Cass Corridor Documentation Project. Oral History Project

Transcription

1 LUCHS INTERVIEW 1 Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project Interviewee: Kathryn Brackett Luchs Date of Birth: August 25 th 1950 Place of Birth: Detroit, Michigan Relationship to Cass Corridor: Artist, Documentarian Interviewer: Bart Bealmear Date of Interview: March 31, 2010 Location: Reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI Bealmear: State your name, please. Luchs: My name is Kathryn Brackett Luchs. Bealmear: My name is Bart Bealmear and I m the interviewer. Today s date is March 31 st, 2010, and we are sitting in my home in Ferndale, Michigan. This interview is being recorded with a Sony MP3 IC Recorder. Okay, let s start with your family background.

2 LUCHS INTERVIEW 2 Luchs: It s an interesting background. My parents were both painters. My mother is still to this day a renowned figure painter. My father, who died in 1982, was Donald Alexander Brackett. My mother is Evelyn Raskin. She was Evelyn Brackett Raskin at some point. I grew up with a house that my father had built, with two studios one at the front and one at the back and my mother was doing figure painting and exhibiting at Garelicks Gallery on Livernois. So I grew up with a kind of advanced psyche, in that my mother was the one that was working a working artist and receiving a lot of attention for what she did. My father would teach at Cass Tech High School. He taught there for twenty-five years, watercolor painting, art history and he founded Michigan Water Color Society. He left Cass to found the Macomb Community College Art Department, which was just being created. So he went in there to build that faculty. Bealmear: When was that? Luchs: That was in the mid-1970s. I think around 77, though it may have been earlier than that. It was around 1965, actually. Bealmear: Where did you grow up? My father built our house in Oak Park, Michigan, with the two studios, so I had the figure painting going on what they called non-objective painting when I was growing up in the 1950s, which sort of evolved into abstraction and expressionism. Those were the words that

3 LUCHS INTERVIEW 3 came along, later, but it was referred to when I was a child as non-objective painting. My father was a theosophist, too, so there was this consciousness around our home. The theosophical society would visit it was very much like Buddhism (laughs), in its finer application. There were a lot of lectures about reincarnation. Where as my mother was completely in the other world When were done, were done. She s non-religious. So there s kind of these interesting dynamics. They divorced when I was about fourteen and I started to commute between two houses one in northwest Detroit and one off of Jefferson near Indian Village. I would go to Cass and I would decide each day what bus to get on (laughs) which house I was going to. It was kind of a difficult situation there were five children. My sister had already gone on to become a student at Monteeth at Wayne State University. She was befriending lots of artists and she s six years older so I started meeting many of the artists that became well known in the future when I was about twelve years old. She would be bringing them around. Her best friend was Ellen Phelan. A lot of her boyfriends became faculty at Wayne State and Macomb. So I was getting introduced, very young, to folk music musicians that she knew and artists that she knew. Bealmear: Who were some of those people? Luchs: Philip Fike was one of the artists. Stanley Rossenthal, Al Hebert. These were people she was hanging out with. The musicians included Patrick Sky she brought him over to dinner one night, and I m trying to think of her name. You ll know whom I m talking about. Midnight at the Oasis who sang that? (laughs)

4 LUCHS INTERVIEW 4 Bealmear: I don t know (laughs). Luchs: It ll come to me. Bealmear: Okay. Tell me about Monteeth. Luchs: Monteeth was an alternative program, and both my sisters and my brother attended it. It was developed in the midsixties at Wayne State, and it was a very, very liberal-minded program. So there was a lot of coffee drinking and discussion going on. I m not one to really go into it since I didn t actually participate, but I know Ellen Phelan was at Monteeth while my sister, Penny Brackett, was at Monteeth as well. Also, when I was a child, my parents were always bringing painters into our home, as well. We were just really enmeshed in all this as a reality. Also, I was attending one of the earliest alternative schools as a child, so my psyche was not prepared for structure in many ways. Bealmear: What school was that? Luchs: It was Paul Best, in Oak Park. We had desks that moved around and we were always reconfiguring, as children, and we had no grades. So, I had kind of a meltdown in junior high I think it was Lincoln Junior High; it used to be here in Ferndale. The desks were bolted down and the bell rang ever hour, and I just thought it was absurdly, horribly terrible. A terrible thing to do

5 LUCHS INTERVIEW 5 to human beings. I didn t last very long in school. By fifteen, I was living on Wayne campus with both my sisters, in an apartment. By sixteen, I left school. Bealmear: When did you first become interested in art? Luchs: As a child I was drawing all the time. Bealmear: How old, do you think? Luchs: Well, they have photographs of me in two newspaper articles. In one, I m drawing at home with my siblings my mother was always being photographed for her shows and I m drawing. I was about four. Around the same time, for another show, they printed, in the paper, me holding up a potato print (laughs). This was before kindergarten. When I entered kindergarten this is crazy stuff to talk about they were having a fair, and one of my best memories about that was the teacher aloud me to roll out butcher paper and do a life-size baby elephant for the fair. I loved working at a large scale when I was five. It was really exciting to me. Bealmear: This was at the alternative school? Luchs: This was kindergarten, before I went into the alternative school. Bealmear: So, you started at the alternatives school for first grade?

