Tag: leocastelli

New York City-based artist Nancy Goldring talks about:

The artist building in the West Village of Manhattan, Westbeth, where she’s lived since 1971, when she moved in as a graduate assistant, and was paying $144 a month (which actually seemed like it might be too much at the time); her experience being on the committee reviewing applicants to live in the building; how once you get into Westbeth as a tenant, it’s an irreversible tenancy (though one artist she knows was thrown out for subletting); the changes in and near her neighborhood, now full of restaurants full of people in their 20s and 30s “talking too loudly;” how there’s a center for the elderly in Westbeth where you can have a 3-course meal for $2.50 (Nancy doesn’t partake because “I’m too picky,” she says), and how a lot of residents are on social security, including a 100-year-old poet; how she never would have been able to live in New York, especially on her adjunct teacher salary, if it wasn’t for Westbeth; how much jubilation there’s been around Mayor Zamdani, which she’s experienced firsthand from talking to strangers (on the subway, etc.); how many of her students at Montclair State, the last place she taught, were ferociously conservative and anti-intellectual…

In the 2^nd half, available to Patreon Supporters of the show, Nancy talks about:

how she used creative approaches to teaching drawing, including having students draw tones from an out-of-focus projection, upside down, to get them free, unshackled from dependence on others’ opinions about art, getting them to think for themselves; her art process, which involves using multiple projectors and a bas relief, a bespoke approach to image making which all started with an accidental capturing of multiple images on her Venetian blinds; how for her first show using the projectors, in the late ‘70s, got a review in the Village Voice, calling her ‘Window Woman;’ that what she’s after in her projection-hybrids is depth, and since analog film retains that sense of depth, she only works with analog projectors, whereas digital only creates edges, and seems thin to be; how the spirit of the1970s NY art world was doing things no one had done before, and a sense of anything goes, was followed by the 1980s of certain styles/trends becoming models for the market that everyone (collectors, museums and even artists) would latch on to, a move that so frustrated Nancy that she stopped teaching contemporary art in 1982; how the art world (and many artists within it) has reached a peak level of shamelessness, one in which artists hire agents and stylists to help them boost their image; how the 70s NY art scene had a collaborative spirit, and “a sense of evolution and potential that was exciting;”  and in the final stretch of our call/video, Nancy gives a tour of both her bas-relief/projection artworks, as well as a bit of the inside of her apartment, which has a close-by view of the Hudson river.