The Sign Painter

Before we start, I want to let you know that this episode contains multiple descriptions of sexual assault and a reference to suicide.

You didn't do anything.

Are you doing anything for you?

Okay.

My first words, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

That's the artist Alona Granite.

She's greeting me and Ben, Dakota Ring's producer, as we arrive at her studio in New York's East Village back in 2019.

Are you taping me already?

Apparently, a rule of recording is you're supposed to tape

the whole thing.

Alone has lived and worked here since 1982.

When she moved in, she was in her 30s, a performance artist, a sign painter, and a part of what everyone called the downtown scene.

I just walked by Moises again?

You know?

And the chocolate, these long cigars are like you could die.

I think if you saw her today, a very petite woman strolling down 2nd Avenue in blue suede booties, her white hair piled atop her head, walking her very slight Italian greyhound, you'd think New York character.

And you'd be right.

I've known her my whole life.

She's one of my mother's oldest friends.

So,

yeah.

I thought I'd go like in order of the signs.

Her studio is jammed with decades of work in stacks and piles and milk crates.

There's a bank of windows on one wall and a huge pale blue painting with small ghostly figures on it on another.

But most of Alona's work is not paintings on canvas.

It's signs, graphic images painted onto metal.

But this one is from a series, men who were acting poorly towards women.

So they were actually about sexual harassment.

Right now, she's showing us a light pink square street sign with black trim and black letters and three figures on it.

First on the left is an incredibly strong silhouette of a very powerful man and he is pulling back as hard as he can on a leash.

The leash is restraining a humanoid wild animal.

And he's got like wild hair coming out.

He's got enormous like dracula hands

and his tongue is sort of like drooling out.

He is grabbing for a very happy, sexy, beautiful woman.

So basically he's like the id and

the man holding him back is the super id, and she's the prey.

Above and below these three figures, in English and Spanish, is the text, curb your animal instinct.

The sign is made of baked enamel aluminum, exactly the material and thickness of a New York City street sign.

And that's because in 1988, it was a New York City street sign.

There are signs everywhere in New York City, most of them warning you not to do things like parking and littering and hornblowing and so on.

Now artist Alona Granite is going to add some new signs warning men not to be wolves or various other species of animal and in general to stop bothering women on the streets.

The Curb Your Animal Instinct sign and another darker pink sign reading no cat calls were hung by the Department of Transportation all over lower Manhattan by the Brooklyn Bridge and Staten Island Ferry, the World Trade Center and City Hall.

Good morning.

Why did you decide to do this?

Well I thought that

it was time for men to start thinking of themselves as part of the human race instead of part of the animal race and

treating women with a sense of dignity.

The signs were highly visible public art about the street harassment of women, and that made them provocative, especially 35 years ago.

As you just heard, they made the local news, but they also made CNN and the international news.

They were written up in mainstream publications and art world journals, in New York Magazine and the AP, in Australia and Italy, Germany, and Japan.

I had this moment of unbelievable success in getting an image out into the world.

Images.

Up to that point, Alona had been a performance artist, a feminist artist, and a part of various artist-run collectives and bands.

She performed and shown her work at galleries, squats, artist-run spaces, and art centers like PS1.

Her career had accrued an organic momentum.

One piece of work had led to another and another, and now the signs had really struck a nerve.

It seemed like Alona was on her way, not necessarily to fame and fortune, but to a kind of art world stability involving recognition, public engagement, the ability to show her work, to make a living.

But that kind of upward trajectory, that's not what this episode is about.

Sometimes you have a moment, and then there are all the moments after.

I mean, the only thing we could talk about, the elephant in my horror room, is like

I can't even say the elephant in your horror room.

Yes,

I have a lot to do, and I'm getting up there in the years.

I have all the stuff that I want to show.

Wait, so what's the elephant in the room?

Well, the elephant is death or success.

It's success.

This is Decodering, a show about cracking cultural mysteries.

I'm Willa Paskin.

Today's episode is about an artist that most people have never heard of and what happened to her.

As such, it's a little different than usual.

It's not about a cultural mystery that you or anyone else has been wondering about.

Just me.

But I've been wondering about Alona for years.

So, back in 2019, I interviewed her a number of times for an episode, and then I chickened out of making it.

Not because I didn't think there was anything there, but because I was worried about talking about what was there.

And what's there is the flip side of a story we all know, the story of making it, of struggling, following your muse, finding your voice, and then success.

That story, that myth, it's the primary one we hear about artists because if we're hearing about them, chances are they've succeeded, even if it's after years of trying, even if it's after they've died.

So, that's what we're looking at today: not the familiar myth of making it, but the mystery of not making it.

What happens to an artist, to anyone, when they're good enough?

But that's not enough.

So, today, I'm decodering that question and an introduction of sorts:

Why don't you know the artist, Alona Granite?

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So I said I've been wondering about Alona for years.

Specifically, I've been wondering about her since I was nine.

Before then, she was just one of my mom's friends.