6 LUCHS INTERVIEW 6 Luchs: The alternative school was first grade, and there I was embraced by the art teacher. I could leave class, go to their art room and work. I would draw things like the stages of the development of an egg. We d have teachers each year that would take us on a field trip and get us a chicken and a dozen fertilized eggs, and we d hatch them in the classroom. So I would make drawings of this, and those would be put up in the school. That was happening first, second grade. Bealmear: Can you think of any early influences that you had? Was your teacher an influence on you? Luchs: She was. She was very beautiful, very quiet, very tall. She looked like Morticia (laughs) from The Addams Family. I was just so happy I was given the choice to walk out of the classroom and go down to the art room. I did all kinds of things besides drawing. I could do enameling copper enameling, and things like that. She would solicit me to help her put up displays. Bealmear: How long were you in that school for? Luchs: Through sixth grade. Bealmear: Can you think of anyone else who influenced your art during that time period? Fellow students?

7 LUCHS INTERVIEW 7 Luchs: Not students. I think it was all environmental, at home, because there were two studios going on. My father was doing the color, expressionist work in one studio, and then in the other studio my mother was doing figure painting. The other thing was she had a closet full of cardboard one side was gold and one side was white. The dealer she worked at, Garelicks, would just give her tons of scrap material to actually work on. So my mother often poured gessoes and inks onto the cardboard and would draw into them. That was a free resource. There was no limit, so you could open that door and pull out any shape or size and color and work on it. Bealmear: Did your parents let you create your own art, or did they influence you in some way? Luchs: Their influences were strange. It wasn t like they would suggest how I should work. My mother would always encourage me and say, That s wonderful. Your better than I was when I was your age. And then my father, being very temperamental, and, uh, kind of a dry drunk, actually. Bealmear: A dry drunk? Luchs: Yeah, he didn t start drinking until later. Bealmear: Oh, okay.

8 LUCHS INTERVIEW 8 Luchs: When I made my first oil paintings he would go ahead and paint over them (laughs). So that was kind of a message to me that they were (laughs) not worth saving. So there was this negativity that was counterbalancing the positive. There was a lot of intensity in their personalities and in the environment. A lot of unhappiness and problems in the marriage. It was an intense family. Bealmear: Were all your siblings artists in some way? Luchs: My brother s a fiber artist and he does very large scale, beautiful fiber works. He teaches in Lawrence, Kansas. His name s David Brackett. My sister did a lot of works in the arts. But she went on to do other things in her life. A very smart woman. She repairs insides of computers panels and things like that. She does the electronics, where she troubleshoots broken panels and finds the problem. The circuitry I m not very good at describing this. But she s a very creative mind, so she s got like nineteen projects going on all the time. My other brother and sister one became a psychologist and the other became a grade school teacher. Bealmear: You said three of them were at Monteeth College? Luchs: Yeah, Tom Brackett, Jane Brackett, and Penny Sue Brackett. Bealmear: Okay. Do you think their work had any influence on you as an artist? Luchs: Well, they weren t working in the arts.

9 LUCHS INTERVIEW 9 Bealmear: Oh, they weren t? Luchs: They were all older. I think what influenced me was the fact that I left home at fifteen and I was living amongst artists and faculty around Wayne State. Around artists who were going to Wayne State, around that were going to CCS [Center For Creative Studies]. I was around them all the time daily. I was in that community really, really early. Bealmear: What year did you move there? Luchs: I started living on Wayne campus in 1965 when I was fifteen years old. I stayed there until Bealmear: At one point did you have a child? Luchs: I had a child in Bealmear. Just to back up slightly when you went to high school did they have an art program there? Luchs: (Voice raises) Oh, Cass Technical High School was all about curriculum and you could choose your curriculum. So, I was picking all art classes and I was working with a wonderful man, after my father left, in that department. My father was actually running the art department

10 LUCHS INTERVIEW 10 when he left to go to Macomb. Irving Berg came in, and he s well known in Detroit. His wife is Harriet Berg, the dancer. Irving did everything he could to keep me in high school. He was just a lovely man, really supportive. He just died a year ago, and I ve known him all my life, since then. He would always kid me. My father was kind of in shock that I would leave. But I would always, thought in alternative ways. I went back to school (sighs) when I was thirty-two years old. I transferred into U of M and ended up becoming faculty there (laughs), without ever completing a high school diploma. My father would say You have to have this diploma, and I d say, It ll work out. [smiles] I worked it out my way. What was more vital and critical to me was what was going on. It was an incredible and intense period amongst people. This is Vietnam, this is the riots, and this is an art community that s being formed. Artists didn t have cell phones, they didn t have phones, they just gravitated constantly to these places. We would arrive together (at a certain location) and be together. Bealmear: What was that like for you to be a fifteen year old alone in the Cass Corridor? Luchs: I was intensely shy, and frightened, but interested. That s part of my personality, I tend to be a little shy, and careful. But also intensely interested. So I pushed through those feelings, which is always a good thing. There was a lot of fun, too. It was very spontaneous. A lot of people were there for each other, constantly. I was living with a boyfriend I stayed with my sisters for about six months and then moved in with a boyfriend, and then moved into a house. That was the era of we d moved on from my sister s generation, they would call them beatniks. By the time I was there they were calling us the hippies. It was very, kind of amazing on some levels, in terms of human interaction: feelings, communication. It was really a beautiful time in a

