Artist and Curator Walkthrough of Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul and Josh Smith: Life Drawing

An in-person exhibition walkthrough with artist Josh Smith and curator Claire Gilman with Barbara Paca of Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul and Josh Smith: Life Drawing

Claire Gilman:
My name is Claire Gilman. I'm the Chief Curator at the Drawing Center and the organizer of this exhibition, I guess both exhibitions. In this room we have Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul and in our other gallery we have a show Josh Smith: Life Drawing with the amazing artist Josh Smith, who is here with us tonight, and we're going to be joined momentarily, she's just running a little bit late, by Barbara Paca, so she's just going to kind of join on in, I think. And Barbara is a Frank Walter scholar. She also the keeper of the estate. She knew Frank very, very well. They were very close. She met him in Antigua. And so she's really our source in a way for all things Frank, because I did not have the privilege of knowing Frank who passed away in 2009.

So I'll tell you a little bit about Frank's life. I want to sort of talk a little bit about who Frank was, how he moved through the world, because he was an incredible person as well as artist. And then talk a little bit about the show, how I conceived of the show, how it's put together. And then rather than, I don't think this is the kind of show that one sort of walks through work by work for various reasons, some of which I'll touch on. So I was thinking maybe myself, Barbara, and Josh could each talk about some favorite moments in the show. And then hopefully Josh will also bring us into his show and talk a little bit about that. Because I don't think I mentioned this, how the shows relate to each other, they are separate exhibitions. But Josh in fact was introduced to Frank's work, I think about two years ago now in Brussels, and fell in love with his work and myself knowing Josh, Josh being a friend of the Drawing Center, we began a conversation about Frank. And so I invited Josh to do his own show of drawings as a kind of homage to Frank. So Josh's show is an exhibition of his drawings, which have actually never been shown before. He's never shown his drawings before from the nineties to today. A few from the nineties, but I think it will be pretty clear or pretty evident what that relationship is when you see this exhibition and then look at Josh's alongside it.

Okay. So a bit about Frank. So Frank Walter was born in Antigua in 1926, and he was actually born to a fairly well to do family, so he was a very well educated, a scholar, you could say from the very beginning. Also interested in art early on, but it was a little bit later on in his life that he began to actively pursue the arts. He was the son or he was the ancestor, not the son, sorry, the ancestor of both white plantation owners and enslaved and Tegan. So he came from this mixed heritage, which I mentioned because it really was a fundamental part of who he was and in a sense how he moved through the world and how he lived his life. So he lived in Antigua till about 1953 when he decided to go on a European tour with his cousin, essentially in search of this sort of other half of his ancestry, his sort of Germanic roots. And when he landed in the UK with his cousin, who was much lighter skinned than he was, they were met at the boat by another cousin who was already living in the UK. And who said to his female cousin, okay, you can come with me, but you are too dark and you have to stay at the boat. So he was essentially left abandoned in the UK with no resources knowing no one, no money, no way of supporting himself.

And essentially for the next 10 years, he traveled through Europe, he went to the UK, went to Scotland, he went to Germany. And it was a profound experience for him, a very traumatic experience for him, in many ways. He had encountered a kind of racism that he had never experienced before. He was poor, he was hungry, he had to find various ways of supporting himself. He worked in mining, I think for a period of time. He spent a lot of time in libraries in order to find refuge, warmth, among other things. While in libraries, he did a lot of research and I think there began his interest in his history and in his genealogy, and I'll talk a little bit more about that later, but he began to sort of spin out these various narratives and understandings of who he was in the world.

He was able to trace his Germanic side back to the Walter family, which is based in fact and is well-documented, but also created a kind of partly, mostly fictitious, I think other identity for himself as being potentially the ancestor of Charles II. There was some sort of story out there that had some truth. I think that possibly Charles II had a mixed race son that had been sort of sent off to Antigua... I think that was the story. Who knows? Largely, this is probably fictitious, but this became a kind of source of a sort of obsession for Frank throughout his life to sort of figure out who he was in this way. After spending about 10 years touring Europe, he came back to the Caribbean. He spent quite a number of years in Dominica where he planted trees, cut down wood, sold wood for a living, then moved back to Antigua, began working in a photo shop. He opened his own photo studio, and he did that for quite a number of years. That was how he made a living. He would take photographs of tourists and he would also make signs. You see a few of those signs up there that sign, introducing the new breed, some of those he would make and sell, some of those he would do on commission. And then eventually after doing that for a number of years, he retired in a way, into himself, into his own world, moved up to a remote location on top of a hill in Antigua, and basically made art for the rest of his life. And I think he had been making art throughout his life, but I think probably the vast majority of the work dates from that period.

