Lisa Yuskavage

JZ

I’d love to first ask you a bit about your time in grad school.

LY

When I was about to graduate from grad school, I had already hooked up with Matvey [Levenstein], who’s my husband now of 38 years. I knew he had a year to go, and I didn’t want to hang out in New Haven. I knew that would be the death of me. So I applied to Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and got in. You go up there on October 1, and it ends May 1, so it’s off-season, and it’s for fiction writers, poets, and visual artists. It’s pretty great. There’s nothing expected of you. They give you a stipend, and a room and board. When I went, you lived and worked in the same room, which had a charm. I had a futon mattress on one side of a wall and then walked around into the working area. It was an intense period of isolation, but I learned to love being near the water in the off-season. I learned to love writers and poets because I became a part of that community. You know, Mary Oliver was still alive and so many people were in the community—Stanley Jasspon Kunitz, Yehuda Amichai, all kinds of poets came in during my year. Carole Maso and Victoria Redel were interesting writers there as well.

JZ

I was wondering about language in terms of the titles of your work—are you thinking about poetry? Are you thinking about things that you’ve read, other points of reference?

LY

The first poetry that I read was by my friend Jesse Murry, who was this very literate man. Jesse introduced me to Wallace Stevens: “Light the first light of evening, as in a room / In which we rest and, for small reason, think / The world imagined is the ultimate good." That was his major influence. It’s interesting how much that still influences me. I made a painting, Snowman which is a musing from the poem by Stevens. Also, a work Pink Studio (Rendezvous) in which I was thinking about Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. I don’t know if you know the story about Jesse. They did a rolling show at Zwirner, More Life, for the fortieth anniversary of AIDS, and Jarrett Earnest and I co-curated one of the shows with the work of Jesse Murry. He was my best friend at Yale. When I was being interviewed, there he was: this six-foot-four Black man with a big belly like a Santa laughing at me. At Yale, your interviews were in the sub-basement of the art and architecture building, and he was down the hall and I came with my parents, in my stonewashed jeans, sparkly applique—I seriously still remember my outfit. [Laughs.] He was laughing at me because I kept telling my father to leave me the fuck alone. This is someone who didn’t have a father and had had an incredibly brutal life and had made it to Yale on his own. He was just laughing at me because I was being a total entitled bratty asshole. I remember looking at him and thinking, I hope he doesn’t get in—I hate that man. And of course, the first day of school, I see him and I start smiling, waving, and we became best friends immediately. Jesse decided to get tested for HIV because there was free healthcare, and he found out that he was HIV-positive and came to me. I remember seeing him on the street. He was a giant. I held him and said, “I’ll be with you through the entire thing.” I promised Jesse I would never, ever let his work be forgotten or let him be forgotten. I talked about him for 30 years to anybody who would listen. And it’s finally started to work—just this week, Hauser and Wirth Institute has taken on his archives. It’s huge. All of his journals, all of this letters.

JZ

When did he pass away?

LY

In January of 1993. I was having my first real show, and he called me about the opening while he was in the hospital for pneumocystis pneumonia, one of the many ways people died of AIDS. He had an oxygen mask on and he was asking me who was there at the opening and then he just took a turn for the worse. He was in the ICU and the nurses made us leave, so we weren’t able to be with him exactly when he died. I got home from the hospital and passed one of these bodegas and I bought a candle, and I lit it and put it in my window. I wrote in my journal—he was really suffering, and I said, “It’s okay to let go.” At three o’clock in the morning, something hit my solar plexus really hard, like a thump. I woke up, and I ran to the phone. I had gotten the name and the number to call. I said, “This is Jesse Murry’s sister,” because I knew they wouldn’t give me any information if I said I was his friend. They said, “Mr. Murry expired”—I’ll never forget that word— “15 minutes ago.” I think he came to me. I’ve had so many visits with him. He’s kind of been a guide. There’s a way in which he was such a teacher. And when he was dying, he would vacillate between being incredibly angry, which is understandable. He was impatient with me, because I was very young. He was probably 45 at this point, and then I was so young, sometimes I didn’t understand something. He would lash out at me, and sometimes I would lash back, and I’d say, “Well, why don’t you get yourself somebody more appropriate, age-wise,” you know, like, I’m doing my fucking best here, man. And then he would laugh. The amazing thing is, when I was doing the piece for More Life, I called his partner, who I hadn’t talked to for all these years, and he picked up the phone, and we had all these conversations; it’s been a very profound thing. We got his foundation together and we’re going to get the Hauser & Wirth Institute to help us arrange a Jesse Murry Study Center at a university. That is my goal. I’m not stopping until that happens. Interestingly, our class at Yale turned out to be kind of a star class, so many people went on to become quite well-known. John Currin, Sean Landers, Richard Phillips, and also sculptors.