Sometimes we'd visit her downtown or she'd visit us uptown, always with her long-haired miniature dachshund, who is named Dainty.

My sister and I would play with Dainty while Alona talked to my mom and sometimes drew for us.

She would make us delicate little pictures of people on clouds or riding horses.

That was pretty much the extent of my thoughts about Alona, the dog, and the drawings.

And then.

Do you remember when I made you cry?

When I was little?

Oh, yeah.

What happened?

Come sit.

Come sit close to the mic.

Oh, oh.

You and your sister were like, I made, I made this, and we were on the porch.

It turns out she didn't quite remember what had happened,

but I did.

Like I said, I was about nine, maybe ten.

She was sleeping over with Dainty.

Alona always has a dog, but Dainty was the first.

And what happened is that her beloved Dainty sat on my beloved blankie.

Oh, that, yeah, vaguely.

And you were mad at her for doing that.

Or I was mad and you said,

she's just a dog or whatever.

Oh, yeah.

She was like, my daughter is totally protected.

Totally protect.

I did love Dainty.

I love Dainty too.

And I told you to get a life.

Oh, yes.

You told me to get a life.

That was the most horrible thing you could say to somebody.

Me without a family.

So I am mortified by this story now because I cannot believe how rude I was.

Excruciatingly rude.

But while I was being extremely obnoxious, I was not being pointed.

I was mad at her and I reached for an insult insult that I probably got from some TV character.

But I didn't know something when I said, get a life.

Alona thought that I did, though, that somehow I could see some lack in her and I was going straight for her weak spot.

And she ran into the bathroom and sat on the dryer and cried.

Yeah, get a life.

What a horrible phrase that is.

It's pretty awesome.

It's really terrible.

But it is just like, it's funny because I just really, I didn't mean it.

Like, I didn't know what it meant, but you took it in a, like, you thought I knew secret things.

Oh, it was just this thing that said, and I thought you certainly must know that or have a point of view that my life was

not a good enough life.

At the time, I felt really bad, but I also felt uncomfortable.

I hadn't wanted her dog on my blanket, and it had somehow spiraled into this highly fraught interaction with an adult, one who was so vulnerable.

She had let me hurt her like I was a grown-up when I was just a snot.

And this incident marked her for me.

It made her stand out from the other adults in my life.

Initially, not in such a good way.

Alona might not have remembered, but I did.

And through middle school and high school and college, it just made me feel away about her, like too much.

I'd gotten this peek into the complexity of adulthood that I did not want.

But as an adult myself, I've come to see her differently.

When did you start doing art?

When I was born,

I was always in love with letters.

I liked the shape of letters and I liked

all these different variations that they, you know, curved around, that they were jagged, they were complicated.

I loved it.

Why do you love something?

Why do you love something?

I loved it.

It was weird.

Alona was born in Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and moved out to Long Island when she was six.

Her father was a design engineer for nuclear projects, and her mother was a bookkeeper.

She was an energetic kid, a performer.

She danced, she sang.

She designed clothes for her dolls.

She loved horses and horseback riding.

She wanted to be an artist, an actress, a ballerina, a cowgirl.

There was no sadness in my house.

We were a jolly family.

So, I mean, you could have been intensely depressed, but nobody would have had words for it or talked about it or acknowledged it.

I thought I had a happy childhood.

I went to this fabulous summer camp.

I had a gazillion boyfriends.

I went through them all.

You had a gazillion boyfriends?

Yeah.

I was sort of, well, I think with my early childhood development, I became very interested in boys.

Alona is referring to something that happened to her soon after her family moved out to Long Island.

I was a little girl, somewhere between six and eight.

Our next-door neighbor, he was like 14.

He was sort of a tough guy.

He decided to play strip poker, which is quite a con game.

He put himself on the bed, and then he had me on top of him,

sort of as, you know, like masturbating him.

I had no idea what was going on.

It happened a couple of times and Alona never told anybody about it.

She tried to put it out of her own mind.

As she said, she thought she had a happy childhood and she thinks of herself or wants to think of herself as a happy person.

One of the ways that manifests is in how she talks about even really horrible things with some lightness, silliness, laughter.

Like the time she was in seventh grade and she went back to her neighbor's room when she thought he wasn't there to borrow the encyclopedia that was kept over his bed.

And then he came in there and he attacked me and started ripping my clothes off.

I started like punching and kicking and he finally he stopped.

And then he took my clothes that he ripped apart and went downstairs and he sewed them back together in the sewing machine.

And I stood there behind him waiting for him to sew them.

Then I went back home

never to say a word to anybody about that.

It's kind of funny.

You know, I mean, obviously, it took a lot to get through his head that I really wasn't interested.

And I accepted that he was going to go down there and sew them, which is cute that he knew how to sew, you know, this big bully.

I never thought it was a big deal.

You know, it was sort of my neighbor.

It happened.

It was over.

I didn't think it had anything to do with my life.

Right.