In a way, there are two sides to Frank Walter that I want to get at. And this is reflected in the exhibition. So I'll talk a little bit about how I conceive the exhibition, how it's put together. As I see it, there is this one side of Frank looking for himself, interested in history, interested in who he was in the world as a historical person. And you see that in what's occupying basically these vitrines, these vast genealogical charts that he created, this enormous manuscript, 6,000 page manuscript that he wrote, which is essentially his autobiography or the story of his life, pages and pages of poems. He also wrote songs and musical scores, and all of that material is occupying the vitrines in this space as well as this wall, this center wall here, which I'll let Barbara talk about because that really was her brainchild, this wall in the center of the gallery. And then the other side of Frank was the man who was a gardener, who lived in nature, who observe people and animals in the sort of solitude of his home atop this hill and Antigua, and who found refuge in that world of nature and animals and people. And that is the frank that you see in these different drawings and paintings on all different kinds of supports. Anything that he could find, he would make art on that you see framed on the walls. And I will mention that Frank at one point did talk about the exhibition that he wanted to see of his work, and it sort of followed this format with works, ephemeral kinds of works, manuscripts, things like that in vitrines, and then drawings and paintings elegantly framed on the walls. In some ways that seems like a kind of standard way of putting together a show, but it's not the case. One could put a show together many different ways. And so in a way, in putting it together this way, I think we're honoring Frank's, Frank's desires to see his life in the midst of his art in a sense.

And then a couple more things I'll say about the exhibition and how it's put together. So it's really important to note that there's no date. None of these works are dated. So really there's no chronological or you can't talk about a chronological development to Frank's work. I mean, Barbara, you may have a sense of what you think the dates of these works are, but there's not really any sense in thinking about them that way or in thinking about or needing in a way to think about chronology that this led to this or led to this because it really isn't like that. I think there are probably works dating from the sixties and seventies, but the majority maybe from the nineties and early two thousands, a lot of the work, as you can see is not, it has suffered a lot of damage in the climate of Antigua. So I'm sure there are many things that did not last, were not discovered at the end of Frank's life. So the exhibition is not organized chronologically. There's no need to start in a certain place or finish in a certain place.

How it is organized is really in putting it together, I think there was something that, or what I feel to be fundamental about Frank and how he views the world is that he operates both on this sort of cosmic plane looking at things from very, very far away and on this sort of microplane looking at things from very, very close up. And I really wanted the show to be a reflection of Frank looking and how Frank sees the world. He was interested in things that were right in front of him, and he was also interested in other planets and other spheres. He wrote an opera about Jupiter, and there are a series of works that explore other galaxies.

So each wall in the exhibition begins, or sort of group of walls, begins from a place that is veering towards or that sits more in the realm of abstraction. Nothing that Frank made was ever completely abstract. I mean, because everything was rooted in some idea of the world or a world if not this world. But so each wall begins from a place of abstraction and moves into a place of greater specificity and kind of moving in a way closer in. So you see things from farther away, and then you get up very, very close to just an individual bird or an individual dog and then move back out into this place of abstraction. So that happens on this wall, it happens on this wall, which is this series of works called the Spools. A series of works done on this circular substrate we're not entirely sure what it was possibly used in the bottom of baskets. Definitely I think suggestive of a period of time that Frank lived on a ship and was actually incarcerated on this ship when he was on this European tour. He was institutionalized several times when he was on this European tour. And so possibly reflective of that in some way. But the back wall, again, we are also moving out from a place of looking down on the universe, starting with that beautiful half moon and moving closer and closer in looking at individual flora and fauna. And then back out to this final image which says, which actually has the words only God for me. And I included that because Frank was a very religious person. He was guided by Christianity, by spirituality. I think it's important to acknowledge that in this exhibition. So you see that in a few places. So mostly animals on that wall and human beings on this wall is sort of loosely the way that I've organized that space. And then ending over on that wall with four works that are part of that galactic series that I was talking about.

I think maybe I will stop there for the moment and let the two of you sort of chime in and maybe talk about your relationship to Frank. Barbara, maybe you could talk a little bit first just about how you came to know Frank, how you see Frank and talk about some moments in the show possibly, maybe you could talk about that.