EO

Whoa. Currin was in your class?

LY

Yeah. We’re still great friends.

EO

Were you two making the same kind of work? Or did it happen later for both of you?

LY 

I was always a figurative artist. He was making abstract paintings. He was very interested in what I was doing. And then he started taking William Bailey’s figure painting class and started making these really excellent little figure paintings. Everyone was like, “Where the fuck is that coming from?” Turned out when he was a child, his parents had gotten him lessons with some Russian master. When I was, like, wacking off in front of the TV watching Gilligan’s Island or something, he was studying with a Russian teacher. I had no lessons as a child, so I was like, “Oops.” He had secret skills tucked away.

JZ

Were a lot of kids at Yale bringing some childhood experience or training to bear like he was?

LY

Yes, I suppose but Jesse and I were two kids that came from relatively un-posh backgrounds. But we both had travelled extensively in Europe and seen everything in situ. So he was one of the few people like me, realizing the Americans had not traveled. They were too busy being Americans. When Jesse walked into my studio and saw the paintings I was originally making, he said, “These remind me of Giovanni Bellini’s Sacred Conversation paintings.” The fact that this man from a profoundly broken background from the South who basically raised himself, was gifted enough that he could walk into my studio, see that, acknowledge that…I didn’t even quite recognize myself that I was bringing that forward from several years prior, having been in Venice. Bellini’s Sacred Conversation paintings are kind of about a seance, where you’re bringing people together, and they’re in a room not acknowledging each other, but feeling each other. It's sort of like that Stevens poem about being in an imagined room.

EO

I’m curious—because the internet didn’t yet exist, references like that must have been very uncommon. People weren’t exposed to art in the same way because they weren’t traveling. Was Jesse the singular person who had the same references?

LY

Matvey had them too. Matvey said that I was the only person who knew anything about art the way he did. I had this very intense knowledge and understanding about the things that he cared about. Matvey had come from Moscow from the Soviet Union, as a Jew. They were letting Jews go at the end of the 1970s, early ’80s. They were like, “Bye!” Antisemitism didn’t officially exist, but they’re like, “Oh, if you’re Jewish, you can go.”

EO

Were you thinking about America in your work?

LY

I was thinking about trying to create a very strange and potent inner narrative that I’d never seen before. These paintings were like these strange rooms, with these figures in them that were kind of about an inner scene. They were not about something outside myself.

EO

And were they about telling a story? Were they narrative in that sense?

LY

They were a non-narrative visual representation. That’s why my website goes back so far. If you go back to the ’80s, back to the ’70s, they actually still have a reference to what I’m doing now. And the thing with Jesse was, he recognized something that was an underpinning because he was so mature. He was an art historian before he went to Yale. He was teaching art history at the Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and he had been writing criticism for art magazines, and organizing panel discussions. There’s an amazing thing on the Zwirner website that you can listen to—we actually uncovered it from the Archives of American Art—of him leading a panel discussion with Ana Mendieta about Expressionism. He was brilliant enough to bring someone like her in, not just painters, and she talked about the death wish. Jarrett [Earnest] and I were working on finding his voice, and we found these two panel discussions. It was so amazing, the conversation with him and Ana is so great. We don’t know what happened exactly, that night with her. But she sounds so brilliant in this conversation. This is the kind of stuff he was doing before he went to Yale. So I had the great privilege of having someone like that as really my friend and my teacher, and he led me to poetry, and then I went to Provincetown, and then when I left there, we went to the East Village, because he lived in the East Village. We made studio visits as artists in the East Village. But then he got sick, and while he was sick, he still came to my studio, and was so generous, and gave me some really incredible feedback on some of the more thoroughly outrageous paintings I was making. People were saying, “No, no, no, you cannot do this. You’re never going to get anywhere with these paintings.” He came when he was sick and he said, “You’ve got to have your pussy screwed on straight to make this work.” That was such a profound comment, because what the hell did that mean? I was thinking, what does it mean to have your pussy screwed on wrong? Because I do you think there is a meaning. I think a lot of people have their pussy screwed on—it’s a little off. You’ve got to really know where you are as a person in this body. I’m just like, “This is it. I’m doing it this way.” That was incredible feedback from him.

JZ

It’s also permission in some ways—you’re on the right track. Don’t listen to the noise.

