Henrietta Mantooth (center) in her studio with curators Nancy Azara (right) and Matthew T. Leaycraft (left), selecting work for her show.
LW: What made you switch to art?
HM: The government had been overthrown by a dictatorship, and I protested at the university, which was then closed. I said to my boss, ‘can’t you send me someplace,’ and he sent me to Brazil for two months. My job was to go out to the farming and fishing communities and interview these people. In the meantime I met an American journalist there and we got married. My boss gave me two months off to get used to marriage. It’s the first time I didn’t have to think about money. I had gotten a grant and I started drawing live models three nights a week. It was a great adjustment and probably saved my marriage. I kept my job, but little by little I began seeing people more visually, how clothes fell on a body, how a kid held his mother’s skirt, the way a person’s feet were planted on the ground. I eventually quit my job and went to Europe for seven months.
LW: What did you do in Europe?
HM: I studied with the cubist André Lhote in Paris, did a print workshop, and drew from the model, working 18 hours a day. Then I went to Italy and spent time in Florence. I stayed in small inns or people’s houses or in convents. Then I went to Greece. Then I went back to Brazil, where my husband was.
LW: What brought you to New York?
HM: I was very intrigued with the New York School and the Abstract Expressionists. I used to come to New York, sometimes with friends, from Brazil. We’d land at the airport at 7 a.m. and be in class at the Art Students League by 9 am. I would stay two or three months. Technique bounced off me like a magnet, in the other direction. I studied with Morris Kantor. The schools gave me a place to paint, make friends and get some guidance. Eventually I moved to New York and lived on the Upper West Side.
LW: How did you get into theater?
HM: An African-American woman who lived nearby and was married to a white actor called me and said she wanted to connect theater with the arts. I agreed to do a show in the lobby of the Circle Repertory Company theater, [located in a loft] on the Upper West Side. [The company was founded in 1969 by director Marsha Mason and playwright Lansford Wilson, among others, and throughout the 1970s presented many of the era’s most important new plays.] When I walked into the lobby with the little 8×10 photos of actors, I said ‘I have to paint [this space].’ I painted the upstairs and downstairs lobby with my two sons and their friends, and I’d hear these workshops. It was so interesting, and I got into these workshops eventually and became a member of the acting company. I also did sets. We just did an audio version of Hot L Baltimore [the award-winning Lansford Wilson play, a leading production of Circle Rep in the 1970s].
LW: How did theater affect your art?
HM: It informs me all the time. Everything I learned on stage was the best advantage and experience in my life. It’s concentrated living, and you can practice the same things in your life. One thing I learned in being an actor is you can’t blab about what you are working on. You share it once you’re on stage, you don’t dribble out your energy. If you keep something and let it develop in you, it gets very powerful.
Eventually I said ‘I’ve got to stop theater,’ because I didn’t have time to do my painting. It’s as if I was pregnant: I had ideas and had to get them out. I left acting for a while and went back into my studio. A friend at Circle Rep who’s a technical person asked me to do set for City University in Jamaica, Queens. Barbara Nickolich was the director of theater and art at York College [and now professor emeritus] and she hired me immediately. We’re still working on a visual piece about Nostradamus, although it’s difficult because she’s ill and I’m not great [recovering from a fall].
LW: Do you still do theater?
HM: I created a theater piece with actors and dancers in which the art pieces are part of the performance. It might be a paper sculpture a dancer would dance with. It’s with dancers, poets, and actors. In the last three years I’ve also taken three workshops in short story writing.
LW: What keeps your creative juices flowing over so many decades?
HM: I have a fascination with people. I grew up in a dramatic environment, in which everyone was in trouble in one way or another, either with their marriage or their job, and I was sympathetic to them. I never seemed to blame anybody for anything. People give me a lot. They’re full of ideas. I belong to an intergenerational feminist group, and the other day I got an idea to do a visual piece with another member who’s young and black, while I’m old and white. It will probably be a visual thing with self performance, probably in a gallery.
[The creative process] is not that orderly. [For example,] a Brazilian dancer and I once did a wonderful three-part evening performance in a show called New Choreographers at Cubiculo, [an off-off-Broadway experimental playhouse in New York City in the 1980s], which was like a black box. She and I performed, plus I did the visual, which were paper pieces she danced with. A big roll of red paper covered the whole stage and we used visual things in odd ways. She would go on stage, rehearsing in the space, and I’d say ‘yes that’s good,’ then I would do stuff and she’d watch and do an improvisation. That’s my basic way of working.
LW: You’ve said that painting is about bravery. Could you explain?
HM: Sometimes you have to destroy something you’ve already done. Picasso said painting is a series of destructions, and that’s what is it is for me. To feel art takes the same kind of bravery. You have to let go of your fixed ideas.
It’s about bravery and about hope. I do have lot of hope for the world. Not that I don’t get depressed, I’ve gone to therapy for years, but hope does seem to rise. If you can just get in touch with your materials, then hope and energy and love come back. Sometimes you just pick up a brush and put some black paint on a piece of brown paper. Henry Miller said to paint is to love again. I feel that with people.
LW: How have you survived financially as a creative person?
HM: It’s still not easy. I’ve gotten some big grants that have helped me enormously. I’ve taught and [money comes in from] here and there. I was married for 43 years and my husband was very supportive. I’d have a show and he’d take the flyers around.
LW: You lived in Latin America for 18 years. What’s the biggest difference between that culture and ours here in the U.S.?
HM: One of the first shocks when I came back to the U.S. was that people here don’t hug each other. In Latin America people always embraced, kissed, held hands, and touched each other. Seven years ago I went to an artist’s residency in Bahia. I went on a trip to country towns and I remember this little girl standing by me and she’s touching my arm as if I’m a flower. That sense of touch and expressiveness was so wonderful. I came back to the U.S. and almost had a nervous breakdown. Here people now kiss each other, but it’s still not the same. We don’t have that feeling for the body that the Latins do.
— Lynn Woods
“Henrietta Mantooth: Jailbirds & Flowers,” opens Friday, October 24 at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, 36 Tinker St., Woodstock. There will be a talk by the artist at 3 p.m. Saturday, October 25 followed by an opening reception, 4 pm.-6 p.m.and a Panel discussion on the New York prison system from 3p.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, November 15. For more information, e-mail [email protected].