Barbara Paca:
Thank you all for coming out today on such a hot day. I apologize for being late, and it's really wonderful to have been able to work with everybody at the Drawing Center. I see Aimee who does programming and Claire and just the whole team has been really fantastic, and working with Josh and Megan [Lang] has been incredible. They're both amazing artists who raise your hand if you know Josh's work. That's what I was figuring. Yeah, I have had the pleasure of knowing, or yeah, I still know Frank, even though he passed away in 2009 because he's still around in his way. And so I've known him for about 20 years now. And the first time that we were lucky enough to meet Megan and Josh was in Brussels at a dinner, and I was with Frank Walter's nephew, and he looked at me and when about 15 minutes, he mouthed Frank, uncle Frank. And so if you know Josh, then I think Frank, and he's in this room right now. I sort of met him by accident with a family member, and I was completely blown away. I was taken up to his house, which was a hike. And I think Josh in the essay I write about Josh and Frank as a kind of a unit, if you will. You said something about when you and Megan went up to Frank's place, right?

Claire Gilman:
Well, we were fortunate enough, I'll just mention that, to be able to send Josh to Antigua. And so Josh was able to go to Frank's, I mean now abandoned studio, a place that you had visited when Frank was living there. And we have two wonderful videos playing downstairs, both of which were made by a man named Thomas Freund. One is a film just about Frank and Frank's... which has a lot, actually a lot of Frank talking, so you can hear Frank's voice, which is really an amazing distinguished voice reading his poetry. And then we have another film that Thomas just made very recently of Josh and Megan talking about Frank and their experience of meeting Frank, so that's what Barbara's referring to.

Josh Smith:
I mean, it's very special when you get to Antigua. You are right away in a Caribbean place, but I was struck by the amount of tourists there. There's a really black and white part of it, and the tourists are kind of pervasive in a certain part of town. And then as you go up Frank's Hill, his studio was up a dirt road on this hill, and it all kind of goes away. He built the studio... probably for privacy, I mean the location, it's private and if you wanted to go visit him it was more difficult. In town, he was more accessible. And it's very simple, it was nothing grand. He wanted that contained feeling. And the landscape is a big part of his studio. And another big part was this beach. I call it Frank's Beach, but it has a real name, Rendezvous Beach.

Barbara Paca:
It's actually owned by the Walter family. It's a vast, expansive land.

Josh Smith:
Yes, the Walter family is an enormous presence there. Everywhere I went with Jules, Frank's nephew, they recognized him by his face. "Are you a Walter?" "Yes, I'm a Walter." So that must have empowered him and also kind of made him retreat a little bit. He had a supportive family and the community, it was understood, that he was working and stuff, but I can't overstate how special the environment was. And it does lend itself to examining things like very intensely. It would be a great place for any artists to work for a period of time. And you can see what kind of grew out of it here. It's an ethereal sort of place. I've never experienced anything else like it. Barbara was insistent on me going, and I found a week to go, and I'm so thankful that I did.

Barbara Paca:
I remember you talking about how the rooms were calibrated for one person and even the spring of the floor and how the studio actually began. It really isn't exactly a road, I would say it's more like a footpath, but people use it as a road until they really can't go any further. And then they walk. But you said, the second you step off of a footpath onto his property, his studio actually begins, but it's just wild land and then a walk to a little house and then a little studio. And the studio is a platform. It has no walls. It has no ceiling. But he said, why would I need that in a place like this?

Claire Gilman:
It also has this, so there's the building that's the studio. And then isn't there sort of this, I don't know what you would call it, like a terrace or this, that's where that extends out.

Barbara Paca:
That's the studio.

Claire Gilman:
That's studio? His studio is separate from the house? Okay, okay. I understand. And I think what's what's really fascinating about that is that it does show that he lived his, that his studio for him or making art for him was about looking. It was not about being confined in a private space, which many of our studios, I mean, I'm not an artist, but are, right? We're in our private studio. That's what we think of an artist studio as being inside as being their space where they're away from the world. He was away from the people at a later point in life, although not always because he did make drawings of people, but I guess that might've been earlier on. But his studio was about looking out at the world and what he was depicting was that world, but also his view of that world.