LY

And from him, from my teacher, from my brother. That’s the voice from beyond! I always hear that. When he passed, his partner and I were boxing up his work, and there was a giant painting that he never got to make, six feet square. Before he died, he came to my studio and saw these color field paintings that were easel-size. He said, “I can’t wait for those to be on the scale the color field paintings are meant to be”—meaning large. I didn’t have the money to make them large. I was too broke. When he died, his partner gave me that six-foot square canvas, and it became a painting called Big Blonde Smoking, and I dedicated it to him. And then I just put everything on my credit card and ordered two more canvases and made a triptych and just went for it. In the triptych, they all were holding cigarettes. They all stared at you with their big blondness. I was 30 grand in debt from materials, and I just didn’t care.

JZ

And what happened after you made those paintings?

LY

I just kept going, thinking it’ll all work out. My husband started to do well, and he started selling paintings, and I just started borrowing money from him. I had a show in Los Angeles, but I never took off. The way young artists take off now—in Paris just now, people thought I was a young artist, like “Why are this young artist’s prices so high?” Because it’s the first time they’ve seen the fucking work. I’ve been showing for 40 years. I’m putting it out there.

EO

How many false starts did you have?

LY

Probably six or seven, all through the ’90s, up until I showed at Marianne Boesky. One could say maybe it wasn’t even until I showed with Zwirner, which was 2006. 1996 is when I was able to stop working at a day job and was able to pay off my debt. So, I was 36. I made a promise to myself that if I was 40, and it didn’t change, I wouldn’t stop painting, but I might not keep the Manhattan thing going. I might relax the housing situation and rethink it. I don’t know if a girl can go back to Philly. [Laughs.] I know it’s cheap. You know, there’s a New York Times article where they won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about all the Night of the Living Dead, all the junkies walking around in Kensington. I come from near Kensington.

JZ

You’ve mentioned that a man attacked you as a child and you managed to escape?

LY

I was having a picnic with a friend. I was about eight years old, seven years old, and we went to Fairmount Park, which is one of the largest park systems in the world. It’s got an upside and a downside because it is a city and there are a lot of places for bad people to go. So my friend and I decided to make a picnic, and we got on our bikes and went way, way out where we were told not to go. We were in the middle of a clearing, and this guy—he says, “Would one of you make sure that nobody sees me take a pee pee?” He talks to us like we’re children, which we are. I didn’t have any brothers, so I was kind of stupid about it. I didn’t understand that men don’t do that. They don’t need to be checked on like that. My friend Mary was very ornery. Unlike me, I became ornery later, maybe because of this. [Laughs.] She was tougher than me. So she said, “Well, I’m not doing it.” And I said, “I’m not doing it.” It turns out I did it. I go way, way, way in the woods with him, he said he really needed privacy. I’m giving him his privacy, I’m looking around. Next thing I know, he’s practically naked, his pants are around his ankles, and he has a knife. I don’t even hesitate, I start running, and if it weren’t for the fact that his pants were around his ankles, he probably would have caught me. I got to Mary, I threw her on the back of the bike and we got the fuck out of there. I didn’t tell anybody—I tried to tell my dad, and he said, “Well, just don’t go back there.” I was a kid, I needed to say that I did something wrong. Then I started walking in my sleep, screaming in my sleep. My mom was like, “What happened to Lisa?” My dad’s like, “She said something about the park.” So then my mom got it out of me, and my neighbor was a chief of police with a German Shepherd and everything. So he comes over and I was told that they found the guy. What happened later is there was a Catholic schoolgirl in the neighborhood next to mine named Dolores de la Pena. I never forgot her name. She was grabbed by somebody on her way home from school and decapitated and her hands were cut off. They never found her head, so we were all terrified—we kept worrying we were going to find her head, because they found her body in this creek in New Jersey. They kept thinking that the guy who did this to me was the guy who did that to her. There was this total fear of what was going on. Just a dangerous undercurrent, it didn’t feel safe. One of my dear friends that I grew up with was also raped at gunpoint by her stepfather, and I was her confidant. It started at the age of six, and she was always my friend. I had a safe home, and she used to come over for safety. The point is, it was a weird environment. People always presume that whatever I was depicting, especially in some of the earlier work, was frivolous. I think what I was trying to say is, this actually comes from real life. That violence is real. It is not coming from a desire to be sensational. It is a desire to express a real-life experience.

JZ

I would also say some of these paintings feel maybe like a rejection of the violence because it’s a dream world, it’s otherworldly.