You know, but that, I think, had an enormous amount to do with my life.

She didn't know that then, though.

She boxed up what had happened and thought it worked.

She liked high school.

She was popular.

She had a lot of friends.

She had a good time.

By the time she was ready for college, she knew she wanted to be an artist.

She enrolled at the Tyler School of Art, a part of Temple University that was outside of Philadelphia.

I remember thinking, I have to become much more than I am because I have just been a playgirl.

I thought now I'm in art school, I'm paying attention.

She arrived at school with a lot of skill and talent for someone her age.

She could really draw.

She understood shading and perspective.

She had a beautiful line.

She was also intense about her work and a perfectionist.

And Tyler, in the late 1960s, was demanding and intense too, but also cold and quiet.

Alona was brimming with theoretical and technical questions she didn't feel she could ask.

For her junior year, she studied abroad in Italy, where among other things, she met my mom, Pamela Hort.

She was sitting across from me at the table, and I really didn't know anyone.

I hadn't really found my friend or the person who was in.

And she was across the way, and she was hilarious and charming.

And I just thought, oh, she's the one I'm going to be friends with.

I found her.

And even as Alona was having adventures and a love affair, listening to the news about Vietnam in the studio and dancing around in her room to the doors, she was increasingly anxious, consumed by formal questions about some of her first adult paintings.

She was so worked up that, in her words, she started disintegrating, even more so after she returned to the States.

By that time, actually, I had spent half of my junior year thinking about how to kill myself.

Just kind of mind-boggling, you know?

I mean, it's really sad.

Although I've never really expressed this like this,

and And I couldn't tell anybody because

I was too isolated in my mind.

I just took as many pills as I could find.

My mother was actually visiting the weekend right before this happened.

I thought we had a delightful weekend, and that's when she made her suicide attempt right after I left, which freaked me out because I had no idea that she was suicidal.

It was very scary, and I was very.

I mean, I'm getting tearier.

You know, it was really painful that I didn't know.

Yeah.

It's really upsetting.

I wasn't reading her despair correctly.

But I mean, I just saw her as this pal, this charming,

appealing, talented.

It was terrible.

Alona was hospitalized briefly and then went home for the rest of the school year.

She went to therapy.

She joined a group.

She took some art classes where people chatted.

She started singing to herself on the street late at night, like she had when she was a kid.

And all of these things helped.

Her depression abated.

She slipped back into a happier version of herself.

After undergraduate school and stuff, I became sort of like a cheerful person and,

you know, was having fun and, you know,

played with the artwork.

It was now the 1970s.

And as Alona's 20s unfolded, three events in particular would set the course of her life and work.

The first is that she became a sign painter.

Right after college, she went up to Boston where my mom was to live live for a bit.

She got her own studio space and a very unstable boyfriend.

And to make money, she got a gig at a marina, hand lettering the name on the back and sides of boats, often yachts.

She would go on to do some America's Cup boats.

The work could be exhausting, hanging off boats every day, sunrise to sunset in all weather.

It involved a lot of technique and skill, like drawing intricate letters freehand on open water.

But by doing it, she taught herself a trade, sign painting, that she liked.

She was her own boss and it turned her love of letters into a living.

The second thing that happened is that she found her voice as a performance artist.

After Boston, she enrolled in graduate school at the prestigious School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her time in Italy had made her wary of painting, so she started doing installation art, which is when you create an environment, fill a room with objects made or found, and people walk in and experience it.

For one of her final projects, she put together a five-story installation piece at a graduate school building.

Friends of hers had been supposed to perform in it, but they bailed at the last minute and she decided to do it herself.

Okay, Alona, we're going to either have a nervous breakdown or we're going to be, we're going to be an artist at the end.

We're going to be really for real.

We're going to be in our body.

I started running through the whole five floors, like reading things, singing, making things up, whatever.

It was like I was free.

You know, where you hear of artists where they, you know, they they spend their adult life imagining their Picasso, whatever they're.

And then if they're very fortunate, they break into their own.

Well, this happened when I was like 21.

It was such a miracle to me.

I'm a kid.

So am I going to surprise you with a poster board I need for the science fair tomorrow?

Probably.

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At the time, Jerry Saltz, who is now the art critic at New York Magazine, was a young artist in Chicago himself.

He was also Ilona's boyfriend.

She was way out in front of so many artists in the early 1970s who would later go on to get pretty famous.

He says he'd heard of her before they even met.

She was a star at art school.

Her reputation, her work, preceded her.

She would incorporate a lot of made sculpture, painting, cartooning, politics, pop culture.

Everything was integrated in these little apparettas, really,

with one of the most charismatic performers I have ever seen, pixelated audiences, just sort of threw fairy dust on people, and suddenly the sort of chasm would open, and you'd be with something very magical, but something very cursed, cursed, something that had a chaos to it.

Most of her performances weren't recorded, but this is a clip from one of the rare ones that was.

I mean, if she would have known my history, she would have thought I was even worse of a low life.

