Suppose the fine arts world is in the best position to recognize and promote artists who approach artistic creation as a career. Career among artists enables MFA programs, premier galleries, auction houses, annual and biennial art fair circuits, and other institutions that inextricably bring artistic means to meet capitalist purposes. There are other types of artists, however, and Faina Lerman is one of them. If others are “career” artists, Lerman is a “living” artist – not in the fundamental sense of being alive, but in the sense that her artistic means are inextricable from her life, rather than driven by the desire to earn a living.
Perhaps the story begins in 2004. It was then that Lerman, identifying primarily as a painter, earned his undergraduate degree at the College for Creative Studies – not only the only undergraduate art school in Detroit, but all over Michigan. In 2005, she married the largely self-taught sculptor-engineer Graem Whyteand in 2007 they purchased a large mixed-use building on the northern border of Hamtramck, a town within the city of Detroit.
“The intention was to create a space where we could live and have studios, and we knew we couldn’t live in a real house, because we had too much stuff,” Lerman said, in an interview with Hyperallergic. “It was a bit like going to college or buying the building – so I think we chose wisely.” The purchase took place at a time when Detroit was still languishing in decades of obscurity, slightly before the first waves of interest that would culminate, over the following decades, in a characterized tsunami of redevelopment, with varying degrees of sardonic, like the “return”. In an environment largely devoid of resources, but also lacking surveillance or censorship, Lerman and Whyte’s artist residency grew into a gathering point for their artistic community, a neighborhood hub, and ultimately a venue for formal exhibition and a residency program called Pops Packaging.
“We both had really strong practices,” Lerman said. “At that time we had a lot of shows and I was very active in the studio – every time we had a show it required me to empty my studio, reset, have a show and then put it back on. Then once our daughter was born in 2011, I wasn’t really working that way, so it turned into a full-time gallery and artist residency program.
It was one of many pivots for Lerman, in a life marked and made possible by a timely pivot. Perhaps this story begins much further back, in 1980, when Lerman, then four years old, emigrated from Rigain Latvia, in a family unit that included his two maternal grandparents, his parents, his sister and an uncle.
“This [region] was under communism, it was hard to leave,” Lerman said. “You were blacklisted, although I think the Soviets at the time were allowing a number of Jews out – they were sort of like, we’re done with you, okay, go ahead. They had already exterminated 99% of Riga’s Jews. Between the Germans and the Soviets, we still don’t know who killed my grandfather’s family.
One would assume that art appreciation wasn’t the highest priority for a freshly Americanized immigrant family, who had just moved to Detroit at the low point of their ill-fated decades, with professional roots that included garment factory work, hairdressing, cleaning, and an endless whirlwind. secondary agitations – but Lerman points out that the art was part of his development from an early age and scarcest resources.
“The arts were so valued in the Soviet Union, like composers, ballerinas – they had opportunities,” she said. “My mom really loved art, so we would go to museums, we would see symphonies, and they would take loans so I could take ballet and piano lessons. Now I pay for my kids to do everything. they have to do, don’t they? And she says, ‘I pulled out some credit cards. I borrowed money from your grandfather when we needed, you know, c ‘was important to me.'”
In 2017, Lerman presented a solo exhibition of new paintings for the first time in nearly a decade. family scrapbookwhich opened in the CAVE Gallery at the Russell Industrial Center, reminded newcomers to the scene that Lerman was more than a gallerist and residency coordinator, and more than half a performance art duo hilarious and award-winning, the Airplane Czarinas — she is also an accomplished painter.
“I became obsessed with family albums and the fact that all my baby photos are black and white, because somehow – it’s 1975 to 1980 – there’s had no reason to have color anything in the Soviet Union. They were so beautiful, because it was like the only time someone was there with a camera. It’s not like we had a camera where things were documented all the time. What was once an abstract, gestural painting practice has become figuratively and obsessively iterative, focusing on family and Lerman’s changing place within it, as it progresses through the generations.
“Now it’s like, why am I still painting my kids — all I want to do is paint my kids or flowers,” she said. “You know, there’s been a lot of trauma and stuff, and there was a time when I felt like I was painting in my darkest mood or my darkest place. And now I’m painting the joy.
Conventional wisdom might caution against cultivating a painting practice, as well as a performance art practice and the artistic and administrative commitment to converting a family art space into an arts organization at thriving nonprofit and an international residency program. Careerism would dictate that having children and making sacrifices to benefit them is a setback to an artistic practice, and a chorus of blogging moms will insist that letting your children arrive late for school because they have fun making waffles is a precursor to their social degeneration. Through all the noise, Lerman remains nimble and responsive, continuing to pivot, dancing to the beat of his living art.
“I feel like artists are like the bravest people I know, in so many ways,” she said. “You constantly have to take these risks – with yourself, with a material, with an environment, with the way you live your life – because there are no written rules.”
As living artists we can have mentors, but role models are next to impossible because no one can tell you the best way to live your life.
“You are a person who is ready to open things up for yourself, but this is all unprecedented,” Lerman said. “Because every artistic life is different. Each artistic life is totally different. You know?”