LY

A long time ago, somebody had called the figures bimbos, and I said, “If they’re low, I’m down with that, I’m not judging them, I’m down there with them.” I’m elevating them as well. I’m 100% with my subjects. I’m bringing us both to the next level, through light, through intellect, through color, through every formal tool I have, through what painting can bring. That’s why painting itself is such an incredible medium, and that’s why painting on the level that I paint is so important, because that way I can use painting to get the messages through. As I have aged, the desire, the need to talk about those particular things has less of an effect. When I started, I was just in my early 30s, and now it’s so many years later, so now I’m revisiting a lot of those images in a quotational way. I’m putting those paintings within paintings. Those paintings are now being used as moments to revisit. I think in 2010 I made a painting called The Art Students, there were just three people. One of them was a male, and then two females and one of the females is laying on her back. I depicted her in a linear fashion just with charcoal. I decided not to actually paint her. Then there’s a standing nude, and then the male I decided to paint only in grisaille. The standing nude, she looks like she’s getting tickled, everybody’s painting her and she’s ticklish. I just thought, “Oh, it’s like painting, drawing, and sculpture.” And it’s playful because I remember one of the things I loved about being an art student was, there were lessons, but we were also having sex, and it was sort of the fun part. We were taking it all in, but we were also enjoying our bodies. So I made a couple of paintings about art school. There was a painting in my last gallery show in New York called Night Classes in the Department of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture, which the Art Institute in Chicago has now, where there’s a guy—it’s almost like he’s Doubting Thomas, and he’s touching the female. The funny thing is that I derive these images from some sort of porn. There’s always a little old-fashioned porn, where they have a scene where somebody’s painting on someone else. I sort of gleaned these images starting with that, but I decided to make an art school scene. I always wanted to make one set in the middle of the night, you’re working on your homework in the middle of the night. I decided that the background of the painting was, they’re so desperately trying to do this abstract painting assignment and they get so bored. They just start having sex or running around. I put the Bad Baby painting in that painting, and it was the first time I quoted my own painting within a painting. It was kind of a mystery to me. Because art school is ground zero for how you become something as an artist. I thought, well, this is a really interesting subject, art school. It’s not just about art studios. It’s about art classrooms.

JZ

When you were experimenting with color and you’re finding your own language, there were people telling you, don’t do this, don’t go down this path?

LY

The amount of “don’t” that I got—we live in a world of don’t, but you learn to flick it away.

EO

I was watching your talk with Helen Molesworth, and you mention these women who are getting PhDs in art history and how they think they know how it is, and you were saying they don’t know at all how it is.

LY

Their pussies are not screwed on straight, at least in the direction that my true north is. [Laughs.] All I care about is freedom. My “do” is their “don’t,” and if I’m going to live in their oppressed world, I’m going to fucking commit suicide and that’s just not going to happen, I’m not going to die for them. I’m not going to die on their hill.

EO

What were they fighting for and what were you fighting for? What were you trying to escape?

LY

They didn’t want me to do what I was doing, which is to make these fucking fun, hilarious paintings that had titties in them, that were outrageous. These original paintings, my first show, let’s break that down. The show that Elizabeth Koury got—my friend died during that show. January 9. He died like four days after the opening. I noticed from the November website that you have done a lot of interviews with artists from Metro Pictures, the Pictures Generation artists. The Pictures people got me. I think the Pictures people are fucking smart. They were rule breakers themselves, and they were image makers and fucking conceptual. You know? There’s a way in which they just looked at it and got it. Cindy [Sherman], Laurie [Simmons]. As I’ve met them over the years, they’re like, “Come here, little sister.”

JZ

How big a part does humor play for you?

LY

Some people don’t think any of that belongs in art. But Mike Kelley was such an important artist for me, because he brought in that weird Catholic trash. And I was like, “You can bring this in? This can be an art?” Warhol was so played out that I thought, this cannot feed me. I feel like I saw the Koons Banality show, and I saw the Mike Kelley dolls around Metro Pictures, all in the same day. It may be a conflation in my mind, but I thought, there’s a way in which this could be turned into painting. I’ve said this one time at Yale: I was looking for something that wasn’t being made. I was seeing a lot of things that were hitting on all of the notes that I wanted, but they just weren’t being made in painting. Now you could say, was John [Currin] doing it? Well, he hadn’t done it yet. We had this weird, it’s like...

JZ

Parallel time?

LY

It’s a parallel time thing, yeah. When you see somebody and then you say, “Well, I’m not stepping off it,” and they go, “Well, I’m not going to step off. And no, you step off.” So then you know what you do? You just keep plugging, and try and make the other person work harder, step higher, make it better. And we’ve made each other better. We’re lucky to have each other. One of the things Jesse said before he died? “You are lucky to have each other.”

EO

So your potential was apparent even then, in school?

LY

We were lucky to have each other in school, too. I mean, John and I have always been very good friends, and have always been very close. We can see each other. It’s true with Matvey also. We all share studio visits and can talk frankly about the work and a shared history.