Four times gone.

Four times gone.

That's from a piece Alona calls her rape performance, which brings us to the third thing that determined the course of Alona's life and work.

In a few short years after graduate school, when Alona moved to New York, part of a cohort of artists and musicians settling in the rough old industrial neighborhoods of Soho, Tribeca, and the Lower East Side, Ilona was raped four separate times.

It was at night.

It was winter.

I was on the subway.

I walked a couple of few blocks to my house.

So I was

opening the gate, and there was this

voice from behind.

And he said, he had a gun on me in my back.

My first one, I thought, well, bad things happen to people all the time.

This is my first bad thing.

So grow up.

Ilona remembers each of these experiences and she talks about them all in her way.

She laughs sometimes, but not to play down what happened to her.

The second time I had was lettering boats by this time at this marina in Boston and this one person had not paid me.

I had to hitch there because I didn't have any money to get from New York to Boston to get the money.

So there was no car, nobody was stopping and finally a truck stopped.

So I thought, oh, well, okay.

He raped me.

He took out a knife

and I thought, oh, oh, it's the knife.

It's finally arrived.

This is intolerable.

So I pretended that I had an epileptic fit,

which didn't really,

he didn't really buy it.

And it was really rough to like, you know, sort of like pretend you're having a seizure, you know, while you're sort of terrified, you know.

The third time, somebody came in through my window.

I went to sleep and I woke up

screaming.

Not, I had no idea what I was screaming, with this, with hearing this man say, If you don't stop screaming, I'm going to kill you.

He had a mask on and uh

and a steel pipe.

The finale, he then wanted to date me.

He asked me if I would go out with him.

I think I started laughing then.

The last one was um it was during the day on a Sunday.

I was wearing a raincoat.

I was looking for apartments or lofts or something in in Brooklyn and I and I went to the park to think about it.

And uh it w there were very there weren't that many people in the park and this young

sort of cute

boy man came over.

He was wearing a tennis he was carrying a tennis racket and he was wearing like a green and white stripe t-shirt.

And he looked perfectly.

He asked me for directions, and

then he pulled out a gun and he told me to keep walking.

I think I said to him something like,

I don't know, is there like a group where you all meet and find out like where you're going to go next?

Because this was like two weeks later.

So it was totally freakish.

Yeah, it was totally.

I mean, it was surreal.

You know, that's when it was surreal.

You know, really.

This is really nutty.

In the years immediately after this, Alona was needless to say, totally destabilized.

She was full of fear, but also of a strange kind of fearlessness, scared to walk down the street, petrified it would happen again, but also, in her words, a little wild, full of the perverse invincibility that comes when the worst things have already happened to you.

Her experiences immediately entered her work.

Part of my mantra was lucky I'm not the rapist because how

terrible to be that person who was that disturbed and that

ugly inside, you know, that angry or just twisted.

I had been through my own horrors already.

I thought that I, you know, in certain ways by my, you know, the childhood experiences,

I was a fighter.

I wasn't going to be turned into a puddle.

It was like so awful.

I thought that it was actually kind of like my responsibility to do a performance about it.

Although my performances before were kind of fun and entertaining.

I mean, they had some depth to them, but they weren't terrifying.

So this became a terrifying one.

I mean, I'm in this hospital for a really long time by myself, and up to now, the three other times I didn't mind, I didn't mind so much.

This is also part of her rape performance.

She's talking about one of the nurses who treated her.

And then this nurse came in, and she took this dagger, and she jabbed it into my ass, and I cried, and that's what happened the time before.

It was like, you're in this white, empty room with this person that doesn't even talk to you or look at you.

She just jabs you, and you start crying.

She tells you to shut up.

The nurse told Alona that what had happened to Alona would never have happened to her.

Alona remembers thinking,

Yeah, you have the money to take cabs everywhere.

We have a totally different life.

What do you know?

Alona began performing this piece in the 1970s and kept doing so into the early 1980s, at which point her experiences began to make their way into her signs.

But in order for that to happen, Alona had to come to see her signs as art, which for a long time she didn't.

They were a job, a craft.

But that started to change with a number of collaborations, basically spontaneous outgrowths of her being fully enmeshed in the downtown art scene, one where everyone was doing everything, making movies, making art, starting bands.

Alona joined Disband, a no-wave feminist outfit of female artists who couldn't play instruments started by the artist Martha Wilson.

You know, we were political.

We were doing songs about nuclear power, nuclear radiation poisoning,

and about being accosted on the street as a woman.

But she was this gadfly who brought relief somehow.

The heaviness went away.

One of the other members of Disband was Ingrid Sishi, who was then the Wonder Kind editor of Art Forum.

She would go on to edit Andy Warhol's interview magazine for 20 years.

She asked Alona to do some signs for a show she was putting together.

Meanwhile, Alona was also loosely connected to Colab, a downtown activist artist collective.

She had participated in formed in their group exhibitions, some of which were staged in squats.