And I think my essay for the catalog, I really focus on that idea of perspective and looking and view into something. And that's something that you see over and over and over again in his work that you're aware not just of the tree or the animal that's being depicted, but the view onto that tree or animal. I think it's a little difficult to move around the exhibition with this large group, which is why I don't think we're going to do sort of a traditional tour, and maybe even not for this moment, but one moment that I wanted to point out. But it's all the way on the other side. But you can look at that also on your own is this image with these three birds and the bird in these images. So there's an egret, well, there's one image where it's a flock of birds flying. Then next to it is an egret who's standing in perfect profile on this rooftop looking out over to the side. And so you can see the bird in profile and then an image of a cormorant with his back to the viewer. As though the cormorant is, in a way, Frank's alter ego or something like that in this image. So you see Frank looking onto the cormorant who is in turn looking out into the world, and it's an image of a creature looking as much as it is an image of that creature or an image of that landscape. And you feel him in a way gaining access to the world through this bird. And I think you see that also in these spool images, which again, have that idea of a sort of view onto something. And I think that's where we come up with this porthole idea, yes, because he was on this ship, but also because they look like little windows onto something or little lenses onto something. And I sort of tried to recreate that moving again, as I said, from something far away. And then I love this, I think it's the third image where he's looking over a fence onto, I think it's a, it's a window seal or it's a terrace or something, but he's looking over something onto the landscape behind it. So again, it gives you this sense of where you are situated in this world. Obviously this is different than in the small sketches where you're not getting a sense of those are just individual creatures that he's captured. And then in a way, taking those studies and putting them into these finished compositions where you see them in context.

Barbara Paca:
So I think because you all seem to know Josh or of his work, and hopefully you know about Megan's work as well, I think that there's one of the similarities is if you think of a drawing as a kind of essay, you see how one follows through with those ideas. Frank felt that way about, even though he was very shy and very reclusive, he was incredibly polite and he would engage with people. And since the time of our first kind of exhibitions about Frank Walter, we asked him, as Claire was saying, what kind of exhibition would you like to have? And it was about how you, the viewer, would feel experiencing his art. It was never from his perspective. So it was very Josh-like, it was about how that artist's work would make you feel and how it would make you think. And in the course of being at the Biennale and people coming in and saying, gosh, I can't believe Antigua and Barbuda has a national pavilion. And you have Frank Walter (in 2017), because actually "I actually met this man," and every person said the same thing. And they talked about meeting Frank and how he made them feel that they were the only person in the room. And they often would tell me that they were at some kind of a crossroads in their life as an artist. They were struggling with something. And here was a person who they met randomly by accident, who listened to them and helped them make a decision that at the time they didn't know was important. So I just feel like there's a connection to what Josh does and the way he reaches out to his audience.

Josh Smith:
I've gained a connection with Frank since I was first introduced to his work and to you, and later on to Jules. And I met in London and Jules, his nephew and the area, it's become a large presence in my mind. I am so impressed by the fact that he, against all odds... I mean, he was a very industrious person. He was a very hard worker. And yes, the nature and the surroundings and the people around him were very important, but he had such a huge internal combustion engine. And I think that's where a lot of the writing and the more abstract art, and there was a fire in him that was inextinguishable. And it's unfortunate that people die. But the beauty is that we're and Barbara especially are working very hard to preserve his art and to convey the message that he's a very special person. And that's inspired me a lot. Within the show, you can see so many different points of probably 10 or 12 points of what he was focused on. And I think that there was, I have an abundance of materials around me. Frank kind of conjured all this from nothing. Yes, from the photo studio. He was anxiously waiting for the film packages to use for frames. He didn't have an idle moment, I don't think. And within that studio, there was work he made inside and work he made outside, and that really shows.

Claire Gilman:
And I want to point out one thing. I didn't actually realize this until yesterday, Barbara, when you pointed it out. One of the things that he would make in his photo studio and he would sell were these alphabet cards that are in the first vitrine. And I didn't understand really what the purpose of them was. So he would make A, I think his "Ape." So each letter, would go all the way to Z for Zero, and then he would make the drawing and then he would photocopy it, and then he would hand color the photocopy and then he would sell them. And he made them for the purpose of education. You were saying he believed very strongly in education and actually was making these specifically for children to come and learn, I guess many different things, language, but also relationship between things, visual arts. So he had this generous, he was connected to the world in that way. He wasn't just up in his studio disconnect. He was very much attached to the world and believed strongly in making the world a better place. And talks about that a lot in his texts as well.

Barbara Paca:
Yeah, I mean it was really important to us. In the beginning when I first met him, the family said, would you be willing or interested to take on the intricacy of Frank's very fragile mind? was the question that was posed by a man called Sir Sullivan Walter, who's sort of the patriarch of the family and is no longer with us. And I said, absolutely, of course. And it was really a lot of people who've worked on Frank Walter: To Capture a Soul, and one is a neurosurgeon from New York Hospital, and she actually went through the 50,000 page archive. That's just 6,233 pages of one draft of a monograph that he wrote. It's incredible. It mean it's really beautiful. And she wrote a beautiful essay about how Frank Walter did not suffer from madness. He actually suffered from genius and had he been in America (she's at New York Hospital, so I think she speaks with some authority) that he would've been institutionalized and medicated and unable to pursue his dream of work.