JZ

Do you think your trajectory and your career would be substantively different if you hadn’t had somebody like that to play with?

LY

His wife and I were texting the other day, and she said, “John just said you’re a great artist.” They say that these things come in groups. That really good artists, really good art comes in groups—Scorsese wouldn’t be himself without his colleagues. You see these groups of people that come together.

JZ

How important has cinema been to your work at different points?

LY

I totally rely on other media for ideas. I’ll take ideas wherever they come from, but more importantly attitudes. I had this sort of shitty show where I felt very lost. I saw the show, I walked into the opening, and after the opening I quit painting for a year, and I just decided, maybe I’m not a painter, maybe I should be a filmmaker. I thought maybe there’s something wrong with me and painting. My ideas are there, but there’s something about what happens to the way I approach it, my attitude gets very precious and I become not myself. There’s a way in which I edit, I become too highbrow when I bring painting into it. I don’t seem to function on all cylinders, like there’s something missing, like the “check engine” light is on or something, I can’t do it. So I just quit painting for a while. I thought maybe I would be freer in the film medium because I didn’t know as much about it. I would just be able to express these ideas more freely.

EO

What do you think you were doing when you were painting? Were you expecting too much?

LY

I think I had a kind of schoolmarm talking to me. The idea of multiplicity, multiple personalities that are integrated. We all have these multiples, which I truly believe. I think one of mine is a very strong schoolmarm, and it pops up quite frequently. It functions quite well; it gets me to work. My house is very neat. But I had to let that go. It didn’t function in the work, I had to kick it out. I didn’t know until the year was over what was going on.

JZ

What called you back to painting?

LY

I had little jobs teaching watercolor to old ladies and didn’t have a lot of expectations. I went to a lot of festivals at the Film Forum. The Tarkovsky festival ran for two weeks, and I watched them all. Whoever it was, I watched them all. There were certain things that I’d watch and I’d say, “Oh, that reminds me of that thing I saw in the galleries.” I started making connections between things that I’d seen in galleries that spoke to me. I was keeping records in journals, connections I was making. I was just thinking, thinking, thinking. I was going to the New York Public Library, looking at books, just going in the stacks and going on microfiche and looking at shit. I started therapy for the first time; I was in therapy at Yale, but I started therapy for the first time in the real world. I couldn’t afford it, so I did therapy at NYU, with a trainee. Five dollars. I stayed with the woman for 27 years.

EO

[Laughs.] You've lucked out on life in so many ways.

LY

She was a great therapist, brilliant. She still is, she’s so great. I made paintings about her. I was so mean to her. I was so angry and so mean. But it was great, because she’d say, “You can throw shit at me all you want but we have to talk about it while it’s dripping off me.” She was neutral. I really let that fly, and she got me through the Jesse grieving. It was an unbelievable experience, what a gift. I had no choice but to get my shit together and pursue some career outside of going to see movies. One thing I noticed about Fassbinder’s movies is that they had the same troupe of actors. He used them over and over again—he had this blonde Hanna Schygulla that he used in many different ways. It occurred to me, that was an interesting idea. So if you see my work, you’ll often see something pop up again and again and again. Jasper Johns does this repeating and repeating. It’s one of Johns’ famous quotes: “Take something. Do something to it. Ditto, ditto, ditto.” Fassbinder just kept taking this woman and allowing her to go deep into all these different dreams. Hitchcock kept casting new blondes. It’s a different idea. Hitchcock was trying to fuck those blondes, whereas Fassbinder was not trying to fuck the blondes, he was trying to fuck the male characters. That’s why the males were changing [Laughs]. I learned that from Fassbinder, so I do take things that I see in films, and they have to trigger some hidden knowledge in me. You’re not going to take something that’s not already in you. It won’t mean anything if it’s not already there.

EO

Can you only let go of the paintings once they mean something to you?

LY

If I don’t think they’re interesting paintings, they’re not leaving the studio.

EO

Is that a feeling? How do you know when they’re finished?

LY

They click into place; they conclude in this way. You know when you learn to speak in a sentence, and your voice goes down? There’s a way in which when a painting is done, it doesn’t go up, it goes down in a nice way. That sounds odd because you know, a body of work, there’s still the lift, there’s openness, whereas an individual painting, it ends on kind of a period. Whereas a body of work ends with a question.

JZ

And there are callbacks to your earlier bodies of work in new bodies, there might be something from a previous show in a new show.