11 LUCHS INTERVIEW 11 lot of ways. But the flipside of it was it very difficult. Many of us were really, really poor, and we relied on each for survival, as people. Bealmear: What did you for a living at that time? Luchs: Nothing. Bealmear: Did your boyfriend support you? Luchs: [pauses] For a while. He was unhappy about that. But I have personal histories that were even more difficult. My stepparents were difficult people for me to deal with, and they messed me up a lot, to the point where I was unable to work. At fifteen I had a job, but my stepfather [slight pause] had me working for him for a couple years he s a veterinarian, and he was inappropriate with me. We don t have to discuss that in detail, but he messed up my feelings about trust in the world. So after working for him I was afraid to work. I became damaged, for a while, and I did rely on others to help me. To be there for me. Bealmear: Were you constantly working on your art? Luchs: I had a lot of paranoia, a lot of nervousness, a lot of fears, and I always channeled it into drawing. If I got scared I would just start drawing. I was constantly working on my work, but my situation in that situation was that I was much younger than everyone else. So the way people related to me or thought of me was as this young either girl, or girlfriend, or person. So it was a

12 LUCHS INTERVIEW 12 rather long time before my art really developed to a point where it became actually more resolved and figured out in a way that was making sense to me, and the world. Bealmear: At what point was that and what sorts of mediums were you working with? Luchs: Well, I think I took a long time to do my personal research. I think I m just figuring out my work (laughs) in the last years. But one thing that I did that was really powerful was like I said I was tremendously curious about how this work that was going on in the Cass Corridor was being created, because it was all alternative, unusual, bizarre stuff. People were working with they were using tapes and fire my husband used fire. The graphics and the way people worked were they were always pushing their own work to see what they could make. I was so fascinated about how this stuff was getting made, and the fact that the environment was so bizarrely interesting, that I got myself a Super 8 camera when I was about twenty-two years old. Bealmear: So, about 1972? Luchs: Yeah, and I took one course at Arts and Crafts, which is now CCS, in filmmaking. It was a silent Super 8 camera, and I just started. I had no money, but if I could buy a role of film I would buy a role of film. Often I didn t develop the film, I d buy another and just save the rolls. If I had any extra money I would develop them and look at them. But mostly I was invested in the film so I could have the films. So they could exist. Bealmear: What was your intent?

13 LUCHS INTERVIEW 13 Luchs: I wanted to record the art being made by the people I thought were doing the most interesting experimental work. Bealmear: Who were those people? Luchs: They re the people that, obviously, ended up in the film I made later. Robert Sestok was the first person that I filmed, and then Steve Foust. There was my husband, in the future, Michael Luchs. Paul Schwarz, and John Egner. Gordon Newton there was a couple of times I was going to film him and it didn t work out. But I did film a lot of his actual pieces and the studios that we were all sharing up in the Vernors building. I didn t film him actually making stuff until later, much later, in the future. I also went back and filmed Ellen Phelan and Nancy Mitchnick. Bealmear: When was that? Luchs: I didn t film them until the summer of Bealmear: At what point did you decide to make a documentary film? Luchs: Ann Mikolowski, who was the wife of Ken Mikolowski they had the Alternative Press she was dying, around She was a great friend of many, many people, and my great friend. She had this personality that made you feel like you were her best friend [laughs], and she was totally focused on you when you were with her. So everybody had this great love for her,

14 LUCHS INTERVIEW 14 because she had the capacity to give great love and positive responses to people. She was an interesting woman and a very good artist. As she was dying, her and her husband Ken were online to do this symposium at the University of Michigan, Special Collections. They were doing thirty years of the Alternative Press work. They had done years of working with artists, where the artists drew five hundred postcards and they would combine them with the work of the poets that they were printing and publishing, [then] they would send out packages of these art postcards and poetry to people. They had done this for years and years and years. So they were showing this work and going over the history for the symposium, and as I was visiting Ann asked me if I could put some of my film works of the artists in the symposium. I said, Ann they re all individual, silent documents, but I would really love to get them out of Super 8 and make them more public. I said I would try to do that. I hooked up with another woman who was a digital artist, and was very gifted Shaun Bangert. She was at U of M as a grad student at that time and was doing a lot of great work with digital film. I showed her my raw footage and she said she would be interested in working with me. To edit this stuff into a piece that could be seen by the public. So we started in on this project, and I started to copy about fifteen hours of Super 8 into digital sitting in a dark room (laughs) running cameras and filming the films. Bealmear: What was it like to see that footage again? Luchs: Well, I d seen a lot because I was always showing it to the artists because they wanted to see it. That was making me very nervous because it was getting scratched and they were raw copies. I had tried in the past to get grants to copy them, but I was having trouble getting support for it. People wanted to see art developed at a higher level before they gave out grants, but it was

