Riptide
Regarding Mary Beth Edelson's belongings, my mother's ashes, and a vinyl pouch of court records.
no story
no narrative
no message
no sentiment
no nostalgia
no weather
no time of day
no sky
no sun
no clouds
no mystery
no trees
nothing is growing
grit
gritty
surface is everything
— From notes my mother made on the work of her last show.1
I’ve lost all nostalgia for my parents this week. It’s all grit and gritty.
People sent me the Artnet article: “Art and Ephemera Once Owned by Pioneering Artist Mary Beth Edelson Discarded on the Street in SoHo.” The subheading reads: “The purge of material, including works on paper, was organized by her son, Nick Edelson. Some who came to take items criticized the disposal.” (Annie Armstrong, April 17, 2024)
Nick is criticized for being disrespectful. Mary Beth Edelson was an acclaimed artist who died in 2021 at age 88, a member of the pioneering feminist cooperative gallery A.I.R.. She was there with my mother’s second cousin, the artist Dotty Attie; I realized writing this. (Then I found the image of Dotty’s head in Edelson’s collage from 1976: Death of the Patriarchy/A.I.R. Anatomy Lesson in MoMA’s collection online.)
Such a small town.
My mother’s work is not on the street waiting for Junk Luggars. Junk Luggers came directly up to the loft, as did Materials for the Arts, with whom I disposed of most of her ephemera and some of her artwork to be repurposed by art programs, artists, and schools in NYC.
The scavengers of Edelson’s trove on Mercer Street remind me of Mimi. She loved to scavenge stuff off the street. Both my parents did. At my core, I, too, am a scavenger though now I fear the accumulation of things.
Most of Mimi’s work is in an unheated storage unit down the road, not good for art, but so far, not disposed of at the end of my driveway.
I don’t know Nick, but I don’t judge him. My brother wanted nothing to do with Mimi’s work, its preservation or disposal. I alone carry this. My father’s work is lovingly tended by his late-in-life daughter. Only I shoulder Mimi’s.
And I am not good at this. This blog is a ruse in that regard. I archive nothing.
Both my parents had trouble caring for their work. At my house, my father once used salad oil to rub down a still life he’d painted for me. The landscapes on my bedroom wall are scraped up with their repeat journeys in and out of his painting racks, sheets of salvaged cardboard sometimes dividing them.
Here I am at age 15, a painting that he’d left for years in our little unheated summer camp in Maine.
I hired an art restorer to clean the mold off my face. She did so with her saliva and cotton wool. I have many filthy canvases, and I asked her to show me how.
I’ll never get to it.
I’m raw today with their material. In that storage unit last week, I was setting mouse bait when I decided to pull open a zippered vinyl portfolio I’d scavenged from her file cabinet. It’s there in a plastic bin among the many bins of art and the warped cardboard boxes of kitchen things that do not do well in the condensation of that barn-like space among her shaker dining chairs and canvases wrapped in plastic and cardboard I’d scavenged in Soho. That vinyl pouch had loomed, as had her ashes, untended, unread.
But since her ashes found the sea last week, my feet felt firmly planted. The ocean that had filled my head was now bounded by its shoreline, so I opened that mysterious zippered pouch that I knew contained court documents, divorce documents.
And I was reminded that people are myriad. They cannot be reconciled. They are not simply good or bad. They are not high-minded or petty. They are sea foam and sea trash, morning light, and thunder clouds. And mine specialized in rip tides.
Here were their court papers and testimonies, reminding me of their worst selves and my position sucked under their surf.
I had my hands in her ashes last week. They had rested in a box above my desk for four years, but the week of the big snowstorm at our house held the Friday we took them south in our car, the same Friday of the earthquake in New York and New Jersey, where we were headed, which resolved into a glorious sun-flooded Sunday with my brother at the beach in Atlantic City before the solar eclipse on Monday. I spread her with my hands, fist fulls, sand on sand and lapping surf, desensitized to the husk of her.
“People are myriad,” I read somewhere. And so I will find my way back to Lennart and Mimi, and not just their ashes. But today, I am caught between their sun and moon.
Two Houses is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and Time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson.
She’s grieving her neighborhood’s ongoing construction while jabbing at the “dogmas” surrounding 50s abstract expressionism (as my father would put it).
How apt to pair this with the "Excavation" painting, as you excavate your mom's (and your) life.
Beautiful writing. This post is so raw--and hits hard. I love the way you tie together the threads of the story of your parents, of you, of the art world--while still allowing them to be loose. You don't attempt to paint a single, cohesive narrative--instead, you give us finished and unfinished pieces, much like the work you have been uncovering from your mom and dad. Thanks for sharing your story.