LY

The interesting thing is, when you turn 60 it’s your second Saturn Return. Something happened, and I didn’t do it on purpose, where I became kind of in love with my life. [Laughs.] And I look back on my life and I was like, “Look at what I did! Look at all of what I did.” And look at what I’m GOING to do. [Laughs] I just felt free. Any former shames that I had—in the first half of my life, some of the troubles and the weirdnesses—I left them behind. I felt kind of sorted. I could really step into who I really am. I felt like the bloom was off the rose. People call fertility the bloom of the rose, and the whole feminist movement is really in some ways not just about equality, but about being able to have your body be yours, whether you’re going to be a mother, how that’s going to impact your life. It was absolute torture through my 40s, when people would not leave me the fuck alone about my body. Everybody is all over your shit about that. Because I was a cis, female married person, it was “When are you going to have a baby?” When I was actually in my 30s, I didn’t have the income. Then it’s: “You can adopt.” I started getting so sassy. I started saying, “Honey, if I wanted a baby, I would steal yours.” If you don’t understand that Lisa Yuskavage is in control of her mind enough and her body enough to know that she could have wanted that and done that... But the fact that people step over that threshold of privacy when you’re a woman and get all up in that business, it’s very painful. The beauty is, once you start to get to a certain age, they drop it. That was a fucking relief.

EO

Was that channeled in your work?

LY

It was channeled in my work because I just didn’t have that day-to-day stress and that question. Strangers asked you that question. “Do you have children?” I would say, “No, I killed them.” I actually never have had to do that, but I like saying it as a troublemaker. I choose to say obnoxious things sometimes. When I was down South where a friend was having a show down, where we were, and we went somewhere, and a woman was Russian, and my husband’s Russian. So we went into a synagogue and a Russian woman was taking care of the synagogue, and I speak a little Russian. And the woman started asking, they can’t help themselves. Where are your children? To keep it short I just said, “They’re home.” My parents never asked me to have kids. Never.

EO

How do they feel about your work?

LY

They’re super proud of me. Never been ashamed. Always right out there. They have work in their house. People come over and they’re weirded out and they’re like, whatever. She’s doing her thing.

JZ

I would love to hear about the influence of Philadelphia on your work a little bit more. You were looking at Duchamp as a teenager, but what other artists made an impression early on?

LY

I think it’s really cool that in New York City, Philadelphia, places like Washington, D.C., you can go into museums. That’s an amazing gift. I got into a program in high school called the Mentally Gifted Program. We got taken out of the class once a week and brought to different things. One of them was the Philadelphia Art Museum, and we got a tour. I got really great art history classes, around thirteen. I went to this high school called the Philadelphia High School for Girls, which was a magnet school, and it took me an hour and a half to get there because it was in North Philly. It took two buses and then I walked. I never missed one day of school. I was never late. It’s the reason why I have a nickname— “the Yus.” My homeroom teacher used to say “the Yus is here.” [Laughs.] I loved this place, everything about it. I was voted the Best Dressed white girl because I was dressed by my mom sewed all my clothes. It was a really cool school—Philadelphia was actually a great city because I learned what the breadth of the city was from this school for smart girls. We always read porn in the lunchroom on a dare; we were totally crazy. I had a big sheet of paper in there on the table and everyone drew their tits. We were obsessed with our bodies. [Laughs]. You know who was in my class, was Mary Washington. She’s in the House of Representatives, the only Black out lesbian in the House of Representatives for Baltimore. Mary Washington sat next to me in choir and gospel choir. I was just having a laugh, we thought it was funny. I wrote on the top “The Tit Papers.” I think the boys’ school broke into my locker and somebody stole it. I mean, it’s a pretty amazing gift for the boys. Imagine that. I went back there with Ariel [Levy], with The New Yorker. We went back to Philly to walk around and we went to my high school, got past the metal detector, which didn’t exist back then. And they said, “You have to talk to the vice principal.” We went in, and this dude comes out. I was expecting an old lady with, like, orthopedic shoes. It turns out he was my age, but it looked like he was forty. I said, “Well, I just want Ariel to see the art room.” It was so cute. I started telling him the story about how I didn’t miss a day of school. And the story about “the Yus”. And he turns around and says, “Wait a minute. What’s your first name?” And I said, “Lisa,” and he goes, “Wait a minute. I’m your biggest fan.” He’s freaking out. It was so funny. I signed a book and sent it back to him. You never know where your people are.

JZ

I would love to revisit the first show after the one where you took a break—what was the show where you first felt confident about what you were doing, your career?

LY

Well, when I showed with Boesky in 1996. I had disappeared for a long time. I was showing in Los Angeles from about ’93 to’96. But that’s a long time when you’re that age.

EO

What was your experience of showing in LA versus showing in New York?

