Where Is a Lonely Exiled Artist to Go?
Posted by: admin in Minnesotan Art Failure Tales (MAFT), Exploiting artists, Americans pretty much hate artists, Artists who fall through the cracks, Decline of human culture, Doomed artist, The struggles of artists, My published arts writing, Artistic failure in AmericaIn a previous post, I described—in an oversimplified, somewhat glib six-point plan—how artists are exploited, over and over, by cities around this country. The sixth point of the plan read:
- Kick the artists out of your buildings, sell to investors at a huge profit, retire fat, happy, and with a spotless conscience.
Since you’re likely not one of the conscienceless exploiters, you probably wonder sometimes what are the results of this callous manipulation of artists. What happens to the artists once they’re turned away from the hip and happening urban district—and from the spacious studios and accommodating galleries—they’ve helped create? Well, as it happens, I’ve profiled a couple of artists through the years who have faced exactly those circumstances, and I’ve seen the fallout. It’s not pretty…
In the spirit of open information exchange, I’ll share two such profiles. In the first, I write about Frank Gaard. He was one of perhaps hundreds, maybe even thousands, of artists displaced and removed from their studio and living situations during the artist-spawned regentrification of Northeast Minneapolis.
A wildly productive artist of long-standing status locally, Gaard long has lived (as the story describes) on the edges in terms of financial, and mental, stability. As a result, he was in a terrible position to weather a sudden and unexpected change of living circumstance when he was kicked out of his apartment in 2001. In the profile, which appeared in City Pages in the fall of that year, I describe his conditions, after having moved to a dingy basement apartment in one of the roughest parts of South Minneapolis, thusly:
Gaard has a haggard look about him these days. His face is lined and sags heavily into his thick shoulders; his skin is pale and his wispy gray and white hair flies from his head in unkempt bunches. His eyes and his occasional smile still exude charisma, but the overall air about the artist is what doctors from another age might have called melancholia. The effect could also be that of stress stretched over a long, bleak period. Gaard had to leave his Northeast apartment this past summer after his landlord sold the building. (The artist had been providing paintings in lieu of paying full rent.) His new apartment contains colorful acrylic canvases leaning against walls and furniture, stacked on tables and counters. These may not be the best of times, but Gaard continues to work at an impressive clip; he is nothing if not a persistent man.
The happy coda to the story is eventually Gaard pulled himself back up by his easel legs. When I visited him at home in 2006, his circumstances had changed dramatically. There was light coming through the window of Gaard’s front living-room studio in the cute clapboard house he kept with his new girlfriend, and he looked many times happier and healthier than five years earlier. It probably helped too that he was also fresh from a triumphant, widely publicized local billboard project that had been commissioned by the Walker Art Center.
Still, it took a good four-five years after his exile from Nordeast for Gaard to get back to this stable ground. Four-five years of stress, unhealthy living, and lack of production (he only had one exhibition during this time) before Gaard was a viable artist again. It’s very revealing, after all, that at this moment of triumph, in the little Walker web-Q&A posted to accompany his billboard project, this is what Gaard has to say:
7. What advice do you have to offer young people today?
Enjoy your youth before the evil days draw nigh.
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