Artist Edy Ferguson has spent 10 years in London after earlier periods in New York, Vienna, Mykonos, Hydra and Athens. In this interview, she discusses the experiences that shaped her, how artists survive and why she wants to work beyond the conventional gallery system.
James: Tell me about yourself, starting with where did you grow? What was family life like? Were your parents artists or especially creative in some way?
Edy: I grew up in the South Suburbs of Chicago. My family life was really complicated because I was adopted with my blood twin brother. We were both little artists, drawing like fiends. We were child prodigies, and my adoptive parents and my adopted older brother and sister had no art background.
Family life was a bit chaotic. There was forced racial integration in schools. Life was both idyllic and really pretty intense. This was in the 1970s, so it was kind of a hot point. I remember a few racial riots raging through schools that were never reported. This was personally confirmed to me by Faith Ringgold, who actually made a painting about this time in 1967, it's hanging in MoMA, long overdue.
It turns out my biological parents were graduate students at Yale. My biological mother was a painter, one of the first women allowed into Yale’s graduate programme, and my biological father was an architecture student. It was all DNA. It was not my environment at all.
James: Tell me about your earliest memory with art.
Edy: We were always drawing, and my brother and I would have these very philosophical discussions that no one else could keep up with from a very early age. Even in high school, we would go landscape painting. We were constantly drawing and very competitive.
My mother sent us to the neighborhood art classes, where a chain-smoking, country-listening music lady taught us how to paint using Bob Ross how to oil paint books. So we were comfortably oil painting by the age of 12. And my parent’s house was filled with these tacky Bob Ross style landscape paintings.
Then we got scholarships to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we finally acquired real culture. Whatever class we wanted to take was free. We took figure drawing, painting and printmaking classes downtown during high school, it was like an early college programme. When I went to Washington University in St. Louis on a merit-based art scholarship, I was already way ahead of my classmates, in terms of skill. But I found my peers fascinating socially because they came from different parts of the country, and they were all very progressive.
James: Which artists or genres or people in your life inspire you?
Edy: Anyone who has been the underdog, musicians, actors, writers. But Jean-Michel Basquiat was a huge influence because I moved to New York a few months before he died, and I used to see his graffiti everywhere. I actually got some of his art supplies after he passed away, and I met a lot of his friends.
I experienced the New York atmosphere that he painted. I agreed with something he said, it doesn’t matter what you paint: you just paint. He had that really burning need to create a purely visual story, which was more like an intense feeling, an atmosphere, it was not literal. He was non-verbal. It’s hard to find people who can capture reality like that.
James: When did you know you were an artist?
Edy: When I was a young child, my bedroom was also a gallery and an art installation. I took it all very seriously even then. After I graduated, I moved to New York. I shared a flat on ave B and 4th Street and I got a studio on Avenue C. That's where I continued my painting with a separate art studio. I worked freelance on film shoots, art directing and working on hip-hop videos mostly, along with indie movies and some TV.
James: Are there particular things that you really enjoyed or found particularly challenging during your film and hip-hop work?
Edy: The best music video I art directed was ‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam. It won best video in 1993, where I also did all the paintings for it. I did them all in my apartment in the East Village. We hung them in trees in Staten Island. That was the best, and last music video I did. I was weary with the commercial world, and then I went back to graduate school, as I knew I always would. I just wanted some life experience first.
James: What’s the secret to producing art, manifesting creativity? Where does it come from?
Edy: I think the artists who really keep making art, not for monetary reasons or to make a career, have stories to tell that they can’t tell any other way. It's a way of communicating, and has nothing to do with money.
James: Did you ever have a mentor? If so, who and what was her/his impact you?
Edy: I didn't really find many mentors in my life. I was always a wildcard and my teachers could never figure me out. My mentors were mostly dead men: Basquiat, DeKooning, Picasso, Calder, Twombly, and then there was Joan Dideon, the writer. Or the crazy people I meet in the street. My experience going to any art school was that they can’t teach you how to make art. In fact, it gets in the way.
James: You work is featured in a number of public collections – tell me about one or two that are especially meaningful for you and why.
Edy: George Economou is a collector I met through one of his buyers. George bought a bunch of my work when I moved to Athens and helped me get a start there. He has been supportive since then. He helped fund my mid-career survey at the Benaki during a time when Greece was having a lot of economic problems. The survey then moved to the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva.