So his family owning a lot of land, recognized that he wanted to live in seclusion and made that kind of life possible for him. There were a lot of questions we had, and again, I worked with philanthropists and think tanks to talk about how do you address a person who's as high functioning as he is in a society that may not necessarily fully embrace that. I mean many people did. So we had members of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton here yesterday, and I was a member there 30 years ago when John Nash was there. So if you saw the movie Beautiful Mind when I met Frank Walter, we all would sort of bow and sort of make room for John Nash when he was walking through. And so I only recognized Frank's genius when I met him, and I thought it was just really important that we have a conversation that starts at this level and goes like that. And that if people were willing to take the work seriously and do the work, the entire archive has been digitized. It's organized. So there are a lot of people who, including Claire, who have really done the work on Frank Walter. And I think that we wanted to kind of recreate these Beautiful Mind walls, if you will. There's one on either side just to express how much information he had access to because he was a wunderkind, I mean, when he was very, very young, the family recognized his genius. He really was at the highest functioning level I've ever been exposed to. But he had a soul and he had the kind of compassion and artistic genius that we see in somebody like Josh Smith. No pressure.

Josh Smith:
When I was asked to participate, I was scared and thrilled at the same time because I love the Drawing Center and I love Frank Walter's work, and I know they always do two shows like this. And I do a lot of drawing and sketching. I don't take a nice sheet of paper and make a drawing like some artist can. I kind of express that type of thing in printmaking, I think more, and to go back to Frank's alphabet cards, those are printmaking. That was what he had access to as far as replicating his work and he jumped on it. If he had an etching press or something like that, which is easy to access over here, we would've seen a whole another thing. I'm sure he would've gone crazy on that. But I love printmaking and painting. I'm primarily a painter, I would say, and a lot of my drawings are the foundations for my painting. So when I'm interested in something, I'll do a lot of sketches, like hundreds. And I don't generally keep them, they accumulate so much, I just throw them away.

But here I was forced to kind of parse through what I had around and pick out things. And I realized that a lot of it is similar to Frank's subjects and stuff. I'm interested in things that kind of showed time and moments in time. And yeah, what I present is very simple. I wanted to show five drawings, and Claire worked me up to 40. It doesn't feel like that many. I suppose I didn't feel like equal to Frank in a lot of ways. It brought out my more self-conscious side. I'm a artist that likes to show off a little bit with my shows and stuff, and I didn't really do that here. I just showed a selection that I felt would compliment Frank's work. Yeah, I'm very happy to participate. If I had this big room, I think it would've been a totally different show. But if I ever do, I'm going to try to make it like Frank's show probably.

Claire Gilman:
I think that's one of the wonderful things about that room is that it gives people that opportunity to do something more intimate and not feel like you have to fill a space, not have that pressure of having to fill a space. But it was interesting. We didn't really know what was going to happen when we first started before you pulled all the drawings, what was going to come out, or how in a way natural it would be. But it really felt like we didn't have to search, you know what I mean? For drawings that made sense in the context of the show. They just were there. Just these images that I think in both cases you see this focus on, for Josh, I think this really does run throughout all of your work, individual subjects and again and again, that sort of trying to get at, I mean, it's a different thing you're trying to get at in that expression of that subject in a way than Frank is getting, but it is that sense of honing on in some sort of essence, as you said, of life or death.

I'll just mention the title of the show To Capture a Soul. Just where that came from was that Barbara told me a story how Frank used to go around, I think when he was still down in the town, drawing from life from people. And people said, well, you knew when he was coming and he picked up pencil paper, you were afraid because he could capture your soul. Which I think is particularly true in certain images, especially those figures right there. But I was going to say one, Josh, I remember when we were trying to decide what works to include one of Josh's subjects that, for those of you who know, his work is very well known are his reapers, and we do have a few of those in his show. And I think you were saying no, we originally know Frank doesn't do death really, so let's not include them. But then we decided to include them.

Josh Smith:
I think that life and death are part of each other, and I don't know, Frank probably would've liked those. I just put a few and it would've been obscuring the truth to leave him out because it is like five years of my work kind of playing with that subject and stuff. I learned the other day that Frank, a lot of the people came from photograph. He were drawn from photographs too, which was interesting.

Barbara Paca:
One of the things that's really uncanny about your work, Josh, is the connection to Frank. And when we look at the years, it's uncanny and there's kind of an immediacy and an honesty, but more than anything, there's a humanity and to the work that's very almost interchangeable with Frank.