No matter what they told me, no matter there was nobody that told me nothing out out there in the lands of nothingness, what could I think of but my love and the hopes of the future?

The artist Jenny Holzer was also affiliated with Colab, and she asked Alona to collaborate with her on some pieces.

Sometimes she would go from lettering yachts, one of her other occupations, and then come to me to work on these paintings.

Holter's work involves slogans and aphorisms, and in one collaboration, Alona lettered Holzer's text onto images by the graffiti artist Lady Pink.

Phrases like, I am not free because I can be exploded anytime, and don't shoot civilians.

At moments, we would choose sans serif very matter-of-fact letters.

Other times she would do her patented, wonderful, fluid script.

Things started to snowball.

Alona's work was in a number of gallery shows, including one at PS1.

She was getting more requests to make signs for other artists, including a set of signs for an avant-garde theater that were so large there was more to think about than just the letters.

I thought, wow, this is like painting.

This is so interesting.

This is fun.

For the first time since college, she really wanted to make aesthetic decisions about what she calls her flat art again.

So she began making signs to go in her own performance pieces, specifically one called, Is It Work or Is It War or Are We All Just Waiting for the Good Fairy?

about global instability, nuclear war, economic injustice.

In this version, made specifically for video, she's wearing a black shirt and skinny tie and sitting at a desk when she pulls out a rectangular sign.

It's all black with three blocky white figures on it.

One adult and two children, all holding up missiles.

It reads, missiles for minors.

This is instead what I have to keep under here.

These little signs that I make.

That's not going to pay $1,000 so I can get a pony.

It's not going to pay $1,000 so I can get a car.

It's not going to pay for anything.

It's not going to even pay for more missiles.

It's not going to pay for more babies.

It's not going to, it could pay for more signs.

That's true.

She would give the signs out at the end of her shows, as well as handing them out in Midtown so people could display them in public on buses and subways.

And then Alona noticed a sign on the subway herself, an advertisement for the 1981 James Bond movie, for your eyes only.

All you see is these long legs with nothing on them and maybe high heels.

And

maybe 007 is somewhere.

I don't know.

I just remember that and thinking.

It was

so provocative and it was so sex, you know.

A bunch of legs and a vagina.

She found it so disturbing.

She brought it up at the end of one of the rape performances.

I asked them if anybody was a designer out there, would they please make some signs that addressed rape?

To design something like that was, it just seemed way above my

ability.

And then I finally realized that I really wanted to figure this out, that it was like a challenge to me and it was healing and it felt really important.

So in 1982, she started trying to make signs that addressed rape herself.

I started out totally hostile, you know, saying stay away with men flying in the air and attacking.

And then the next one was stay eight feet away and the third one was basically like, fuck you.

And then I thought I should take a vacation because the whole point was I wanted to be out in the street.

For Alona, the signs being out in the street where everyone could see them, where they could change things was fundamental.

They were activism even before they were art.

But that meant they needed to be polite enough for public officials to agree to hang them.

So over the next six years, she honed them, making them clearer and funnier.

The phrase curb your animal instinct in particular was a riff on then Mayor Ed Koch's pooper scooper signs, which asked people to curb their dog.

Alona was asking men to curb their verbal excrement, a cheeky way of giving the signs authority, making them look like they belonged.

Her strategy worked better than she could have hoped.

The Department of Transportation agreed to hang Alona's signs in neighborhoods where the local community boards okayed it.

Not all of them did.

One board member in Greenwich Village told a newspaper: there was a feeling that it was reverse sexism, showing men as animals.

But the lower Manhattan Community Board, though divided on the signs, ultimately approved them.

Not everyone was thrilled.

When we put them up in Wall Street, it was lunchtime.

Yeah, total traffic jam down Wall Street.

They flip my tires and my beautiful old Mercury Montclair.

Some like man in a suit who's screaming out that we should just go back to the kitchen if we don't want to run it.

It was like all these caricatures.

And then this little guy rips it down, steals the sign, then runs into the Wall Street building that they're building and holds it up like he's won.

He's holding the sign up.

He's so proud and everybody's cheering.

You know, it is demented.

Wendy Alsoff, a co-founder of the gallery PPOW, remembers the hostility too.

There was anger from the men on the street seeing these signs going up, literal scary, like scary, threatening anger.

PPOW, which was then located in the East Village, had just begun to represent Alona around the time the signs were going up.

What she was doing for feminism was way ahead of her time.

And

and it really resounded she definitely hit a nerve and there was success and she got press and we sold them they were inexpensive like 750 but still she had sales she had press she was you know making political actions that had meaning she had something to build on for sure and over the next couple of years she did Alona was in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.

She got commissions to make a set of signs and a series of billboards.

In 1989, these works were featured at Alona's first solo solo show at PPOW, which at the time was a scrappy newcomer that represented a number of political artists.

The show was well reviewed in places like Art Forum and The Village Voice.

Alona wasn't making much money at this time.

In fact, she was still painting boats to make a living.

But things were going well.