15 LUCHS INTERVIEW 15 kind of a catch-22. I couldn t get it at a higher level. So, I d written two grants to the Michigan Council of the Arts that had been rejected, and I just thought, I m going to do this, somehow. After we got this started, I then applied for a grant to the Arts of Citizenship at the University of Michigan. I was much older then and was able to write a grant that made sense, and I could show some raw footage. I think one of the other primary motivations, beyond Ann s request, was that I was feeling more and more raw about the fact that these artists I had filmed as a young person my age, or a little older were growing older and older, and were still as committed to their work as they were as young people, but they were kind of being written off because they were growing older. The culture likes what s new and they like the older people to be seen romantically, as they were as young people. I found that the community the people that positions at museums or galleries they were interested in the raw footage as footage. But they were not interested in what I wanted to show, which was to give voice to these artists and to show a sustained commitment over time. From when they were in their twenties, to now, when they re in their fifties and sixties. One of the artists had died, and that was another motivation, too. Bealmear: Which artist? Luchs: Paul Schwarz had died just before Ann. They were dying at the same time. I was feeling more and more anxious about making sure that they (in the film) didn t disappear. The film ended up being dedicated to Ann and Paul.

16 LUCHS INTERVIEW 16 I didn t want people to be ignored for the work they were doing in the present. I guess living with a man Michael Luchs who is twelve years older than me, and watching him painting every day. He s pretty much a recluse. He just sort of walked away from everything and said, I just want to paint. He doesn t want to involve himself in politics, or ambitions things like that. But because he s not doing that work (promoting himself), he s disappearing in the mind of the culture. For various reasons, people disappear in the minds of the culture. People are alive and well and working in their studios. Visual artists have interesting personalities and not all of them are proactive for themselves. They re not all great communicators, in terms of getting their work/product out there into the world. I think of them more as poets. Bealmear: Whom did you talk to when you did the new interviews for the film? Luchs: I went back to everybody who was alive, that I had filmed (in the past), and filmed them. Then I went to Ellen Phelan and Nancy Mitchnick and interviewed them. Bealmear: What was it like seeing those people again? I imagine it had been some time since you had seen some of them. Luchs: It had been twenty to twenty-five years, and it was incredible, affirming, and wonderful. It reconnected me and all of us. For instance, Nancy Mitchnick she was teaching at Harvard at the time and the weekend I showed up was the weekend Ellen had been fired from Harvard. It was very political. There ended up being a long, long article in the New Yorker about her being dismissed. She had developed a program that was controversial. So, I had ended up walking in

17 LUCHS INTERVIEW 17 with my camera on a weekend I couldn t even begin to film Ellen, because it was just insane. So I went out to Ipswich (New York) and ended up spending two days with Nancy and filming her. I just ran the camera constantly and reconnected with her. After that, a couple of years later, she came up to Lewiston and visited with Michael and I and spent a week in our studio. I still see her now. It was great to see them and have their voices. Up until now I only had Images, and now these people are really interesting, bright, articulate people Ellen, and Nancy, and John Egner and Michael Luchs. They gave me a lot of new footage. Just like the other films I put them away for eighteen years--i put this stuff away, too (laughs). You know, what do you do with it? It exists. I haven t done anything more with it, except for what I chose to make the connections in Images from Detroit s Cass Corridor. Bealmear: What do you think are some of the most important pieces from the Cass Corridor art scene? Luchs: It s really hard to say. I don t think of them as pieces, I think of them as bodies of work that people accomplished. At that time, things were very different in terms of the research that the artists actually did for, say, an exhibition. There were two things that happened, in that period of time. One is the artists developed a gallery, the Willis Gallery. [Before that] they had no gallery. There was no representation for local artists. Outside artists were being brought into the Detroit Institute of Arts, but not local artists. There were some changes that happened in that period. Sam Wagstaff came in as the curator of Contemporary American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He started to show and support some of the local artists. Simultaneously, the local artists developed the Willis Gallery. The first exhibition that they did at the Willis Gallery,

18 LUCHS INTERVIEW 18 all the collectors from out in Birmingham and that direction, came in on a bus together. Drinking martinis and stuff. There was a full moon and everything it was just crazy. There started to be this energy that was being directed to the energy the artists were generating. What would happen when there was an opening, it would be a huge event. People would want to go see what the artists were up to. They would work on a show for a long time, and it would all be interesting new work. I discovered Paul Schwarz at the Willis Gallery and I was blown away by the geometry in his work. The materials he was drawing on wood and varnishing it. He was doing tensions in the work, using wire between two pieces. Beautiful, beautiful pieces, that maybe now would seem a little more common. The culture has experimented more often with these kinds of communication. In the early 70s, these were pieces we hadn t seen before. The artists would also respond to the works. The materials and the geometries, or the expressionism in somebody s work would be responded to by another artist in their show. You could see that that had been absorbed somehow, and then developed and gone down a different direction. There were also tensions. People were feeling, that as things evolved, their information was being appropriated. It started off, for a couple of years, being extremely exciting, and then there were tensions when collectors started to buy the pieces and information was being appropriated between the artists. There began to be more and more tension around that. Bealmear: Can you remember the moment when it became obvious a scene was starting to develop?