Claire Gilman:
We went back and forth a bit on texting about what the title for Josh's show should be. And then I think there was something like we were honing in on this Life Drawings and then said, no, it should be Life Drawing, not life DrawingS, because it's about drawing life. And the other side of that is death with the reapers, but it's not about drawing from life, which Life DrawingS would sound like drawing from life, but it's about drawing life, which I think you do in your own way. And Frank does in his own way.

And just to go back to what you were saying a minute ago about the many different sources that Frank used for his work, I think this is a really nice constellation, these four drawings here, because you see four very different kinds of individuals and different sources. So I think this drawing is an anonymous woman. We don't know who she is, likely drawn from life, possibly from a photograph. We we're not sure... so this probably an imagined figure, this a very well-known figure who was a Rastafarian leader, King Frank-I, probably drawn from a photograph, but I think Frank did know him. Okay, so maybe drawn from life, but someone he knew, right? Someone who was in his orbit and then next to him, again, another anonymous figure that for me really represents this idea of capturing a soul because I think that that's what that figure is. It just looks like a figure who is reaching up to some spiritual, some soulful place. And just in the most simple of lines, you get the sense of the interior world of that figure. And then right next to him is the drawing of Fidel Castro. So there you get Frank's interest in history and who knows what was going through his mind when he had this interest in Castro. So there you see all the different sources, obviously drawn from a photograph. So all the different sources that he would take to get at this idea of drawing from life.

Josh Smith:
He was making things to look at too for himself to look at. His hand and his mind... He was interested in what would come out of it. The personal sizes and stuff are, I mean, kind of illustrate that. There's not any difference between the drawings and the writing. It's all very made for himself first and then sharing it. He would be a great peer as an artistic, he would be a great contemporary person, and it's a shame he didn't live a little bit longer.

I was interested in this wall yesterday, like the film canister. He used everything. This was... these sardines, they must have had a lot of them. So he would use these to, he would use the back of that. I was like, what does this mean? And Claire explained like, oh, this was what he would use for paper. And all the paper is cast off sort of paper. A lot of it's so legible too. You can read it. Yeah.

Barbara Paca:
He told you he's Charles II. He would always start by being, he was Charles II and he was privily known as Francis Archibald Wentworth Walter, which really was his name. And then he'd kind of go through these very elaborate family trees. He was a lot of different people at a lot of different times, and he was capable of just changing the channel in a really wonderful way. And he expressed it through his art. And so finally, we actually went into the family genealogy and we did trace them back to Germany to 1550 to a village and met those Walters. We met the family, the people that lived there, and they were just delighted to know about their relations from Antigua. This is a picture of Jules Walter, who's the uncle of Jules Walter who Josh is contemporary and he's now 95, and he's with his cousin, professor Perry Miles, who was at MIT, and he worked on gamma rays. And he told me, I always thought I was just a Jewish guy from Australia until I went to Antigua to do a little work on my genealogy cause I heard that we had a great plantation. And then he found out that he was actually of African descent and that there's a very early painting that they have in Australia of his forbear who is portrayed as sort of passing for white. So there's this incredible complicated mixing of families. They're standing right behind the Savoy Hotel in London, which is where their mutual ancestor was buried. So there's just these stories upon stories upon stories...

Claire Gilman:
Most of these items were found in Frank's studio.

Barbara Paca:
Yeah and Josh, we talked about this, and Megan, these were organized by Frank Walter, these two, maybe other people, they didn't appear to be organized. But again, there were people very early who I think, people called him, the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua. And the most common thing was he was sort of this John Nash character, this Beautiful Mind character. And it really stuck because he was very high functioning, but everything he had, every scrap of paper was deeply organized. He carved on the other side, Claire has a case of the sculptures, and he carved 1000 sculptures. And when we would go to visit him, I was always accompanied with family members. And we would sit down and we'd looked, talking to him, but you'd feel like something was watching you and you'd look and there was shelves of these sculptures staring at you. And they were talismanic... I mean, they really had this power. And then we'd go back again a month later and they would be moved. And he never ever sold his sculptures. They were sort of his companions and this, they had a very powerful force. And I think even in that case, Claire managed to capture it.

Claire Gilman:
We got as many as we could there. We wanted to give that sense of abundance. I mean, throughout the show, we wanted to give that sense of both abundance and elegance, because I think those are the two sides, simplicity and abundance. And because you have to get at both of those sides, the sheer volume of his production. Like Josh was saying that he never rested for a minute, but yet he made. Every individual piece that he made is also worthy of attention.

