Do you lay awake at night trying to think of what you can do with your Art degree? Does it sometimes feel like your backbreaking internship might not be worth it? I think most young people who are interested in a career in any creative field have their moments of doubt, and even more so in these economic times. I sat down (okay, maybe just in theory thanks to the internet) with two professionals working in artistic fields and talked about what helped them get to their current positions.
Risa Puleo is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at The Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The Blanton’s contemporary art collection includes works by Marilyn Minter, Anselm Keifer, and Vernon Fisher. Risa recently curated the installation Subject of Learning / Object of Study by artist Anna Craycroft in The Blanton’s Workspace Gallery.
Q. What exactly do you do?
A. It’s different every day depending on what stage of the exhibition making process I’m in. Some days I work on logistics, other days I write or am in the galleries installing or talking about the show to docents or visitors.
Q.What was your first job?
A. I was a order taker and cashier at a chicken fried steak restaurant called The Hungry Horse in San Antonio. I would come home every day after work smelling battered and deep fried.
Q. What so far has been your favorite job?
A. Oh jeez! There have been so many! This job has been really good to me. And I like the people I work with very much.
Q. What kind of educational training have you had, and have you found it to be helpful in your current job?
A. Well definitely my schooling. I got my undergraduate degree in art history at UT and my graduate degree from Bard’s curatorial program. But experiences I picked up at random jobs have come into play at different points. For example, I used to take care of the accounting books at a bakery. That experience certainly helps me do things like manage exhibition budgets.
Q. What has been your favorite part of working at the Blanton?
A. Working in the galleries with the crew and watching something that I’ve been visualizing in my head for months get realized is very satisfying.
Q. If you weren’t in your current position, what would you be doing?
A. I have fantasies about being independently wealthy and doing whatever I want on a given day. I also think I’d like to be a seamstress.
Q. Have there been any artists that you have had contact with through your job that had an impact on you?
A. All of them! But even artists I meet for studio visits, or anybody you have a conversation with for that matter, show you a different way of looking at the world.
Risa Puleo during a Workspace workshop at the Blanton Museum of Art with Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired educator Anita Lewis
Matthew Wilder is a sweetheart but he doesn’t want you to know that. A man who wears many hats, he labels himself a writer-director. He is based in Los Angeles, California, wrote and directed the movie Your Name Here (2008), and is currently working on the film Inferno about the life of adult movie star Linda Lovelace.
Q. What exactly do you do?
A. Mostly write screenplays that have not and will not get produced. Right now I am in the prep phase of a movie I am doing in January, which I wrote for myself, called “Inferno: A Linda Lovelace Story.” We have a slightly luxuriant period in which to prepare it thoughtfully, as we got postponed a few months, because our star got into some legal troubles you might have heard about.
Q. How did you get this job?
A. The job of writer-director? I guess by fastening onto it from a young age, and refusing to do other stuff as much as I could, to the brink of destitution and homelessness and horror, until I gathered enough momentum that this, in some way, became the only thing I do. I just kept doing it and doing it and simply would not acknowledge the possibility of my being, that is to say doing, something else. Just would not ACCEPT it. And so reality ultimately conformed to my delusion.
Q. What was your first job?
A. Telemarketer. I killed at it, kid, I mean KILLED. I was top man on the board at sixteen, as seen in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” I would take my top-man paycheck at sixteen, drive to the cheesy flapper-era restaurant in my small town, which kinda looked like a theme-restaurant ripoff of “Boardwalk Empire,” and ordered a big fat slice of prime rib every Friday after getting paid. I think it was the one time in my life I genuinely enjoyed the straight world.
Q. What so far has been your favorite job?
A. My first thought was—well, a job that wasn’t a “job.” It was a student thing. I directed Gertrude Stein’s play “Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights,” and through a combination of the financial laxness of the time, and my own megalomania, it ballooned into an epic superproduction, much bigger than most Broadway shows seen now. It was in a huge spanking-new theatre in La Jolla, and it was like everything I had ever seen and ever liked and ever fantasized about on an operatic scale, with thirty hot La Jolla teenagers playing the chorus in a giant moat, and thirty more of them screaming at the audience from the catwalks. It was cool to be basically a little kid and suddenly have this Cecil B. DeMille apparatus at your fingertips.
Q. What kind of educational training have you had, and have you found it to be helpful in your current job?
A. I found my undergrad education at Yale, which was very very diverse and extremely anti-establishment and confrontational, to be quite helpful. I found my journeyman’s education at UC-San Diego, where I got a master’s in directing, less so. I met many very great directors there, but I still feel that Yale was more formative. It’s about shaping your brain, not teaching you a skill set.
Q. If you weren’t in your current position, what would you be doing?
A. I think it would be a literature professor. I went to college wanting to be Harold Bloom. I met Peter Sellars there, who showed that there are ways of interacting with classic literature that are more sparky and alive and “relevant” than writing a paper in a journal. And so one thing led to another and another, and Jesus, I feel old all of sudden.
Matthew Wilder’s film Inferno is scheduled to start filming in January with Lindsay Lohan starring as Linda Lovelace.