19 LUCHS INTERVIEW 19 Luchs: My husband was in the first exhibition at the Willis Gallery, with Gordon Newton and Stan Dolega Bealmear: Was the 71? Luchs: That was 71. (pauses) No, it was probably 70. My son was born in I went into labor right after John Egner s opening at Cobb s Corner Bar. I went from the Willis, to Cobb s Corner, which was next door. The artists would go from Willis to Cobb s. John Egner s opening was in 71, so that exhibition was maybe early 71. John s was October 28 th. Bealmear: Was that when you felt things had developed into a scene, of sorts? Luchs: Well, it had already happened. Greg Murphy was this amazing mind, and he had been going around the previous couple of years talking about that this (the Willis Gallery) was needed. Before this gallery was developed he talked about it a lot. He called meetings at the Cobb s Corner Bar, for the artists to come. They closed the bar on a Sunday at about five o clock. I remember they filled the bar to talk about the possibility of having this gallery created. How were they going to run it? How it was going to be put together? How were they going to determine the shows? How many people were interested? I remember I had actually been knifed that weekend, in front of that bar, by a group of kids adolescents. I had just gotten out of the hospital from having my throat cut.

20 LUCHS INTERVIEW 20 Bealmear: You were pregnant at that time? Luchs: I was pregnant, then I miscarried and got pregnant again a few months later. It was a serious situation. It was exciting, but I had my reasons for being paranoid. It was not a safe place, Detroit. I was with two other women, and we were walking, just a couple of blocks, to the bar. These children were fifteen and they were just hanging out. After I was knifed, they stood around and waited to be picked up by the police, because it was something to do. That s a whole long story of what I experienced in terms of human nature, and how I stepped forward and they stepped forward. How out of groups things happen. Things started to click-in instinctually. I learned a lot going through that experience, beyond what happened to me. I didn t feel it or know it happened. I was working on automatic, as it was unfolding. But I managed to get the bar door open and save my two friends and get in. Back to the Willis [voice cracks] Gallery. The meeting for that happened on a Sunday, and the bar was packed. That must have been around the beginning of the year, maybe Bealmear: What was it like being a woman in that scene? A lot of people term the art macho, and say that it was dominated by white men, and I was wondering what your feelings were about that. Luchs: In a lot of ways, it was. But I found the women very powerful and I was frightened of them, too. The painters, like Nancy Ellen Phelan and Nancy Mitchnick and Brenda Goodman, were very strong, strong women. Very bright women. So I had a lot of fear of the women. I kind

21 LUCHS INTERVIEW 21 of hesitated and hung out with the guys more, because I knew being young and attractive, it was just a-go. I didn t feel threatened. The women I found very challenging. I was younger than them and I was uneducated. They had gone through Wayne and they were getting their Mater s degrees, though I don t think Nancy did. They were really smart and very interesting women. Being a woman had different realities. I know from interviewing them that they had their own battles. The men were being supported to a higher degree by people like Sam Wagstaff, but even more so by James Duffy, because of their sexual orientation. Being gay and being interested in the young men, who were particularly beautiful when they were that young (laughs). There was a lot of support for the men. Bealmear: Who else was supportive buying art or helping promote it? Luchs: Mary Dension did a lot of good work with artists. She was buying work, she was interested, she was supporting artists, and she was helping them to get shows. For a long time she worked at the Artists Market as the director. She was deciding who was going to be exhibiting there. But before then, she did an exhibition with Greg Murphy called The Denison and Murphy Show, in her home. I think it was in Bloomfield Hills. She opened up her whole basement and garage to the artists. It was a real connecting show, where the artists came to the show. It s actually in my film, some shots from that. The artists came to the show, and the collectors came to the show, at her house. They were purchasing works in relation to that show. Hawkins Ferry was there from the DIA. James Duffy was there. It was a coming together of two worlds. She was a very good facilitator. A very supportive person a thoughtful person in her ability to make these connections between the worlds and make them work.

22 LUCHS INTERVIEW 22 Bealmear: Do you feel like the scene changed when the artists and the collectors got together? When the art started to be sold? Luchs: Yes. Other artists would really talk a lot about that. Other galleries began to develop. Susanne Hilberry started a gallery soon after that time period. Jackie Feigenson took on the Willis Gallery and brought it back. It had shut down and she brought it back. She turned it into the Feigenson-Rosenstein Gallery, and then eventually the Feigenson Gallery. She was a great support over a long period of time to the artists working in that community. She also brought in artists from other places. She was a good support in that she would work for the artists give them grants, get them acknowledgement, and bring in people to see the work when she did an exhibition. Make sure the work got viewed. Bealmear: How do you think your art changed once the scene started to get more attention? Luchs: I don t think attention ever changed my work. I think it (the attention) just made me more nervous. I think my art started to change as soon as I started to see art getting made. Instead of going to school I was watching art being made. I was watching people working at a high level, with their information. So there couldn t be a stronger influence or education then what I had. In terms of seeing people work with materials, seeing people work with ideas, seeing people working with their own personal ideas. They may have been more informed than I was as a young person. They may have been more influenced because they were more informed than I was aware of, because of their education. They made me become aware of how powerful art

