My last week in New York. The final sprint begins, the appointments roll over. In the whole time I’ve been here, I’ve painted a total of 24 pictures, twelve of them small, eight in medium format and four large, apart from countless works on paper. According to my residency contract, two works remain in the possession of the foundation, and Eileen Kaminsky personally selects them. Of course, she chooses my two largest ones, but thinks she can be talked to and would exchange one large picture for two medium-sized ones. Pretty clever, now she has three pictures of me. I’m satisfied, after all we got a lot of support and this week she’s organizing our final exhibition in the studios.
But the clincher at the end is an exhibition in Manhattan. A gallery on 6th Avenue invited me and my colleague Annette to show our work there. And it happened like this: Annette and I took the subway downtown to an art supplies store. On the way there it started to rain terribly and we took refuge in a gallery. To buy time, we struck up a conversation with the clerk. It turned out that he is German, but has lived in New York for a long time. He told us that the owner of the gallery is an artist herself and also supports other women. Since we work in the profession, we should definitely leave our contact details here. A few days later he asked if we would like to exhibit at the Leonovich Art Gallery on our last weekend. Well, if we feel like it! What a great opportunity! But that means creating invitations as quickly as possible, renting a van for transport, inviting people.
Since we hardly know anyone, we came up with the idea of asking the German embassy if they would support us. We quickly have a poster printed out in the copy shop and take it to the embassy. A wonderful employee of the consulate, who is responsible for the cultural sector, gives us a very warm welcome. She says that if we send her information about the exhibition by email on the same day, then she will include it in the newsletter, which is sent to 4,000 addresses. I can hardly believe it. Luck seems to be on our side. Now it’s time to put on a great exhibition and then off home. I had a wonderful time in New York and am now looking forward to Fürstenfeldbruck again.
Grafrather artist Claudia Hassel worked in New York for twelve weeks. During this time, she reported on her experiences every Monday in the SZ.
—Claudia Hassel is chairwoman of the artists’ association Fürstenfeldbruck, she lives and works in Grafrath.
(Photo: Private)
—-
