Q & A with fall 2015 Distinguished Speaker Dr. Nell Irvin Painter
Fall 2015 Distinguished Speaker and honorary degree recipient Dr. Nell Irvin Painter comes to SUNY New Paltz Thursday, Oct. 15 to deliver a talk titled “Sojourner Truth as historical person, photographic portrait and American icon.” Advance tickets are available here.
Dr. Painter answered some questions about her life and her work as a way of reintroducing herself to the campus community ahead of her visit.
Interviewer: I’d like to begin with your extensive record of research and publication as a historian. What do you consider to be the unifying interests, themes, and convictions that propel your work as a researcher and author of history?
Painter: I’ve always been interested in ordinary people, though my most recent book, The History of White People, is less a history of people than a history of ideas. I guess that means my interests have changed over my career, but I certainly started with an interest in ordinary people.
I spent a couple of years in the West African country of Ghana in the 1960s, in my youth. There I learned how to see past race. I don’t think I could have done that while I was in the United States, because this country, especially in the ‘60s, was so fixated on issues of race. It was very difficult for Americans to think in class terms; we tended to organize our thinking about class in racial terms. I was a product of that society, so when I got to Ghana I was disoriented at first. Everyone was black – rich people, poor people and just regular people. I then began to think in terms of what the development of that society means to normal, everyday people. That really got me started as a historian, and the place to track those kinds of issues was the American South.
You’ve more recently focused on developing a career as a visual artist. Is your shift to working in that professional space a product of a life-long interest or a more sudden pivot?
One of the things that drew me to Sojourner Truth was that she was a working-class person, not someone who started or, for that matter, ended in privilege. She’s also part of why I’ve moved to working in visual art.
Sojourner Truth didn’t read or write, but she had her photographs taken and she controlled her self-presentation, or what I call her iconography of self. Researching those images, I got some sense of how she wanted herself to be seen, and developed my own interest in the rhetoric of the image.
As an artist I go back and forth between abstract art and figurative art, but I think my interest in portraiture and in the figure makes me very much an African American artist. Many African American artists have shown an interest in portraiture, as Sojourner Truth did.
How has your approach to teaching evolved over the course of your career?
When I started teaching, my great love was researching and writing history, and I taught because that’s what you did as a person who researched and wrote history. I was a good teacher, but I would not say I loved teaching until much later. In the early and central part of my career I was probably too focused on “getting it right,” which I later realized was only part of being effective as a teacher. Just as big a part of being an effective teacher is engaging with students, and maybe also not being so uptight. So I have relaxed a lot, and I think I am a much better teacher for it.
What, if any, are the major similarities and differences in what you aim to achieve as an artist and what you aim to achieve as a scholar and educator?
The way I make art now includes and in fact celebrates mistakes, false starts and indications of where the hand has been. In other words, showing what the process is. When I began my career as a teacher I thought mistakes were to be corrected and the process was to be invisible. But as it turns out, students enjoy knowing about the mistakes, and seeing the process, just as people who look at art now like to see the mistakes and have a vision of the process.
When I first graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design I thought the two worlds, history and art, were totally separate. I’ve found that I cannot divide myself that neatly, but one thing that draws me to art is that it allows me to make fiction. The side of me that appeals to runs against the history side of me, because history is about representing the past and being faithful to the archive. As an artist, though, I can lie all day long! And that freedom is very enjoyable.
You are a recipient of an Honorary Degree from SUNY New Paltz. Could you say a little about your relationship with this institution and this community?
My relationship with SUNY New Paltz was primarily through the late Carleton Mabee, who was also a Sojourner Truth biographer and a very generous historian. He introduced me to the Catskills and the Hudson Valley when I was just getting started in my research into Truth’s life, and he was very kind in doing so.
Your Distinguished Speaker Series lecture will focus on the life of Sojourner Truth. A brief description of your talk promises to consider Truth “as person and as persona.” Why is it valuable to consider Truth in terms of the life she lived and in terms of what her life and her name have come to stand for? Do you find this mode of inquiry applies equally to other historical figures?
My lecture starts with the life of Truth, but then I want to move to specificity in American history and African American history, around the life of Sojourner Truth. Part of the beauty of talking about Sojourner Truth at New Paltz is that my audience will know the specificity of the place where she was born and how it differs from the American South.
I think it’s really important for biographers of any historical figure to think in terms both of the life of that person and the meaning that person’s life has taken on. When I began to write about Sojourner Truth, the way biography was typically written was to ignore the symbol and concentrate on the life. The late, great women’s historian Gerda Lerner once told me I needed to find out exactly where Truth was at every point in her life – that’s what she wanted to know, and that’s how people were writing biography at the end of the 20th century. A concentration on the persona is part of the turn toward theory and toward post-modernism, with its focus on language and on iconography. It’s no longer a new way of writing biography, but in the ‘90s it was quite unusual.
By concentrating on the persona and the meaning of Sojourner Truth, one thing we find that she inserts an activist, smart, feminist, black woman figure that had been missing from the history of American civil rights. Until she emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, all the feminists were white and all the civil rights heroes were male. I think she still serves that very important purpose.
Lastly: is there any lesson or bit of advice you’ve drawn from your own career and life experiences that you’d care to share with our College’s students?
Life is long. Young people in particular, but not only young people, always seem to be in a hurry. Many seem to think that if you have not achieved great things by the time you’re 25 or 30, it’s all over. But it’s not – you have more time than you think you have. Be nice to people along the way, don’t shove them aside because you’re in a hurry. Breathe deep, and do the things that need to be done. Be present in your own life and know that you have more time than you might have thought.
Dr. Nell Irvin Painter will visit SUNY New Paltz as the fall ’15 Distinguished Speaker on Thursday, Oct. 15. More information available here.