23 LUCHS INTERVIEW 23 could be made, by one s own personal vision and working with ideas and materials. From then on I ve always worked with materials worked with different studios and processes. Bealmear: What sorts of materials? Luchs: My first commitment to a formal education was studying technical photography. I went to Washtenaw Community College. So I could photograph my own work, blow it up, change it and make art out of it. That happened after my husband had gotten a National Endowment grant, went to Paris where his brother was. I saw some works that I was aware of, through photographs, but saw them in Paris for real. Bealmear: What works were those? Luchs: They were the French Impressionists works Renoirs and Toulouse-Lautrec. They looked very dull to me. They looked much duller then the photographs, and in that moment I thought, photography is a powerful medium it is a very powerful medium. I went home and set up my own darkroom. I rented a space where we were living in Holly, Michigan. Bealmear: When was that? Luchs: About 1980, moved out to the country. Bealmear: When did you leave Detroit?

24 LUCHS INTERVIEW 24 Luchs: We left Detroit in By 1979/80 I rented a space and set up my own little studio. I got an enlarger and trained myself in photography. My husband and I broke up in 82, and I started going to college. Bealmear: Where did you go to school? Luchs: Washtenaw Community College. I was thirty-two years old. Bealmear: Did you go to CCS after that? Luchs: I had gone to CCS and took one course when I was twenty-two/twenty-three years old. Bealmear: What course was that? Luchs: Film making when I got the Super 8 camera. I wasn t able to do very much with that course. I needed a lot more. It was really the fault of the program it wasn t developed yet. We were meeting in a room in a house and the instructor had no facilities to offer. Basically, he would look at my films and give me comments. So I wasn t able to edit it yet. I got my own equipment and taught myself how to edit. I decided not to edit, because I was destroying films they were originals.

25 LUCHS INTERVIEW 25 That s where we go back to when I started writing grants and wasn t receiving them. I was just too young and inexperienced to get the grants. There were funny stories. The Michigan Council of the Arts asked me to bring in the films and they would consider it that s when I was living in Holly. I drove on the spot, unbathed, with no warning I had to grab my films and drive to Detroit. It was the wintertime, and I got into this room (laughs) and there were all these people sitting around the committee was sitting at the table with all this paperwork. I put on the film and my bulb just burst all over the papers everywhere. You would think they would give me the grant, but no [laughs]. The grant was denied. If I d known better I would have said we need to wait an hour for the bulb in my projector to warm up. [laughs] This was not a digital age. There was just nothing digitally happening at that point. Bealmear: When you were making the films of the artists did you feel like you had special access to these people because of the camera? Luchs: (emphatically) Yes. Definitely. They were interested in their works being documented. I don t think anyone ever said no. My issue was I had no money and a lot of the films exist because the artists themselves would say, Well, I ll buy you the film. I ve never been very good at discussion and trying to work out things out on my behalf. As a young person, I would get up a lot of tension and fear, and I would say, I just need this. I remember I would commonly march myself into the Detroit Institute of Arts. John Hallmark Neff was the curator there, and he was also very supportive of the arts. I would walk into his office whenever I felt I needed to discuss something I needed. Like I need film. I would get so upset about the fact that something was going on and I couldn t film it. I would just get on the elevator and walk in his

26 LUCHS INTERVIEW 26 office, and he would say, "Hello! [laughs] He was a very kind man. He got me five hundred dollars from the Friends of Modern Art to film the making of the Cass Park rabbit. I didn t understand protocol at all. I tried to get into Wayne State this way. (smiling) I walked in and said, I want to go to Wayne. I hadn t finished high school. He (at Wayne) said, You have to take your GED, and said, What s that? (laughing) I ve always kind of managed. I do much better if I work things out one-on-one in the situation. Bealmear: You filmed a band called Shadowfax? Luchs: (smiling) Yes, I did. Bealmear: Did you film any other bands at that time? Luchs: Shadowfax was the band, as far as I was concerned. They were the community band. I m sure people who are into music were probably dealing with music at a much higher level. My thought was that emotionally a lot of us were just connected with Shadowfax. They showed up and played for the community, free, constantly. They had a lot of energy and they were a dance band. They would play at Alvin s and people would get really down on the energy. They were really good. I thought they were really good we all thought that they were really good. They had issues with drugs, and tensions in their personal lives. So they wiped out. We lost them. It was sad. A couple really good people overdosed. One guy shot himself. I would have liked to have gotten a lot more footage, but it was important to me to get some. What I have is really, really shaky. Just a few minutes of them. I just wanted to have them on film.

27 LUCHS INTERVIEW 27 Bealmear: How do you think the people that lived in the Cass Corridor community reacted to the artists living there? Was there any interaction? Luchs: As a far as I was concerned, the artists were the community. There were fifty-plus artists. There was CCS, and Wayne State and the faculty, and people who were just there working in studios who weren t going to school. There was this energy that was picking up. It was getting really, really intense. It was big. It felt metaphysical. We could show up (somewhere) without communicating. We could gravitate to something without communication, and we d all be there. I remember many nights where I would feel pulled to one of the bars, and everybody else did, too. We d all be in the same room together the whole bar would be filled with us. Nancy Mitchnick talks about it never having a telephone, in a gallery. No cell phones, no s. And it worked. Bealmear: Everyone just knew where to go? Luchs: Well, people did go to the bars, and they did talk to each other. People would go to each other s studios unannounced. You would knock on the door (smiling), and either it was a good time or it wasn t a good time. Bealmear: Just checking out other people s work?

