From York St. to Broome, Yale artists grow up

It's a glamorous story—a fairy tale—and it's not a telling example. Many Yale graduates now eke out art careers, but most of them have day jobs. Lindsey Brandt, MC '95, creates light sculptures in fiberglass and polyester resin. One recent work, exhibited at the Exit Gallery in New York, consists of 20 night lights, dreamlike amalgams of human and animal features (one has the body of a bee, a backpack shaped like an ear, and the head of a Roman soldier), flush with a backlit wall. The objects explore Brandt's childhood fears and ideas of fantasy and protection.

Three times a year, Brandt gets paid to help install new exhibits at the Guggenheim Museum. Then she holes up in her studio until the money runs out. "I try to eat as little as possible," she said. "I try to extend it as long as I can." When her funds are depleted, it's back to any number of odd jobs—redesigning houses, researching for an art critic.

Brandt is a good example: not exactly famous, not exactly starving. And she has no regrets. "It doesn't seem very dreamlike, but I'm definitely living my dream," she said. "I'm certainly ambitious. Hopefully, fabulous success will come in time. But I know it's very possible that it won't, and that's okay."

Romancing the critics

"Your slides are like the condom. You can't even take them out until Mr. Art World is already all hot and bothered." This is Hilary Koob-Sassen's, DC '97, advice to the aspiring artist. Shortly after graduating from Yale and dropping out of Columbia graduate school, Koob-Sassen bought the shell of a two-story building in Long Island City and, with some friends, installed electricity, heating, walls, and floors, turning a "wreck" into a beautiful living, studio, and exhibition space. He collaborated with Anna Ehrsam, ART '97, on an enormous sculpture in marble, steel, cedar, rubber, aluminum, and alabaster. Called "Intuition Triggers No. 1-52," it hangs from the ceiling, roughly the shape of a 10-by-10-by-20 foot I-beam.

"It's an anatomy of the intuition," Koob-Sassen said. "It's about the chemical self, and how one can thus comprehend one's contiguity with all matter." Including the model for the World Trade Organization headquarters that protrudes about four feet from one end.

If he had gone to art school instead of to Yale, Koob-Sassen said, he would never have been forced to take science classes—and might never have found the ideas that are the basis of his art. "With physics and chemistry in mind, we're looking for the infinite, the sublime," he said. "No one should try to make art if they've never taken biology."

Alexi Worth, ES '86, a painter who recently won the prestigious Tiffany award, agreed that Yale's range of requirements makes for better-rounded artists. "At an art school, you're surrounded by 60 or 80 or 100 other people doing art, and it can be oppressive," he said. "Everything you do can start to feel like something someone else is doing. But Yale nourishes your illusions. You can make a great painting and think,`Wow, no one's ever done this before,' when of course there are similar paintings lying around a hundred other studios."

Worth's paintings are meticulous representations of groups of models posed in fictional situations. He paints on wood because, he said, "I was tired of the weave of canvas. It's beautiful, but it was part of a conventional painterliness I wanted to give up. I want to articulate images as clearly as possible without fetishizing the surface."

Worth is the first to admit that he's far from being famous, but he says he's not as cynical as he used to be about the art business. "Coming out of college, I was very hostile, very wary of the art world," he said. "But dealers are incredibly idealistic people. They have to be—they're usually not making any money either. Selling yourself is important, but that's true in any business. It's really mostly about talent."

Miriam Dym, SM '90, even enjoys art's political side. Dym's career is starting to take off in Los Angeles, where the POST gallery exhibits her installations: rooms lined with computer-designed abstract maps. They explore and respond to cultural ideas of information and the representation of information, Dym says. "Especially as I get more successful and more confident, I've come to enjoy all the networking and business aspects," Dym said. "It contributes to the game aspect of it, and the feeling that you're making stuff in the world."

But Koob-Sassen, whose massive "Intuition Triggers" is too big for most galleries, longs for a benevolent investor to make his many day jobs a distant memory. "There are three steps to being a successful artist," he advised. "First, you have to have work. Second, you have to fill yourself up with complete, absolute love for your work. Third, you have to meet the right people—and never mention that you have any work until you've gone out to lunch at least twice."

Guilded rats (and other monetary gems)

"A lot of my friends from Yale are making a lot of money right now," sculptor Joel Tauber, DC '95, said. Tauber's work—installations featuring gilded rats, doves, and rat-dove hybrids of varying sizes—is starting to get noticed. His second solo show, at Boston's Kingston Gallery, was reviewed in the Boston Globe and in Art New England and appeared on the cover of Arts Media.

"Yale was really good in terms of how it prepared me to think about art, but it gave me absolutely no practical skills in terms of survival," Tauber said. But Tamara Sussman, TC '99, credits her art major for her survival in the real world. Sussman, who studied sculpture at Yale, now makes a living doing freelance photo printing and assistance. "It's a total fallacy that getting an art degree is a flaky thing to do, or that it doesn't prepare you as well as the humanities for the job market," she said. "I have all these skills—I can print and retouch photographs, assist on shoots and do basic carpentry and construction. If I had majored in history, I wouldn't have those skills."

Skills pay the bills—especially teaching. Tauber's seven-foot rat-doves may resonate with viewers' spiritual anxieties, but "they're not the sort of thing people want to have in their homes," he admitted. Tauber teaches art history and sculpture in a program he designed for a new high school in Cambridge.

And teaching art can be a calling in itself. Painter Joanna Astor's, DC '95, biomorphic abstractions on wood and paper have been shown a few times, but she has not actively pursuing a solo career since she started teaching middle school in Armonk, N.Y. "The Manhattan art scene was very, very competitive, and there's a lot of contemporary art I just don't respect," she said. "As soon as I started teaching, I felt right at home. I could be happy doing this until I'm 70."

Painter Katy Schneider, ES '86, has been teaching at Smith College for 10 years and shows regularly at the Pepper Gallery in Boston. Teaching allows her to balance her family and her art, the combination that is the dominant theme of her work—her paintings are mostly self-portraits that show Schneider painting with her children in the room. The scenes take place in dark rooms lit by a single light bulb so that "the play of light reveals the story going on," she said.

Over the top with no regrets

No artist, it seems, ever looks back and wishes he had sold out when he had the chance. Photographer Shira Weinert, DC '95, has no regrets because she knows she wouldn't be happy doing anything else. "It's such a gift to me to constantly delight in the world, to be continually fascinated by how the world looks through my camera," she said. "I've been a photographer for close to 10 years now, and I still feel a real charge when I take photos, when I process them, and when I print them."

Weinert makes portraits, mostly of friends and family, in tableaux she describes as "slightly over-the-top," and works as the artistic director of the Creative Arts Workshop, an art program for at-risk kids. As far as she's concerned, Matthew Barney can have his slobbering critics. "When I graduated, I had a total sense of awe of the art world," she said. "I wanted to be part of the progression of art history. I wanted to be in the history books. Now the most important thing to me is to make my work and to love it. Four-and-a-half years out of school, it's still an adventure."

Graphic by Shawn Cheng.

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