Broad Strokes, page 16
From the outset O’Malley’s art had her trademark hijinks and witty charms: a big mowed ring in a grassy expanse of front lawn, like a suburban crop circle; leaves cleared right along the axis of a tree’s potential shadow, as if it were painted there; a rock garden where white ornamental stones have been arranged to read “Lawn,” like the old “generic” marketing (bag, hat, aspirin) of the ’70s. The work also demonstrates her talent for community, for elevating all kinds of environments—urban, suburban, woods, countryside—and maybe most importantly, elevating the people in those environments, whose lives and living spaces are deemed worthy of art.
Susan O’Malley. Lawn. 2008.
In her short films, How to Be an Artist in Residence and A Few Yards in San Jose, it’s striking how much a part of her environment O’Malley is. She’s no punk rock anarchist or paint-splattered artiste, but a young woman with plain midlength brown hair in (not especially cool) blue jeans, T-shirt, and sneakers.
She takes up her work like an Andy Goldsworthy of the mundane, arranging rocks and leaves and rolling up hoses. Also, hugging fire hydrants or washing her hands in a birdbath. Watching her reminds me of Joseph Beuys, another earnest explorer of his own origins. But imagine if instead of Beuys crashing his Luftwaffe plane and getting wrapped in felt and animal fat by nomadic Tatars, he was raised with five siblings in a San Jose subdivision.
Beuys’s story is a little like a fairy tale (of the dark, Germanic variety) and there’s something of the same in O’Malley’s origins (a brighter, American version). Raised in a supportive family, she got into Stanford. There she made a lifelong best friend, Amini, and met her future husband, Tim Caro-Bruce. If there’s a theme in O’Malley’s story, it’s about making art and making connections, and how she brings those two things together: “There is something magical about breaking the silent space between a stranger and myself. I have a theory that people are waiting to be asked and to be heard.”
She was not shy about asking. In grad school at California College of the Arts, she founded the Pep Talk Squad, consisting of her and Amini in matching checkered Vans and red track jackets with Pep Talk Squad silkscreened by O’Malley on the back. “We were goofy gals in our midtwenties,” Amini says. “The silliness of our outfits allowed people to approach us.”
And people did. When asked, “Is there anything you need pep or encouragement on?” most people offered up real and difficult personal issues. Each session was a genuine conversation, lasting something like fifteen minutes. As journalist Bonnie Tsui has pointed out, O’Malley embodied that rarest of the human species, “an extrovert but a good listener.” In other words, perfect for her task.
One of the Pep Talk Squad would ask questions while the other typed up responses on a portable typewriter, on carbon paper so both parties had a copy. After listening carefully, reflecting back the nature of the problem to make sure they nailed it, the Pep Talk Squad read an Official Pep Talk and closed by throwing up their arms like a stadium wave and cheering, “Goooooo Mike!” (Or whatever said Pep Talkee’s name might be.)
Try it. Let someone do it for you, or insert your own name in front of the mirror and cheer for yourself. It feels great. I’d bet Pep Talk Squad recipients also felt great. After the cheer, they received a button proclaiming, “I had a pep talk today.” Ah, those lucky few.
Pep Talk Squad performances were part earnest (if awesomely wacky) encouragement of others, and some part critique of the dead seriousness of so much art school production. Witness the academic reaction to the work: a pamphlet O’Malley created promoting the Pep Talk Squad was her grad school thesis. Critiques ran to asking how her work was art rather than, say, self-help, psychology, or therapy.
Maybe it was all of those. Art can be, of course. Matisse knew that when he said he wanted art that was “a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair.”
I first saw O’Malley’s work sometime in 2013, bright and popping posters in places normally reserved for advertising (newsstands, BART stations) consisting of phrases like: This Is It, This Place Right Now, and More Beautiful Than You Ever Imagined. I spotted my first one on Market Street—This Is It—and assumed it was something about a new app or software or some such. But the lack of further advertising made me look closer. In the lower left corner it read, The Thing Quarterly, a local artist-run publication. I was totally charmed to find art in the very mouth of Mammon, where Twitter and Facebook and grillions of start-ups were busy setting up camps, raiding the city and the world.