28 LUCHS INTERVIEW 28 Luchs: Checking out other people s work. Checking out other people that you cared about them and their work. They were a lot of all-night discussions after the bar closed. Bealmear: At the bar or at someone s home? Luchs: After the bar would close people would maybe continue their discussion in somebody s studio. We lived in our studios, many of us. There were tensions between those who were comfortable and those that were not those who had jobs and those that did not. I found out when I had created this film I had one perception of what had happened throughout that period, and I found out that everyone else had another perception. No one had the same perception. Except that everyone agreed that it absolutely influenced their lives. The people who had jobs, thought the people that were poor like myself, my husband, and Greg Murphy had chosen to be poor. There were choices we were making. There were tensions around that. Bealmear: Were descriptions that the press used, like gritty, tough, deviant, and aggressive, were fair and accurate ways to describe the Detroit artists and their art? Luchs: Oh, how people write about it? Bealmear: In the local press, yes.

29 LUCHS INTERVIEW 29 Luchs: [emphatically] Yes. Yes. Bealmear: You felt they were appropriate adjectives? Luchs: Gritty and tough? When we started going into this period, I would bring the artists over to my father s house, who lived off of Jefferson. He was teaching at Macomb and he would tell everyone to Forget it. Nothing has ever happened in Detroit. My mother received nineteen prizes from the Detroit Institute of Arts, and had many works collected by them, but her figurative works are gentle, in comparison. That had been the history. So, looking back now, you might say, This isn t as gritty or tough as something I might have seen, but at that point it was. It hadn t been seen before. The materials, and how they were being used to create visual works, hadn t been seen before. The way they were being used hadn t been seen before, or done before. People were doing things that hadn t been done before. In the film you see Steve Foust twisting cables its like this little dance. Well, he twisted twenty-five feet of cables, with things taped into them, and he twisted and twisted them until they became six-foot sculptures. That whole process, that whole idea, how he sets it up, how he bolts it to the floor, how he goes from this idea to a sculpture I d never seen that before. Looking at the work, you wouldn t know how it was done. That was what was exciting about being able to film. I would not have known had he not let me into the studio to watch how it got created. I couldn t have figured it out. Bealmear: That s what makes those parts of the documentary so engaging. You get to see how the art was actually made. There s so much physicality going on with it.

30 LUCHS INTERVIEW 30 Luchs. Yes. There s a lot of physicality. Now, the women, they were painters and they were working on canvases. Except if you look at some of the shots I included of Ellen s work she was working very physically. She went back to the flat canvas. At heart, she s in love with oil painting. But through that period she really developed some beautiful physical sculptures. Bealmear: She made those three dimensional chairs, right? Luchs: Yes, and the room-size fan that opens that looks like its made of plexi-glass. Some of the shots were taken from slides from Susanne Hilberry s gallery she represents Ellen Phelan. Those were beautiful, formal structural experimental works. Nancy [Mitchnick] is this kind of crazy energy painter. She painted the artists. She did tons of portraits of the artists working in the community. She painted the group of men who were being acknowledged for their works at that time. She did them at a large scale. It was interesting to see them at Duffy s storage room, when he lived on Jefferson. To see Nancy s paintings next to a painting of Chairman Mao by Warhol. These two works were in the same space, side-by-side. Bealmear: Are you talking about Duffy s home?

31 LUCHS INTERVIEW 31 Luchs: At his apartment building he rented a space for his collection of work. At one point we were there to film pieces. I wanted to film Nancy s paintings, which were in that storage space. It was like he rented another apartment to contain these works that he (later) gave to Wayne State. Bealmear: Did you film in his warehouse? Luchs: No. I had issues with Duffy. He was not such a sweet man, in my experiences, as others want him to be or need to believe him to be. He had a very complicated psyche. He played some mean shenanigans with some things that he did. So there was some support, but there were also some things (done) that weren t kind. As a young person I remember some things that had happened. Bealmear: As a collector, he seemed to really have had some foresight. Luchs: Yeah, I have to acknowledge that if he hadn t done the work he had done, the work wouldn t have been collected. I know that John Egner helped him quite a bit figuring out what to think about, what to look at, what to go see. There were a lot of discussions between them. Bealmear: Tell me more about John Egner. Luchs: John is the first person that speaks in my film he talks about Detroit. He talks about how in Detroit we were all so different. What was interesting about the collection of people working together was their strengths were so different. We were fascinated by the differences.