James: Are you working on any new projects?
Edy: I went to New York City for a few weeks recently and was blown away because I hadn’t been there in eight years. New York is really my home. I lived there for more than 20 years and came of age there. I’m definitely a New York artist.
I really loved this new energy in NYC, so I’m developing an exhibition involving painting, 3D immersive sound and a video collaboration there. I feel frustrated with the gallery system. It’s too restrictive for the work I want to do.
James: What does it take for artists of various flavours to survive and succeed in a city like London?
Edy: You have to persevere. Artists’ careers go up and down. You have to figure out many different ways of making money, be very flexible and just keep working. Keep developing and moving, don't just settle.
James: What’s your approach to art sales?
Edy: My approach is to find the people I want to work with who will do the art sales. I don’t want to do that myself. I’ve had big exhibitions and worked with some good galleries. I already have a secondary market going on.
The problem with galleries is that they want you to produce the same thing over and over again. I’m more interested in the individual voice of the artist. Right now, the art world should be more about artists doing what they want to do instead of galleries and dealers. There’s too much control there.
James: So what’s the solution, or is there a solution?
Edy: Artists need to be more proactive and have more power. At the same time I want to work with a gallery, partner or representative because artists can’t do it all. You can’t also be a salesperson and a publicist. What would the Beatles do without George Martin and all the people who helped them? Just give artists the space to create.
James: What would you recommend to someone who wants to pursue life as an artist?
Edy: You’ve got to know who you are, And what you truly want to do. A lot of kids coming out of school seem interested in the fame and fortune, which is only a big distraction. They don’t want to do anything new. They just want to follow the money.
If you’re an artist, you need to go to your studio and work and not care about anything else. Then let them come and find you. If you’re a young artist, you've got to put in your 10,000 hours. I did that in New York. I’d go to my studio and paint 12 hours a day.
You’ve got to go deep. Otherwise, forget it and do something else. If you really love art, you can be an art dealer who knows what they’re looking at. That would be helpful.
James: You’re based in a Bow Arts studio in east London? Why Bow Arts? Why London?
Edy: I’ve been in London 10 years. I had a lot of stuff happen in Athens, and I wanted to move back to a big city like New York, but I didn’t want to move back to New York. It was too soon, so I decided to move to either Paris or London. I came to London. Other than that, I didn’t know anything about London.
My journey in London has been very interesting because it gave me the opportunity to gain skills and meet people who work with 3D sound design. I've learned how to re-master and compose raw recordings of well-known music and how to get the rights for some very interesting artists I want to work with. The ability to work as an actor in the film industry here has also been great.
James: Are you going to do more film in the future?
Edy: I would like to work with directors and filmmakers in a collaborative way.
James: Which artists have you collaborated with in London since you’ve been here?
Edy: Previously I did a collaboration with some crazy performance artists and a collaboration with a choreographer. I’m meeting another choreographer now because I want to do a series of dance films. I love collaborating.
It’s difficult to collaborate with another painter or artist because artists tend to get possessive about whose ideas are whose. It’s hard to work together. Andy Warhol and Basquiat somehow made it work and could make these amazing paintings together, but that’s really hard to find. Everyone is so competitive, you need a special relationship.
James: What does Bow and east London mean to you today – especially given your view as a working artist in an active artist community?
Edy: I’m not crazy about Bow. There’s not much going on. Hackney Wick is cool. I should spend more time there.
James: Tell me a couple of things you love about east London (or any part of London). Got any favourite restaurants, cafés, watering holes, workout spots, or spaces to just relax?
Edy: I have a few friends in the area, and we used to go to the Lord Tredegar, a very nice, heritage English pub. I don’t really hang out in pubs. I’m not a big drinker.
I like Victoria Park. It’s a beautiful park. Some mornings, I go to the cafés there. There’s one in the middle of the park, and I like to write outside for a good few hours. I’m writing a script.
James: Lastly, what would you like readers to see in their minds eye when they hear about the artist Edy Ferguson?
Edy: I’m always kind of ahead of my time, and then later everything catches up. Now I’m moving on to this next thing. I feel like it’s going to be the thing that helps the art world get people interested again. The most important thing for an artist is to remain true to themselves.