LY

It was fun to show in LA. It was just different people, a different attitude. People in New York thought I lived in LA. I’d ceased being known as a New York artist, even though I was living in New York. So I had two shows in Los Angeles that were kind of well received in Los Angeles, it was okay. And then Charles Saatchi caught on to me, and then Marianne Boesky came in, so I had this show scheduled with her and I started making these Bad Habit sculptures. People started saying, “We’re dying to for you to have a show in New York. People really miss you.” I learned that it’s not such a bad thing to disappear for a while. So that show got a lot of attention, the Bad Habits show in ‘96. They were based on these sculptures that were five little sculptures. That was my return to New York and I never had to have a second job again. I started getting collected more seriously. I got paid, and never got ripped off again financially.

EO

Hm, it sounds very Mike Kelley! Was there a lot of dodgy financial behavior at the beginning?

LY

Yeah, people wouldn’t pay me. If I did sell things, somebody wouldn’t pay me. I would have a show, things might sell and then I wouldn’t get paid. As a matter of fact, David and I bought back two paintings together that were in a show where I didn’t get paid. It was devastating. I was like a child that thought your parents got divorced because of you. I thought maybe my work wasn’t good, and that was why I was being treated badly, like if I was a better artist, I wouldn’t be being treated like that. It really undermined me.

JZ

What was the first time that you felt like, “I’m being me, I’m not compromising”?

LY

Being me was probably when I fought my way into making those Bad Baby paintings. I had a collector who was basically the only person who was my light at the end of the tunnel. I was making these much more conservative paintings. When I started making the Bad Baby paintings, this man came to my studio and he said, “This is terrible. It’s a joke. You need to stop what you’re doing immediately and go back.” He told me I was making a total mess of my career, my life, everything. He was my only light at the end of the tunnel, and he took that light away. He was really mean about it, too, and I was hurt and devastated. But I said, “I know this is right. I feel like I’m alive for the first time.” And he just said, “I have nothing to say to that. I’m just telling you this work is everything that I know is wrong with art.” He said, “You’re being ironic.” I said, “I don’t think it’s ironic. You’re seeing it that way, but it’s not ironic to me.” We argued about it. I remember we had to get through a dinner because we always had dinners after his visits. Slowly but surely, we stopped seeing each other, and it was really, really painful. There were a lot of people like that, who slowly fell away.

EO

I’m curious where the forms and the sensibility of your paintings came from? Do you live in your own world? What was it like finding that sensibility?

LY

Trust. There’s an idea that I think is really important that I learned in a really interesting art history class, that as an artist—it could be true about a writer—but that an artist’s world comes from your inner life, art history, or from other people’s work: reading, films, seeing things out there in other work, and then nature. So it’s a combination of how these things get integrated. But you have to have a really, really, really strong knowledge of art history and read a lot. I think one of the missing links for a lot of young people —their film knowledge and their reading is very lacking. So they don’t have a lot of resources and they haven’t seen a lot of art.

EO

What does it mean to look at painting?

LY

It’s like eating food and tasting things—you need to experience textures and it’s how you learn to do the thing. The most important part of this is to learn from other people up close and personal. Imagine being a writer and never reading a book.

JZ

Were there young artists in your cohort in the 1990s whose work was really informing how you thought about painting?

LY

Metro pictures was so great, every time you went, there was something else that was incredibly interesting and important. Going to all my friends’ studios, we all shared studio visits, we kept up with each other—people that we went to school with like Sean Landers, Richard Phillips, John Currin, Matvey, Jesse, everybody. Even people you’d never heard of, we all went to see each other and critiqued each other’s work. I still love a good studio visit. My husband comes to my studio all the time, and I go to his studio all the time. We know how to get in and get out without causing a ruckus or doing major damage. You want to stay married, you want to not ruin the person’s day, but you want to be helpful. First you have to ask the person, what do they need? I went over to the Guggenheim when Sarah Sze was installing her exhibition, and what do I know about installing installation art, but I looked at what she was doing there and just gave feedback. It’s just an instinct, take it or leave it. This is the way that I see it. It’s based on a long history of looking at someone’s work. You know when someone can take criticism, and I have some friends that can’t take any criticism whatsoever.

JZ

How did you arrive at the idea of putting yourself in your paintings for your last show?