Called Mantras for the Urban Dweller (Moment to Moment), the series, as explained by O’Malley, was “open-ended public service announcements; invitations to pause amid the hustle of the city.” I didn’t see much pausing near her Mantras, at least where I was. But I did see homeless people, tech hipsters, art students, tourists, flâneurs, UPS drivers, and more, the messy horde of our too-cool city, rushing by them. Including me.
O’Malley understood this reality, but hoped to nudge us elsewhere. “In these works I’m suggesting my wish for how things could be: if we paid closer attention to our being, to our grieving, to the way the sun makes a spectacular reflection on the buildings at that certain time of day. It has to begin somewhere, why not here?”
JD Beltran, artist and president of the San Francisco Arts Commission, believes O’Malley’s art does begin it. “[Her] work will always remain relevant and powerful, because it taps into the human condition—what we tell ourselves every day that spurs us to continue to go on in our lives,” Beltran writes. “And not just go on, but revel in the present, and to pursue what inspires us.”
Included in a group show with O’Malley at Intersection for the Arts, Beltran fell in love with and bought on sight one of her pieces, a black rectangle with white lettering proclaiming: You Are Here. Beltran calls it “a map of your own personal geography.” Looking at it, she says, “I’m actually aware of ‘being here now.’” Not bad for three little words in black and white.
Though often quite simple, O’Malley’s textual pieces pack a big punch. The next time I spotted her work was a couple of years after the first, in the East Bay. I didn’t know it was hers right away, though I should have. It had her every hallmark: bright yellow with black lettering like a textual smiley face, declaring: Less Internet, More Love. It plastered the side of a building in Berkeley, so large and insistent that I read it easily as I drove by. It made me smile.
I’d been visiting my friend Chaylee in Oakland and was headed into Berkeley on an errand. Though I’d rarely gone to the East Bay during my previous fifteen years in San Francisco, for the past eighteen months I’d visited Chaylee and her children every few weeks or so. She’d been there for me when my own kids were little, and I wanted to do the same. Seeing the mural confirmed my best intentions—that human contact, however erratic, beats out e-mail any day.
Susan O’Malley. Less Internet More Love. 2015.
It wasn’t until I was home and Googled Less Internet, More Love that I discovered the terrible coincidence of seeing O’Malley’s work again (it was her of course; I should have known).
The week before her bright yellow mural went up, O’Malley was at home in Berkeley getting things shipshape before the scheduled delivery of her twin daughters in three days. She wrote e-mails and posted a note on Facebook asking if anyone could help transport an artwork. An artist friend came by to borrow a book, young daughter in tow. It’s easy to imagine O’Malley thinking how amazing it was that soon she would have daughters herself.
Her husband was working in an adjoining room that day when, not long after the friend and his daughter left, he heard a noise. Going in to investigate, he found O’Malley on the floor, unconscious. He started CPR. EMTs were there within minutes, but O’Malley could not be revived.
Her daughters, delivered at the hospital via C-section, lived just long enough for their father to hold them.
Susan O’Malley was thirty-eight years old when she experienced a fatal heart arrhythmia caused by an undiagnosed tumor attached to its outer membrane.
This, to an artist whose work was all about the heart.
It is unspeakable. Outrageous. Unthinkable.
I know. I’ve withheld this tsunami of unutterably terrible truth until nearly the end. But I did so in hopes of holding O’Malley’s big-hearted art—if just for some minutes—apart from the heartbreaking fact of her death. Her art should be, and deserves to be, experienced on its own wacky, brave, and beautiful terms.