She was known in the art world.

She even did a panel at Cooper Union about what it's like to be a famous artist.

And moreover, her work was out there.

Alona's priorities are right there in in her medium.

She makes signs.

They are for people to see.

And people were seeing them.

For Alona, getting to this point had happened naturally.

She'd worked really hard, but without thinking about having a gallery-based career.

But now she'd slipped into one.

It seemed reasonable to imagine that going forward, her professional life would continue to ascend, that there would be growing interest in her work, that she'd show in more places, get more grants, have more collectors, more name recognition, more money, maybe even enough to make a living just from her art.

But that's not what happened.

If this would have ended earlier, I would have been happy with my life.

I would have been happier.

I would have been proud of what I'd done.

I would have enjoyed it.

I would have thought I did

a good enough job, you know.

And I should count my lucky stars that I was fortunate.

And now I don't feel that way.

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The more I spoke with Alona, the more details I learned about the chronology of her life, the more I started to wonder if I had missed something about the time I made her cry.

All these years, I've always thought that when I said that to her, I hadn't meant anything by it.

You heard me talking about it with her.

I've really thought I just as easily could have said, eat my shorts or gag me with a spoon.

But working on this piece, I started to wonder if that could really be true.

I definitely didn't know I knew something, but kids pick up on lots of things they don't understand.

And I was a little pitcher with big ears when I was a kid.

There was nothing I liked more than sitting under the kitchen table and being quiet and seeing what my mom and her friends would get get into if they half forgot that I was there.

Maybe I'd heard something, a conversation, a tone of voice.

The reason I wonder about this is because it's almost too much of a coincidence otherwise.

When I told Alona to get a life, it was the early 1990s, right around a transitional moment in her career.

It's when things started to get harder.

That's why what I said provoked such a reaction, why she couldn't just brush it off as the bad behavior of a mouthy kid.

Maybe for the first time, the life she was starting to see stretching out ahead of her wasn't going in the direction she wanted.

After her first PPOW show, Alona worked on a number of other sign projects.

One about domestic and child abuse, one for an imagined all-female park, another inspired by the first Iraq war of gas-masked figures dancing, eating, lounging underneath falling missiles.

And she could have kept going in this vein.

Another artist might have.

The signs, after all, were what she was known for.

But Alona found she didn't want to hop from hot-button issue to hot button issue, making signs all the while.

They wanted me to continue to make these political signs.

Basically, I think in some ways,

I got off of my track.

Jerry Saltz again.

She couldn't go into production and just paint endless series.

And each one of these came from a a deeply ruptured

place in her.

A lot of them dealt with agr uh male aggression, hostility, abuse, um, nuclear war, then a a real fear.

So each one of her things exacted a lot from her, and that generally frowns on a big series.

Like, I'll do another show of men yelling at women.

It just doesn't work that way for an artist like that.

Plus, she had a craft level that was extremely unusual, that she was making her own work, painting her own signs, doing everything herself, and this took time.

And I thought it was like being a prostitute, just like making, you know, just doing it, you know, coming up with the next subject, you know, for the moment, you know.

So instead of just making more signs, Alona decided to do something totally different.

She started making wedgwood.

Wedgwood is a neoclassical style of ceramics inspired by ancient antiques that was created in the mid-1700s.

It's the first modern mass-produced tableware, and you'd probably recognize it.

The most famous examples of it are cups and plates in a soft periwinkle blue called Wedgwood Blue.

It has white, figurative ceramic friezes along the edges, and they have a visual clarity that's almost sign-like.

Alona, who has always been interested in the accessories of the rich and the habits of the regular, became fascinated by Wedgwood.

And so she set out to make wedgwood urns and vases from scratch.

These two-foot-tall, graceful ceramic sculptures detailed with her own iconography, fighter jets and realistic-looking muscular women lifting barbells and soldiers with their arms and legs blown off.

They're some of my favorite of her pieces, but they were time-consuming.

Even more so because she had to take time away from them to paint boats and signs to make a living.

I must say, financially, it's never felt really good.

The signs were really hard to make, and I worked really hard for it, so it was always really hard.

And I only had a few months to do anything in.

So here she is.

She's been working hard on good work, but it's been over a decade since her big splash.

In that time, New York has gotten more expensive and the art world has gotten more professional.

She's seen peers get famous.

A relationship has fallen apart.

And she's now a woman of middle age who's worried about money.

All of this is the context of her next gallery show at PPOW in late 1998 of her Wedgwood urns and a number of related ambitious paintings.

It's the culmination of almost a decade of work, and she needed it to go well.

And instead, nothing much happens.

It doesn't get a lot of attention.

There's no sales.

Alona is getting frantic, feeling frustrated and panicked with her gallery, and she starts trying to drum up press herself.

She calls one of her gallerists, Wendy, who you heard from earlier, to talk about why an image hadn't been sent to the listing section of the New Yorker, and it escalates from there.

So I called up Wendy, upset, and then she got very angry at me.

