEL: So you were born in 1956 in New York. MS. GRALNICK: Nineteen fifty-six in New York City. Both my parents were born in New York City. MS. RIEDEL: What were their names, Lisa? MS. GRALNICK: Howard and Sylvia Gralnick. My mother was a nurse, my father was a dentist. And then we moved to Long Island. MS. RIEDEL: Which city? MS. GRALNICK: We lived in several places. The first place we lived was Massapequa and—on the South Shore, and my father pretty much had his practice always in Massapequa. MS. RIEDEL: He was a dentist? MS. GRALNICK: Mm-hmm. [Affirmative.] And then we moved to the North Shore, to Huntington. We moved back to the South Shore. Kind of interesting, my father got sick at a very young age. He had a brain tumor when he was only in his 40s, and so he had—my father had to retire from practicing dentistry in his early 40s. And so up until that point, we were living kind of high on the hog. My parents had bought kind of a fancy house, you know, a new fancy house in, sort of, a new Long Island development. And, you know, we had left New York City and move into this kind of fancy neighborhood. And then very shortly after that, my father got diagnosed with having a brain tumor and they sort of immediately had to downsize their life. And then we were— MS. RIEDEL: Did he have to have surgery? MS. GRALNICK:—I remember we lived in a very small rented house for a few years. He had surgery several times. He had surgery at the time, and then the tumor grew back—he had surgery at the time, and he was, after the first surgery, he was still able to walk and, you know, talk normally and that sort of thing, but he had lost too much motor skill and he couldn't practice dentistry anymore. MS. RIEDEL: How old were you, Lisa? MS. GRALNICK: I think I was 17. MS. RIEDEL: And you were the youngest of three? MS. GRALNICK: Yeah, I was the baby. And then the tumor grew back over nine year's period. And then when it grew back, it was actually more—it was larger and it was in a more difficult spot, it was lodged onto the brain stem. And so, at that point then—he already was retired from being a dentist, but at that point then he couldn't walk anymore, and he had serious paralysis, and he was in a wheelchair the rest of his life. Both my parents are still alive. But, you know, my father's been handicapped—seriously handicapped for 30 years. So he got kind of a tough break in life, really. MS. RIEDEL: Yeah. Now, how did you mom handle that? MS. GRALNICK: Amazing. My mom's an extraordinary person. She married for great love, and it has served her well because all these years she's taken care of this severely handicapped man and never complained about it, never treated him in any way like he was less than he ever was. Luckily, he was a very—always a very smart man, and very well read, and with all that has happened to him, he still has all his marbles. His brain is perfectly intact. He can still do the New York Times crossword puzzle if somebody writes the answers in for him. You know, and he reads— MS. RIEDEL: Can he speak at this point? MS. GRALNICK: —an enormous amount. His speech is definitely difficult to understand but, you know, it's still there. And he still has a certain amount of function left. MS. RIEDEL: Didn't you say last night that he played an instrument? MS. GRALNICK: Yeah, when we were young he played in a little jazz combo. MS. RIEDEL: Right. And your mom played piano? MS. GRALNICK: My mom played the piano and I played the violin and my sister played the flute. And I would say it was, you know, I feel very blessed. I definitely grew up in a very loving family. Obviously, my parents went through some pretty difficult stuff in their life with my father's health. But I've always thought it was amazing, in so many ways, as an adult now, to look back and imagine what it—you know, now I'm way older than my father was when he was first diagnosed with having a brain tumor. And when I think now of how, sort of, flawlessly they handled the whole thing, so that we all felt very little change in our lives. You know, I mean, we were in those, kind of, selfish years— MS. RIEDEL: Right. MS. GRALNICK: —you know, between—you know, the three kids, all between like 17 and 21, and how they were going through this thing that was going to change their life forever and we hardly even noticed, you know, our lives went on. And, you know, financially, their lives would never be the same. You know, my father was a dentist so he didn't have a pension, and he could no longer practice, and so they basically were going to live on whatever investments they had made for the rest of their lives. And who can possibly predict something like that's going to happen in your life? Yet they managed— MS. RIEDEL: Did your mom continue working as a nurse? MS. GRALNICK: Yes, she did. Yet they managed somehow to, sort of, all make us feel like, even in the midst of all this, that we were like the most important thing on the planet. And I—you know, now looking back, I can't even imagine how hard that must have been, you know, because, you know, their concerns, I'm sure, were enormous at that time—how they were going to continue to live themselves, how they were going to continue to pay to send these kids to college, that were all three in college at one time, at that point. And, you know, but they did. And they did so brilliantly, I think. MS. RIEDEL: And you and your dad took a jewelry-making class together. MS. GRALNICK: We did. My first class I ever took. MS. RIEDEL: You were a teenager. MS. GRALNICK: Yeah, I was sort of a senior in high school, but I really didn't have—I skipped a year of school, so my—I was only 17 when I started college, so my junior and senior year of high school were done in one year. And I'll preface that by saying that I was, like, an unbelievably rebellious teenager. You know, I was doing drugs, and cutting school, and you know, I was very early to being sexually active. And so my parents were—my parents, and my teachers, and everybody was, like, really anxious to, sort of, push me through and get me into college thinking it might actually save me. And it did. I forgot the question already now. MS. RIEDEL: We were talking about you and your father taking a jewelry class. MS. GRALNICK: Oh yeah, so my senior year, in sort of an attempt to, sort of, engage my father into doing something with me that might, sort of, help straighten me out a little bit, we enrolled in this Saturday jewelry class together at a local art center. And it kind of changed my life. MS. RIEDEL: What about it appealed to you? Because you were into music and into math at the time, yes? MS. GRALNICK: Yeah, well I wouldn't say I was into math though. I was really good at math, but it was kind of something that wasn't—I never really, seriously entertained math as a career choice yet I have this natural ability in math that was, sort of, you know, not something I nurtured; it was just there. But I think that I had always been, you know, sort of, creative. I mean, I was always drawing and, you know, from the time I was a kid the type of games that I liked were, you know, the arts and craftsy kinds of things, drawing things and making things.