32 LUCHS INTERVIEW 32 Because the differences were not settled, they were strong. There was always information in those differences. Bealmear: Was there much interaction with the New York art scene? Luchs: (pauses for many seconds) I don t think so. I think people were conscious of what was going on in New York, and that s where people were leaving to go. Bealmear: How many artists from the Corridor left for New York: Luchs: Ellen Phelan went; Nancy Mitchnick went; John Egner went. Michael Luchs went for a while, came back. Jim Chatelain went there for a while, came back, but he s back there again. Some people would travel there and not stay. It s a huge life force (laughs), change. Bealmear: The expense there is so drastic, too. Luchs: Yes, so you need a way to live there. My husband (Michael Luchs) and I went there and broke-up there. We went there with no plan, which was, as he said, probably the dumbest thing a person could do. (laughs) To go to New York with no plan. So that was kind of rough, but he did stay there for about five years. Bealmear: What time period was that?

33 LUCHS INTERVIEW 33 Luchs: Eighty-two to about 88. Bealmear: When did you [and your husband] reconnect? Luchs: He came back in 88, and he was seriously, seriously sick from his alcoholism. When he came back he started getting treatment, and he battled alcoholism until about He s been sober and in AA since He was very sick in 88 and went into some programs. He was anti- AA, of course, as all alcoholics are until his life depended on it. Then he chose life and to embrace it. Bealmear: Did you start seeing him when he came back in 88? Luchs: I invited him back. I was raising our child alone my father had had a bad accident and died. I had been living with him after I left Michael in 1982 in New York. I came back and started living with my father, who was seriously succumbing to alcoholism. So I went from one alcoholic situation to another, at which point I started to become educated about alcoholism. After my father died I realized my husband was dying of a disease. I didn t understand the disease until I lost my father. A friend gave me a book called I ll Quit Tomorrow, and I started to read about the disease and the progression of the disease. My father died of an accident, which is typical he fell out of a tree, with a chainsaw, drunk. Bealmear: Oh my god.

34 LUCHS INTERVIEW 34 Luchs: I was living with him and I found him. He was alive and unconscious, but I had left Michael and went through this and then I realized that Michael was probably going to die of alcoholism. Either through insanity or an accident, which seems to be the progression of the disease, as I was learning. So I started going to Al-Anon and I started to realize he needed some intervention, otherwise he wasn t going to make it. I found a program at the University of Michigan again, it was synchronicity, and the way my life goes. They were doing a free study at the University of Michigan comparing alcoholism with anorexia. They were all on the same floor together, these people, alcoholics and anorexics. They said they would take my husband if he wanted to come in. I called him it was a long shot and I said, You know, if you want to deal with this I ll support you. A couple of weeks later I opened up my door and he was standing on my doorstep. That s the way he is no communication, right. It was a long haul there were a lot of relapses. It was just the beginning of a process. Bealmear: When did you remarry? Luchs: In It was a crazy Ann Arbor wedding, in the sense that it was full of people from AA, Al-Anon therapists. Everybody was crying. It was amazing. My son was at our first wedding when he was five, and then he walked me down the aisle when we remarried in 1991 when he was seventeen. He s had an interesting journey with these two artists parents. Bealmear: Is he into art himself?

35 LUCHS INTERVIEW 35 Luchs: No. He likes it, but as a child he could never figure out why we would be doing something constantly that made no money. He just didn t get it. Bealmear: (jokingly) He sounds like a young Republican. Luchs: No, he s an intense political Democrat. He wouldn t say he s democrat, but he s very, very thoughtfully in that direction. So, he s not a Republican at all. But he is much more conservative than his mom and dad. He goes to church. Bealmear: How old is he now? Luchs: He s thirty-eight. In my film, that s him in the window when he was two. Bealmear: You said you left Detroit in 77 at that time did you feel like the scene had come to an end, or was coming to an end? Luchs: Michael would have an opening, at say, Feigenson s, and we were just desperately poor. That s when I was having issues with Duffy because he would take advantage of artists who were working and impoverished. He would make these ridiculous offers to buy all of their work and give them very little money. He bought out the first show that Michael had at the DIA he bought it (the entire exhibit) out for five hundred dollars. It was the night before he (Michael) was to deliver the work. It was just a terrible (laughs) thing to do, for Michael s future.

36 LUCHS INTERVIEW 36 We would go to one of Michael s opening and then we d go back home to this little, downstairs of a house, and we would start pulling the furniture apart looking for nickels and dimes, so we could share a beer so we didn t have to ask someone to buy us a beer. We d go to a collector s house, where they had purchased artists works. We d walk in, and they d be amazing homes just amazing homes, with art in them. They would have glass tables with scooped out breads full of plants. I would get almost tearful, thinking, God, they put a plant in the food! (laughs). I couldn t eat that! (laughs) My first reaction was, How could they do that? That s food! So, we were just on the edge. Our perspective was just all about survival. We had no comfort zone. My mother left on a lake with my stepfather in Holly, Michigan. They had a large barn/studio, so they invited us out there. It was in the country and it was lovely. We went out and moved into this barn with a studio and lived in the woods. Bealmear: You worked in the barn? Luchs: We both worked in the barn. We fixed it up somewhat it was very rustic. My son was going into first grade (slight laugh). Bealmear: That s so different from living in the Cass Corridor. Luchs: Yeah. Bealmear: Was there somewhat of a culture shock?