Tompkins: This is great! These are funny. I also make these neon works from actual text messages. All my work and my photography focuses on young girls. But it’s more like it’s weird and difficult to be a young woman to be taken seriously for what I do. It was so mean-spirited of him, a hateful thing to say.Ĭollins: I’ve had a couple similar experiences similar. As the years pass, every once in a while I would think of what that teacher said. If a collector invited me over to his place, I made sure to bring my first husband with me. I ran into it once or twice with collectors, but never with dealers. I figured this out upon hello and calmed down-and we had a wonderful time! And after that, it wasn’t an issue. He was an older gentleman, and he was not at all interested in girls. I gave myself a talking-to: “If you really want to be a part of this art world, then you have to figure out a way to deal with it one way or another.” So I cleaned myself up, and I went in and introduced myself. So when I got off the elevator, I went to the ladies and threw up. I was sexually terrified! He basically told me I had to cooperate in rape. So when I came to New York, and I had my first appointment at a gallery all the way up in a very fancy Upper East Side building, all I heard was that man’s voice in my head. I want to ask you about what your college teacher said to you.īetty Tompkins: When I was an undergraduate, one of my teachers asked me, “What are you going to do after grad school?” I said, “I’m going to New York, and I’m going to become an artist.” And he replied, “The only way you’re going to make it in New York is flat on your back.” When someone says this to you at 20 years old, it has a way of sticking in your brain. Petra Collins: Betty, I wrote this down in my notes. She ambled over, handed us each a glass of water, and leaned back in her chair. Betty didn’t betray any sign of her late-breaking celebrity, however. Her latest solo show, at the Flag Art Foundation in New York, is a stunning blow: 1,000 small paintings of words used to describe women. Betty, 70, is enjoying what might be described as an autumnal renaissance, except I don’t think she was ever this hot in the art world until now.
Her anxiety can best be articulated by the print-out of questions and talking points-on ruled notebook paper, because in her rush she had forgotten to check the printer-she had brought for what I imagined as a casual chat with Betty about sexually empowered art and women in the art world, subjects that already fuel their lives and work and thoughts.
After all, that kind of thing is right in Petra’ provocation zone.
But I’ve never seen the 23-year old photographer and artist look so jittery, and I don’t think it was because of the uprightly-propped, high-stacked, and easeled canvases depicting vaginas, penetration, and oral sex that seemed to have taken over the place. Her shock of hair, like Betty’s, is hard to miss. I’ve seen her on Levi’s campaigns, all over Instagram, and out around town. When I arrived at the SoHo walk-up that doubles as a painting studio-Betty took it over 40 years ago, when it surely went for nothing-I could tell that Petra was excited. One afternoon last week, Petra Collins beat me to the downtown New York home of one of feminist art’s grande dames, Betty Tompkins.
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