And she was like, No, you know,

you can't tell us anything.

We know our business.

And then she said, I'm going home to play with my children.

And she hung up the phone.

I asked Wendy for her perspective on what happened.

We had a fight.

I remember there was a fight, which is not typical, I have to say, with our artists.

But with Alona, there was a lot of anger.

And I would say, in Alona's case, I mean, she had like serious psychological trauma in her life.

There was a lot of triggers that kept bringing up trauma.

And I think moving from the signs to the vases

to bigger pieces, it was a struggle.

She couldn't get the help she needed, maybe for financial reasons.

And maybe we were too young at that time to provide and didn't have the money ourselves to provide that umbrella.

And if you have...

someone who's very, very angry no matter what

and you have no support at that point for that artist because the sign thing was five years ago or ten years ago and really no one knows who you are now

and there's not a lot for us to do i hate to say it and it seems so cruel but you know there's a careerist art thing going on in the art world and it's not the fantasy art thing where you think you can be crazy and you could be vincent van gogh so to speak So PPOW dumped her.

And I sat on that bench with the phone thinking, well, that's the end of it.

That's the end of me, I guess.

That's certainly the end of this career.

I thought I'd die, you know, it was, I was felt disgraced.

Getting dumped by your gallery, it's like getting dumped.

Even though it's business, it feels personal.

And especially for an artist who's not so young anymore.

If there's gossip, if people say you're a handful, Maybe no one gives you another chance.

There's so so many factors that got Alona to this place.

Timing, money, the market, art world trends, psychology, sexism, bad luck, the intangible.

But once she was in this position, it was like a bamboo finger trap.

The harder she tried to get out, the more stuck she was.

Alona's not some smooth operator, and she couldn't suddenly effectively become strategic.

She'd seen men who could sell themselves, but it didn't work for her.

Art world gatekeepers seemed put off by her, and that only made her more off-putting, more desperate, more vulnerable.

And that's the thing about Alona.

She can't always help but reveal her vulnerability to people.

She showed it to a nine-year-old.

And people don't always like that.

Jerry Saltz again.

I believe in radical vulnerability, and Alona, granted, is the embodiment of radical vulnerability.

And that is a great plus, but I think it has a downside, unfortunately, in the

workaday art world.

There have been a lot of very hard things about the last two decades for Alona, many of them financial.

She never had health insurance until she qualified for Medicare.

She has two roommates, a changing cast of 20 and 30 somethings off Craigslist.

She sells her work for less than it's worth, both the art and the sign painting, because she needs income.

And that was was before the sign painting itself started to dry up in the 2000s as technology made it easier to use less skillful replacements.

Alona calls her financial circumstances a nightmare, but as difficult as they are, as anxious about money as she is all the time, the more painful part is her work not being seen.

A lot of artists say, well, it's done.

If I like it, it's done.

You know, that it's really mostly, it's the artist's engagement with the work.

But you don't feel that way.

No, I don't.

And people would

say, oh, these should be up.

They should be everywhere.

Like they would say all the time, you know.

And it's like, yeah, but they're nowhere.

They're in my house.

I can't bear not being able to

get through the door, to get things going, to fix things, to move it along.

It feels so like not being a human being.

It's like a failure as a human being that you can't get what you need.

It's like being a doctor.

Like, you know, you're a great doctor, but you somehow can't get any patients.

Compounding this is that she's seen friends, colleagues, peers from the 70s and 80s thrive, have the kind of careers that once seemed possible for her.

Jerry Saltz won a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism.

Jenny Holtzer is one of the rare artists who's almost a household name.

Since the 2010s, Martha Wilson has been represented by PPOW, Ilona's former gallery.

And that's just the people we've mentioned in this episode.

There are plenty more.

Pamela Hort, my mom again.

Well, I think as she aged,

as her career didn't happen, it's one thing to be a struggling artist at 38.

It's another thing to be a struggling artist at 58.

Friends who she knew made it.

She was alone.

You know, I think it got harder as she aged and as her career didn't happen.

And

it's painful.

it's painful for alona is there anything that's like good about getting older not that i know of

i know a lot of people seem to like it a lot they feel like they've they've made it they're they're comfortable they feel proud of themselves no i could start weeping now i can feel the tears right behind it but i don't really cry much anymore

I had started on this episode knowing that Alona's life hadn't turned out how she hoped, and also knowing that she was brave.

But I hadn't fully considered how exploring the first to show the second might actually make her feel.

You've been thinking about this a lot, probably too much, but like what, so what do you think about your life?

It's depressed me.

I have never used the word, as I told Pamela, I have never used the word depressed with me.

I was raised to be this happy girl, as my mother was, and they sent me down when I was three years old to entertain the lady down the hallway.

hallway and that's so that's my personality but at this point it feels like i i guess i've you know knocked against walls for so long without you know without getting

being able to get through that it just seems like

sad

like really sad

this is about when i chickened out of doing this piece back in 2019.

not because the story is sad but because it seemed like it was making her sad.

