Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on Her New Book, Touching the Art

SAM is thrilled to host the official launch for queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s latest book, Touching the Art. At this free event on Sunday, October 15 in the museum’s Brotman Forum, Sycamore will read from her book, answer audience questions, and sign books. You’ll also be able to purchase your own copy of the book weeks before its official publication date by Soft Skull Press on November 7.

A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is Sycamore’s interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do. Manager of Public Engagement Jesse Jimenez spoke with Sycamore in advance of her appearance at SAM.


JESSE JIMENEZ (JJ): This new book has so many layers. How did you approach weaving together the different themes in this book?

MATTILDA BERNSTEIN SYCAMORE (MBS): Touching the Art centers around my relationship with my late grandmother, Gladys Goldstein, an abstract painter from Baltimore, so I started by literally touching her art, to see what would come through. In this sense I began abstractly, on the terms of the art. But at the same time, what could be more concrete than touch? So it was the felt sense that guided me. 

I started with her handmade paperworks, taking them out one at a time and feeling all the layers, looking at them under the light, trying to figure out how she made these complex works that feel so sensual in their shifting geometries, the patterns that emerge and then disappear, the rips in the paper and everything that’s embedded inside, how these works can look so delicate but actually feel so strong, the way touch is always present in handmade paper too.

And then everything that came through—about watching her make the art when I was a child, about going up into her studio where I could imagine a creative life because I was living it. But also about the ruptures in our relationship, the trauma of growing up with my father—who was her son—who sexually abused me. And then I went from touching her art to the letters we wrote to one another, which mark our falling out when I was 19, 20, 21. My work became vulgar to her once it became unapologetically queer. “Why are you wasting your talent,” she would say to me, over and over, and so in the book I circle around this abandonment.

Then I moved to Baltimore for 8 months, to see what would come through there. It’s the surprises that guided me. And then after that I immersed myself in research about the artists of her generation, loosely the women of Abstract Expressionism, and then books about Baltimore, about Jewish assimilation and white flight, redlining and disinvestment. It all comes together through experience, I think. The felt sense of the work, and the felt sense of the world. We’re always told that we cannot touch the art, but what happens when we do?

JJ: I love that Gladys had strong opinions about art and creative practice. What do you think she would say about SAM’s modern and contemporary galleries? Are there any works that you’re particularly drawn to or call into question?

MBS: That’s a great question—Gladys was a loyal abstractionist who had no time for anything she saw as derivative, she always saw herself as a contemporary painter. So she wanted to experience art that was unfamiliar. Except maybe when it came to me.

I know that I’m really drawn to the Joan Mitchell painting that’s on display, The Sink. Every time I go to the museum I visit that painting first. There’s so much motion and emotion, and you can stare at any part and it looks like its own painting. Gladys’s paintings are like that too, not so much in style but in refusing a central form, and I wonder if she would have recognized a kinship. But she was a product of her generation, and she almost never mentioned female artists because only the men were important. There’s some story about how some critic said, “Gladys Goldstein painted like a man,” or something like that, and all of the women of that generation have that story because it meant they mattered.

I know that Gladys must have been aware of Joan Mitchell’s work because Mitchell is interviewed in the same issue of ARTNews where Gladys’s 1957 show in New York was reviewed. And Joan Mitchell is brilliant in that interview, she’s incisive about art and form and context. Wouldn’t Gladys have appreciated that? In Touching the Art, one of the things I wonder about is what the lives of these women artists could have been like if the men didn’t exist at all, or at least if they didn’t have to exist in their shadow.

JJ: The book touches on the effects of gentrification in Baltimore. I’m interested to know if you see any of these same issues reflected in Seattle?

MBS: One thing I noticed when I was in Baltimore was how artists were brandished so blatantly as tools of gentrification in neighborhoods that have been destroyed by decades of disinvestment. This happens everywhere, of course, but it felt more extreme in Baltimore because so much of the city is still in collapse, and in so many Black neighborhoods in particular you can go for block after block and literally half of the buildings have burned down or are boarded up. So the gentrification starts from the top, like the branding of a neighborhood as an Arts District and then boom, the real estate vultures swoop in, but still these are neighborhoods mostly in collapse. It’s a different scale, in terms of the extremity.

In Baltimore there is a kind of desperation to make a neighborhood alive again, and so people are drawn to the lure of any kind of investment. Seattle is so gentrified already, almost across the board. Here we have developers and government partnering to destroy amazing success stories, like Yesler Terrace, the first integrated housing project in the country, where hundreds of multigenerational families were living until it got sold off to the developers—gentrification is always violence, it just takes so many forms.

JJ: Queerness plays a pivotal role in your relationship with Gladys. How does the tension between family and identity inform your creative practice?

MBS: When I was a kid, Gladys nourished everything that made me queer, so a central paradox in the book is why did she reject everything that she had nurtured in me, once I fully came into myself. I saw her as an alternative to the path of upward mobility that everyone else in my family was obsessed with—upward mobility at any cost. Family as a way to camouflage violence. I thought she believed in something else, but I was wrong. She was the one person in my birth family who could have engaged with me as an artist, and she refused to. But still, looking at her art, I feel a sense of spaciousness, joy, an openness to the world. And this is something she gave me. 

JJ: I like the deep investment in artistic and personal truth throughout the book. How do you think this book teaches people how to engage with art?

MBS: One place where Gladys and I totally agree is in never telling anyone how to engage with art. It should always be on your own terms, I think. That’s what abstraction can offer us, right, a way into possibility or openness. But in the book I want to look at all the layers beneath this, I want to expose the silences, the silencing. I know I write on my own terms, and I think this is the best way to connect with the world, or I hope so. I want to look at the personal, the intimate, the familial, the historical, the structural, all of this at once. Maybe this is what it means to touch the art.