Barbara Paca:
The bits of paper, because you talked when you got to Antigua about, oh yeah, I sort of live like Frank. I had lived with a lot of stuff. And it is organized for you.

Josh Smith:
I know where everything is. I know where everything is. But I mean, I lose my keys several times a day. I have an air tag on them. Forgot what I was going to say. It doesn't matter.

Barbara Paca:
It's the sculpture or things being organized or living with a lot of stuff.

Josh Smith:
Oh yeah. You explained to me that Frank framed all his work. The frames were lost due to various reasons, but he treated his work very preciously. He had beautiful frames on everything. And because of the weather and this and that, they had to be taken out of the frames. But it's a big deal to do that. I mean, he was a woodworker also, so he had the time to, there's a different type of time that he existed in where he could get stuff done in this strange way. So that doesn't exist for me in the same way that it does for him. I mean, I put things aside and say, I'm going to do this, and then three or four years later, it's still sitting there. And that might've been the case for Frank, but he would get to it. The frame thing was surprising me because a lot of this stuff looks like pieces of something...

Claire Gilman:
And also looked more like that before it was restored. I mean, everything in this show has been very carefully restored, has been treated with the utmost care to enable it to be shown like this. But I think that's important to say is that he did conceive of his work as art that should be shown in frames in an exhibition.

Barbara Paca:
Although we don't know dates, but we find on the back of work still say box two 243, 169, and there are 5,000 paintings. So it's kind of daunting. And we realized that in 1973, he wrote a series of letters about wanting to have an exhibition. So it would appear from what others have told us that he had everything boxed up for this exhibition. And he tells people, I'm the most important living artist. I write operas. I'm a painter. I write poetry, I sing, I do everything, and I make sculpture, and I'd like to have an exhibition and it's ready to go. Well, he wrote to coal mines in northern England. He worked there as a miner, and he wrote to the mines in Germany where he also worked as a miner and said, I'd really like to have the exhibition in your coal mine. So the governments, they were very polite. They wrote back, they were very, we have the responses, they were quite courteous, but it didn't quite work out. And he would write in many different languages too. So there are letters in Italian to cruise ship lines saying, I'm the most important artist. I have 5,000 paintings. I'd like to have an exhibition on your cruise ship, which I think it is a great idea. Wouldn't it be amazing to see us work in a coal mine? And he said, I worked with the miners and they were the most incredible people, and they have such a positive attitude and we had such wonderful kind of camaraderie.


Q&A

Speaker 1:
Where is it possible to hear his music and what is it like?

Barbara Paca:
Well, it's possible to hear it on videos which are uploaded, and Thomas Barzilay Freund did two really brilliant videos that are downstairs, and one is with Josh and Megan and other people in Antigua and in Frank's space. The other video has his music in it, so you can see it online, but I mean, tell about the Jupiter Opera and that night when you heard it with your friends, and I think you had to lie down for a couple of days or something...

Josh Smith:
Yeah, there is an idea of producing Frank's opera. It's complex, and I couldn't do it. I read through it, and it's very far ranging

Claire Gilman:
And he sings all the parts, and there's a recording of the entire opera.

Barbara Paca:
His music, it's all kinds of music mean he really was, he would just write songs. He would write songs in Italian and German and English. Some are folk songs. Some are way out in space.

Claire Gilman:
We have a vitrine that has some of the scores with the music and the word. So if you read music, you can get a sense...

Josh Smith:
He had a very, a theater type accent. That's how I would describe it, like a theatrical sort of lilt. And he liked his voice. It was an instrument in and of itself.

Barbara Paca:
He sounds like sort of the Sir Lawrence Olivier of Antigua. He really does. And the whole family speaks with that accent.

Claire Gilman:
And his cousin Jules was an actor.

Barbara Paca:
Yeah. He's in this film, Fight Against Slavery, which would've come out a year before Roots. But in their infinite wisdom of the British bandit, because Jules was portrayed as the lover of the Duchess of Devonshire, and they thought that was just a little too controversial. So in their infinite wisdom, they didn't do it.

Claire Gilman:
Any other questions from anyone?

Speaker 2:
Could you share... I want to know how it relates to Josh's work about how in my reading, I noticed Frank talked about having television eyes absorbing the world and what comes out. I was thinking about that as it relates to you, Josh?