30 years after I'd done it the first time, I was making her cry again.

And they really didn't want to do that.

So I backed out.

She was gracious about it.

And then I just kept thinking about it, about her, about how being an artist is like a more high-stakes version of being a person, where what it's all for and what you have to say and what you leave behind.

It's all front and center.

And so is how completely out of your control it all is.

Artists don't get to decide if their work is valuable, if it's meaningful, if it moves people.

All they get to do is make it in the face of so many material and psychological constraints and hardships.

Most of us do everything we can to get whatever scrap of control we can manage.

We give up our dreams and callings.

We change jobs, careers.

We find other things.

partners, children, interests that can matter to us.

But Alona hasn't done that.

She sat with her lack of control for decades.

And that's been painful and disappointing.

But that's not all it's been.

As hard as it is to make it, as rare, it seems to me just as hard, just as rare to keep trying so single-mindedly when you don't.

Because Alona is still trying.

I mean, I'm not stuck in this world where I don't know what to do, where I, you know, like I'm not, I'm embarrassed, I don't want to do it, or I'm trying to hide and I can't do it.

My, you know, my studio isn't clean.

I don't have enough money.

Whatever kind of excuse I've live, you know, like I'm not there.

I have work, you know, I have more than enough.

For the last 20 years, despite everything, she's been working.

Among other things, she made a piece inspired by Donald Trump, and she's also finishing up this series of five beautiful signs, riffing on Little Red Riding Hood, a different way of approaching the theme of danger and safety for women and girls.

The text on one of the signs says, wander and giggle.

It's a fantasy of freedom and discovery.

And meanwhile, her work is out there.

The Whitney bought the two original street signs for its permanent collection.

In 2015, unofficial, non-sanctioned anti-cat calling signs went up in New York City and Philadelphia.

They weren't Alonas, but ones following in her footsteps, showing how ahead of her time she was.

And this is the thing about Alona that's always been there all along.

Not just the difficulties, but the perseverance.

She's struggling, but she is also in a struggle every day to get her work into the world.

And we don't really know how to value that, how to think about that, how to look at that.

We prefer to avoid it altogether by talking about people like Vincent Van Gogh.

Van Gogh came up so much when I was talking about Alona.

People usually meant it in a kind way.

He wasn't famous in his lifetime.

And look, we all know his work now.

If you look at it closely, it's a weird thing to say.

He was miserable.

He killed himself.

He didn't enjoy any of his success.

But it's not really meant to be looked at closely.

It's just our culture's way of thinking about people who don't make it, or really our way of not thinking about them.

It's nice to imagine that Alona's work might be discovered before or after her death, but the only person who gets to be Van Gogh is Van Gogh.

For the rest of us, there has to be meaning in something less eternal in how we actually live our lives.

My arc dealer basically said, you're dead.

I'm supposed to be dead, but I'm not dead.

Here I am talking to you.

And I don't, you know, and I still wish to be alive because I still have like ideas, energy, and

it has an arc.

And I'm not finished.

I'm still not finished.

So I'm going to finish whether anybody wants to know whether I'm finished or not.

And it's like this childish hope that still I will be, you know, one of these 112 year old ladies that they say, here she is.

Look at this great work.

I don't know what she's going to do with this money because is she going to go to a prom now with this delightful money and buy herself and maybe a mausoleum?

Because what else am I going to be able to buy?

You know, because, you know, I'm still hoping that this will not go down a garbage can.

I also really hope it doesn't go down the garbage can.

But I just have to insist, that's not all that matters.

Because almost everything goes down the garbage can eventually.

Art, fame, money, none of it is forever.

The myth of success is really powerful, but failing in little ways and big ones, that's the fact.

Figuring out how to sit with that, figuring out how to try in the face of that, that's not nothing.

That's a life.

I'm still trying.

You know.

You know, I'm still alive.

That's what being alive is.

This is Decodering.

I'm Willa Paskin.

If you'd like to see Alona's art, you can find it at Ilonah-Granite.com.

That's I-L-O-N-A-G-R-A-N-E-T dot com.

You can also find me on Twitter at Willa Paskin.

And if you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, you can email us at decodering at slate.com.

If you haven't yet, subscribe and rate our feet in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Even better, tell your friends.

This podcast was written by Willa Paskin.

It was edited by Benjamin Frisch and Gabriel Roth.

Decodering is produced by Willip Haskin and Benjamin Frisch.

Cleo Levin is our research assistant.

A special thanks to Jared Holt, Alicia Montgomery, June Thomas, Lucy Lepard, Marion Meneker, and everyone else who gave us help and feedback on the way.

If you are already a Slate Plus member, Thank you.

You can listen to the entire season of Decodering right now.

If you are not a Slate Plus member, we would love your support.

Please sign up for Slate Plus at slate.com slash decoder plus.

It means a lot and it will give you access to this whole season of decodering.

Otherwise, we'll see you next week.

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