– Jesse Jimenez (they/them), SAM Manager of Public Engagement

Photos: Courtesy Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Installation view of The Sink at the Seattle Art Museum by Jo Cosme.

Muse/News: Art Doctor, Fall Reading, and Dürer’s Spite

SAM News

“Behind the scenes at SAM’s new Asian art conservation studio”: For the Seattle Times’ Pacific Northwest Magazine, Brendan Kiley takes you into SAM’s Atsuhiko and Ina Goodwin Tateuchi Conservation Center and introduces to you to Tanya Uyeda, the center’s new conservator of East Asian paintings.

“Now that SAM has its own studio and conservator—with plans to hire others, likely with Chinese or Korean expertise—it hopes to treat works not only from its own collection, but collections around the country. From here on out, Uyeda expects to be doing a lot of surgery.”

Here’s a Seattle Times reader “rave” for the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s 2020 remodel. Good news: You’ve now got one more day a week to visit our Art Deco gem; it’s now open Thursdays as well as Friday–Sunday. 

Among The Seattle Times’ Margo Vansynghel’s “Must-see Seattle-area exhibits in October” is a free book launch event. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore debuts Touching the Art at SAM on Sunday, October 15. Andrew Engelson also recommended the book in “New Local Releases to Read This Fall” in The Stranger’s fall Art and Performance Quarterly.

“No, I’m not recommending an art show where you’re allowed to touch the art. But I promise that you’ll feel like you’re up close with the paintings local writer Mattilda B. Sycamore describes in her new—and yes, touching—memoir.”

Local News

Get your fall reading list together with this Seattle Met list of Washington State Book Awards winners and finalists.

Whether you made it or missed it, relive the joy of Walk the Block at Wa Na Wari

Vansynghel also reported on the departure of E. Michael Whittington as the executive director of the Bellevue Arts Museum. Kate Casprowiak Scher has been named interim executive director.

“Scher—who’d already been volunteering with the museum—has already jumped into the fray, connecting with staff and assuming Whittington’s responsibilities to make the transition as smooth as possible.”

Inter/National News

Farah Nayeri for the New York Times Magazine on Louvre director Laurence des Cars’s “big plans for the world’s most visited museum.”

CBS Sunday Morning shared highlights “from hip hop to Picasso” in the upcoming arts season. There’s even a mention of Renegade Edo and Paris: Japanese Prints and Toulouse-Lautrec, on view through December 3 at the Seattle Asian Art Museum!

A spicy headline, via Adam Schrader for Artnet: “Albrecht Dürer Painted Himself Into a 16th-Century Altarpiece to Spite a Patron Who Paid Him Poorly, New Research Suggests.”

“It’s essentially him saying, ‘this is not actually about you as a patron, Mr. Heller. This is art and this will endure and will be looked at in 500 years’ time.’”

And Finally

“The great Seattle sitcom.”

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Associate Director of Public Relations

Photo: Alborz Kamalizad.

Muse/News: A dazzling assembly, fantasy as a tool, and experiencing “experiences”

SAM News

Thump! That’s the happy sound of The New York Times fall arts preview hitting doorsteps. SAM’s major fall exhibition, Peacock in the Desert: The Royal Arts of Jodhpur, India, was featured in their round-up of “Over 100 Not-to-Miss Shows From East Coast to West.” The show traveling from the Mehrangarh Museum Trust was dubbed “a dazzling assembly.”

Peacock in the Desert opens October 18; it was also a Seattle Times pick for one of the “hottest Seattle events for October” and is among The Seattle Weekly’s choices for “the best entertainment the season has to offer” for fall arts.

Local News

Think tiny! Curbed’s Sarah Anne Lloyd shares that the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture has posted an RFP for “tiny cultural spaces.” Applications are due on Friday, October 14.

Seek help: Here’s two reviews on the Frye Art Museum’s current exhibition, Group Therapy, from Seattle Met’s Stefan Milne and Seattle Weekly’s Seth Sommerfeld.

The October issue of City Arts is out now, with features on writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and poet Quenton Baker—and a blazing cover story on Double Exposure artist Tracy Rector.

“Rector’s ability to seduce through stories is the stuff of hallowed auteurs. But it’s her ability to vanish behind the story that makes her work so enthralling. Fantasy doesn’t always have to be an escape; rather a tool to reframe and change the world.”

Inter/National News

Yay for art history majors: When Denise Murrell’s professor ignored the Black servant in Édouard Manet’s Olympia, she made it her thesis subject—and it’s now an exhibition at Columbia that will travel to Paris’ Musée d’Orsay.

Five design proposals for a planned Boston monument to Marin Luther King, Jr. are now before the citizens of the city; the finalists are Barbara Chase-Riboud, David Adjaye, Hank Willis Thomas, Yinka Shonibare, and Wodiczko.

The New York Times’ “internet culture” writer Amanda Hess with a hilarious and haunting take on the now-ubiquitous pop-up “experiences” and what, exactly, they’re for.

“What began as a kicky story idea became a masochistic march through voids of meaning. I found myself sleepwalking through them, fantasizing about going to a real museum. Or watching television. Or being on Twitter.”

And Finally

Articles with titles like “Favorite Snacks of Famous Artists” will always get an instant click from me.

– Rachel Eggers, SAM Manager of Public Relations

Image: Maharaja Abhai Singh on Horseback, c. 1725, Dalchand, Jodhpur, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, Mehrangarh Museum Trust, photo: Neil Greentree.
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