LY

By accident, I ended up in a painting. I goofed around and found an image in my studio, where somebody had photographed me pretending to paint a painting as an outtake from a New York Times publicity shot. I was standing there, pretending to paint like a mope, but I thought it was an interesting image, and I just thought, that’s weird. I sort of I hate the word meta, because the world is messed up by that now. I don’t like meta anything. But really, it is the word. It was the word before they fucked it. I thought, what if I take this painting, which was Night Classes in the Department of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture. In this photograph, I’m in the middle of painting and I’m not done painting it. I hadn’t even figured out the part that made the painting good. I hadn’t gotten there yet. I just thought, what a weird idea to aggrandize a painting that’s still drying. I’m now going to repaint that painting with me painting it. I’m already historicizing this shit. So I made a small painting, and I thought it was it was actually pretty funny. Sometimes I send an image to my husband because his studio’s in Union Square, and I’m in Gowanus, Brooklyn. So I sent him an image, and his response was, “You can’t do that.” And I said, “Well, that’s what you said when I first made the bad babies. So maybe I’m onto something.” The word “don’t” always gets me excited.

EO

Why did you start painting? And why do you think you’re still painting?

LY

I really love painting. Mentally, when you’re smart, there’s nothing like being engaged, right? One of the things I really like about it is that when I set up the problems well enough, then I get to create a thing. I’m so happy because I’m so engaged. I’m really in the thick of it. Life just feels worth living. It just makes everything good. Otherwise, it’s very depressing. It doesn’t make sense. You start thinking about the fucking weather and Donald Trump too much. I could not have gotten through all of that without this. Sometimes I wonder, what’s the point of it, shouldn’t I be doing something for the world? And then I realize how important the entertainment industry is, and art is part of the entertainment industry during hard times. We create beauty, and places for people to escape into, and we guide them towards thinking things that are not dark. I realized that it actually is important. It actually does have a role. I’m not saying necessarily every single picture, but I think overall, it’s like you’re setting an example towards believing in something that is good.

JZ

You’re really also doing it day in and day out, you have that sense of discipline.

LY

If you ask my mother, she says that I was always a hard-working person. But I don’t necessarily think that’s the key. There was a moment in my life where the difference between working hard and hearing from the angels really is where the change happened. I went to the Tyler School of Art in Rome when I was in the third year. I couldn’t afford the full year in Rome, I had a summer job and after-school jobs in order to pay for the room and board and the airplane ticket in order to go. I never actually faced class hatred—meaning mine for wealthier kids—until I had to leave Rome after the first semester, and I said to the people who had all the money, who could stay: “I’d rather be dead than be you.” I was really nasty. They all were talking about the kids that were coming in for the one semester in spring. We were sitting around eating dinner and they were saying that the kids should not have a choice of studios, they should have a second choice, because they were only coming in the second semester; they should get whatever’s left over. I realized, what if I had chosen the second semester? And I said, “I don’t think it’s fair.” They said, “Anybody who’s only coming here for one semester doesn’t have priority.” It was the first time in my life that I became a communist or something. I went full throttle. It was like blackout rage, class rage. And then there was no one there except for these two friends of mine, and one of them, he sat there and he just looked at me, like, “What the fuck’s the matter with you?” But he stuck with me. He didn’t leave. I was like, “Where did everybody go?” he said, “Do you know what you just said to everybody?” I thought I was defending those people coming in. That was my class rage. So I got back to Philadelphia, still in a rage, like fuck those kids. I hate them all. I was back at Tyler with the drop/add students because all the art students from my class were still back in Rome. I ended up being alone for the first time, nobody was there. Forced isolation. I was living at home, miserable, because I wasn’t in Rome, recognizing for the first time I really was poor. It was like the stink of it hit me in the face. I could see how ugly where I lived was. My sister’s bedroom was my studio because she went off to school, and the quiet that I was experiencing for the first time was key. I was painting, and things started to gel in a really interesting way. I started to paint, but not like an art student, suddenly I started to paint much better. I could hear that there was order. There’s an order and a rhythm to a painting, and then the order completes itself. So I started to glean this thing, and I had a dream that I was in this museum and on a tour. There was a staircase with some expressions written into it—it said in Latin, Vincit qui se vinci. I was in the tour, and the tour guide said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Latin, I don’t know what this means.” And I said, “I do. It means, “She conquers who conquers herself.” I woke up bathed in sweat, thinking, get out of your own way. Don’t let anyone or anything get in your way. This is it. So it became, no boyfriends. Nothing. I remember I had a friend that said, “One day, Lisa Yuskavage, you’re going to wake up and it’s just going to be you and your art.” I said, “Doesn’t seem so bad to me.” Like, get the fuck out of my house. [Laughs.]

JZ

What happened after that realization?

LY

From that day forward, I started to feel this energy coming out at the top of my head, like I was getting information. As long as I was quiet. That’s why when I go to my studio, I don’t want anyone around me. People always ask when they come to my studio, where is everybody? But I need to really be quiet. I hear my inner voice and I know what’s going on.