Josh Smith:
I think a lot of artists probably do that. I mean, I don't know. I can't speak for other people, but yeah, life just becomes heavier and heavy. You pick up life within you and eventually you start expelling it. With my own work, ideas just come from out of, they feels like they just pop out of nowhere sometimes. And the only way you can hone an idea is by rendering it and rendering it and rendering it and learning till it becomes automatic. And you can see in Frank's paintings, they're so economical, just a few brush strokes and this and that, and that didn't happen... That was a result of that sort of honing it over and over again to get to that simplicity. Yeah, I'm most, I mean, am most in love with the paintings and the colors that Frank used in the surfaces.

Claire Gilman:
And even though one might call these paintings, not drawings, possibly, I do think the fact that I sort of see all of his work in a way as being part of this kind of drawing impulse, well, because of the support, because of the paper, because yes, there is color and there's paint, but this is not someone sitting down with a huge easel. This is someone just treating these paintings in a way one might treat drawing and doing again, and again and again. So for me, everything in here makes perfect sense in a drawing-based institution. Any other questions? No. I don't know if you want to say any last things before we, Barbara or Josh?

Barbara Paca:
I think maybe I have a question for Josh, which is, having been in Frank's world with Megan and Yuri and Jules, what do you think artists could really learn from that experience? Because it is, I mean you, I remember you were in such a state of shock. I would talk to you, I was somewhere else, and I was really jealous I couldn't be there, but you were just so unplugged and it just seemed like you, yeah...

Josh Smith:
The question is, what can an artist learn from that? Don't be burdened by the entirety of everything. Just focus on one thing and do that and do it again and again. But I think especially in New York, or anywhere, you get consumed with trying to be a certain thing, and it doesn't matter. All that matters is what's right in front of you and what you're working on, and that's what makes things special. If you please yourself, then try it again and try it again and try it again until you can make something more... There's always something more to be learned from working and working. The most thing I learned, it was more like I felt so lucky to be who I was and who I am. It kind of confirmed that I was doing some things right, and it taught me that I was doing some things wrong, such as worrying too much about the future or the idea of being a certain type of way or a certain type of artist or a person. A lot of that doesn't matter to me as much anymore.

Also, I always feel like I have to change my art, but then I realize the art will change itself if you just keep living your life. I was a guest in Frank's world. We all need to have our own sort of world that we step into or exist in. I was a privileged guest in Frank's world, and yes, it is very beautiful and stuff, but I don't think that that was the most important thing. I think the most important thing was the person and the fact that he was self-contained, and what he did in his life was just go forward. Imagine going to Europe and realizing that nobody wanted you around. And he went with a full heart and came back a different person. And as a sensitive person, I can't imagine how damaging that was to him. And a lot of his art was trying to repair that damage. I think he would appreciate all the hard work that people have done to propagate his vision and his messages, which are seemingly ambiguous, but ultimately are about existing and how lucky we are to be alive, and human beings, and share the world.

And he was proud of himself too. He was a proud person. He really cared about his art and stuff. And a lot of times am not like that. I, I can be really hard on myself, and I'm sure he was too. If he would've been an artist who exhibited I do, I think it would've exploded even more. I think he would've stepped right into that and would've been a very contemporary artist. Lots of things. I mean, you can imagine. If you wanted to go visit Frank in his studio, you had to be a certain type. He didn't want everybody up there, but he did let people up there sometimes.

You have to make yourself a Frank-sort-of-world to wherever you are, whether you're working in a closet in the middle of nowhere or in a huge studio in New York. I think every artist needs to make sort of a Frank-sort-of-world, and the richness will just develop and you don't have to be a certain type of artist. You can be a certain type of person, and whatever you make will be what you make.

Claire Gilman:
I think that's a perfect place to finish. Thank you all for coming. The shows are up through September 15th, so please come back. We also have a wonderful panel on July 10th. Barbara will be part of that panel as well as Caitlyn Hoffman, the neurosurgeon that Barbara was speaking of, the poet Vladimir Lucian from St. Lucia and Billy Gerard Frank, a filmmaker from Grenada. We're all talking about bringing different perspectives to Frank. And I also want to mention that we have a wonderful catalog. I'm just really proud of that catalog and all the contributions to it. Essay by Barbara, by myself, by a young curator from Glenstone named Mia Matthias. She wrote a fantastic sort of really going over the full details of Frank's life. Also some poetry that was commissioned from this poet that I mentioned from St. Lucia of Vladimir Lucian. Just went above and beyond and created this extraordinary suite of poems in response to Frank's work. And a story by the British artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who's also a fan of Frank. So we really wanted to incorporate artists, multiple artists of different walks of life in a way. And poems by Frank as well. So thank you all for coming.