At Montalvo, they’ve reinstalled A Healing Walk and are working to make it a permanent exhibition. Not because O’Malley died, but because of what she made. “She is a significant Bay Area artist,” explains Conwell. “We love Susan and we love having her work here, but this is not a memorial. She is going to help bring attention to an important collection with her work.” And so, her collaborations continue.
O’Malley’s final project was a book called Advice from My 80-Year-Old Self. It came out a year after she died, her words and images still vibrant and working in the world.
Using her genius for connection, O’Malley had asked more than a hundred people of all ages and walks of life to imagine time traveling to the future and meeting themselves at age eighty. What words of wisdom might this future self give? The book—big sheets filled with her trademark bold text and brilliant colors—illustrates those answers. From the idiosyncratic, It Was a Good Call to Buy the RV and It’s OK to Have Sugar in Your Tea, to the broadly instructive, Don’t Be Afraid and Don’t Ever Lie, to the somewhat plagiaristic, Your Heart Has Reasons Your Head Does Not Know (see Pascal), they all share an abiding belief in the wisdom we have within. If we listen to our hearts. (Actually, that’s one too: Do Things That Matter to Your Heart.)
My favorite of these is the only one not brightly colored. In stark black and white it proclaims: Art Before Dishes.
I believe it. I try to act accordingly.
Thank God for us that O’Malley did, too.
Susan O’Malley. Art Before Dishes. 2014.
Our story began with my finding sixteen women artists in the third edition of H. W. Janson’s seminal History of Art. I’ve presented fifteen here. Why one short?
I’ve left room for myself. For you. For anyone who wants it.
Insert yourself here.
In her groundbreaking work The Obstacle Race, Germaine Greer wrote, “Books are finite; the story of women painters has no end—indeed it may be said to be just beginning—but a book must stop somewhere.”
Insert “artist” for painter and the story is the same. Hell, insert anything you like—poet, architect, filmmaker, actor, brain surgeon, astronaut—and run with it. Great lives and great works are endless: we just have to look for them. And, of course, create them.
Let’s get started.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No amount of thanks can express what I owe the following people or the gratitude I have for their existence. It is my gobsmacking good fortune to know them.
Thanks to Carol Edgarian, generous mentor and friend, whose advice on looking to the heart has transformed my writing and my life. Thanks to Danielle Svetcov for her faith, which has sustained me, and her astonishing willingness to dig in. All thanks to Bridget Watson Payne, for believing in this book and shepherding it into existence with such kindness and intelligence.
Great thanks to the wonderful folks at Narrative Magazine, especially Carol Edgarian and Tom Jenks. Gratitude for my writing peeps at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto; I can’t say enough about the support, and fun, I’ve found there.
Thanks to my parents, Jake and Polly Quinn, for everything of course, but especially for always esteeming the creative life. Thank you to my sisters, Padeen Quinn and Diane Regan-Sandbak, for illustrating early what awesome women look like. Thanks to my brothers, Brendhan, Patrick, Tom, John, Chris, and Bill, for being such good men. Special thanks to my nephew, Sam Hoiland, whose life assistance meant the difference between doing the work and losing my mind.
Thanks to Sharon and Tom Welter for decades of unconditional love, and for happily hanging with the grandkids while I hid upstairs and wrote. Thank you to Sheila Schroeder and Jason Phillips for a place to work (and play) summer after summer at the enchanting Chautauqua Institute. Thanks to Martha Easton and Mark Trowbridge for grad-school awesomeness and beyond, and for their essential help with stories here.
Thanks to the many amazing women whose friendship and wisdom have been vital, especially Stacey Hubbard, Annette Hughes-White, Rafferty Atha Jackson, Chaylee Priete, and Tahlia Priete. Special thanks to Jennifer March Soloway, whose many hours of counsel in the pool and on the page have so often saved me. And thanks to Bill and Cindy Feeney, for decades of art and friendship.
Finally, ultimate and greatest thanks go to Rick, Lukas, and Zuzu. Without you I’m nothing. With you is everything.
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