New York Observed

THE WOMAN WHO ATE THE CARNATIONS

ON Oct. 19, the day the obituary appeared, my mother, Maxine, called
to tell me in a flat voice that the cancer had finally killed Marcia
Tucker, the renegade museum curator, feminist and political activist.

The news prompted a jumble of reactions and memories. This woman had
changed my mother's life and, in so doing, turned our family upside
down.

The upheaval started in 1977, when I was 16, and my brothers 14 and
12. That was the year the Whitney Museum of American Art fired Marcia,
then 37, after her show of Richard Tuttle's iconoclastic work. The
dismissal emboldened her to make a gutsy move: with meager financial
backing, she founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Downtown
Manhattan. Her motto was: "Act first, think later. That way, you'll
have something to think about."

At the time, my mother was a frustrated 40-year-old homemaker with a
two-pack-a-day smoking habit. She had once been a promising painter,
but she gave up pursuing a career as an artist after marrying my
father, bearing three children and settling in Great Neck, the wealthy
Long Island suburb. When we were little, she tried to channel her
thwarted creativity into taking needlepoint classes and designing
fliers for our school fairs.

She also took art classes at a local college and claimed a small
sunroom off our kitchen as a studio, where she drew grand-scale
portraits of Bowery bums whom she had enlisted my father to
photograph, offering them cigarettes in exchange for taking their
picture. But she remained adrift, without connection to others who
might validate or challenge her work. Was she simply a Sunday painter,
she must have wondered to herself.

Angry, depressed and desperate to establish her own identity, she
sought help from an Upper East Side psychiatrist, who happened to
mention that another patient of hers had just opened a museum on a
shoestring and needed volunteers.

It was shortly after my mother started work there that the two of them
met. Marcia introduced herself and extended her hand. My mother's
hands were dirty from unpacking boxes, and so she declined to shake.
Marcia didn't care. They clasped hands and arm wrestled instead of
letting go.

The tussle was prophetic. Marcia enjoined my mother to take herself
seriously as an artist. In response, my mother moved out of the
sunroom and took over the basement of our ranch house. She began to
assemble a battle scene out of dismembered toy action figures that she
reconfigured, lacquered in bright colors and adorned with feathers,
beads and rhinestones.

The creation, which included a three-foot-high plaster volcano that my
mother had gotten my father to wire so that it emitted puffs of smoke,
represented a phantasmagorical apocalypse. Was my mother exorcising
her demons, I wondered, or embracing them?

To be honest, her transformation was a mixed blessing. On the one
hand, it was cool having a mother who didn't play tennis or wear
spiffy Ralph Lauren. On the contrary, she subscribed to Artforum,
dressed in denim work shirts and had a kooky new friend who favored
velvet-fringed scarves and encouraged my mother to let her naturally
frizzy hair go wild.

When Marcia wanted to go out to lunch wearing pink plastic shower
bonnets, my mother jumped at the chance. When she and my father
discovered that my brothers were growing marijuana in the backyard, my
parents hauled the crop to Marcia's, where she baked pot brownies and
everyone got stoned out of his mind.

But my mother's adventures left a void. She abandoned all domestic
duties, staying out late in the city with Marcia and Marcia's new and
much younger artist husband. My harried father took up the grocery
shopping, my brothers resentfully cooked dinner, and I retreated to my
room, lonely for my mother but not able to do anything about it.

When my mother was around, things weren't much better. Descending to
the basement to work, she found temporary solace, though for us, her
self-absorption felt like a rejection. My brothers and I blamed
Marcia, whom we now saw as a Svengali, luring my mother away from the
family.

When Marcia introduced my mother to a shy, penniless, misanthropic
artist named David who shared her nicotine cough and her macabre
fascinations, it seemed as if we had lost her completely. The two of
them were constantly on the phone or at his apartment on St. Marks
Place, a one-room space painted blood red and filled with crucifixes.
She took him to dinner at One Fifth Avenue, where they drank bubbly
and sang, "I get no kick from Champagne." When he dared her to eat the
floral centerpiece, she swallowed a carnation.

He visited our house -- the first gay person to do so, as far as we
knew -- wearing a toreador-style black and gold-tasseled bolero.
Keeping his eyes averted, he chain-smoked mutely. It was a relief when
he and my mother slipped away to the basement.

There, however, he was blown away by what he saw. He insisted that
Marcia rush to Great Neck to see my mother's new work. Marcia duly
appeared not long after, and when she glimpsed the genocidal tableaux
from the top of the staircase landing, she burst out, "Do an
installation for the front window of the New Museum!"

WHEN The New York Times printed a photograph of my mother's
assemblage, the event represented the turning point in her life. She
was now a "real" artist who deserved to live among other "real"
artists. SoHo summoned.

In 1984, with the purchase of a loft on Wooster Street, my mother
finally secured her independence. By then, my brothers and I had left
for college. My father remained on Long Island, to which my mother
commuted on weekends. My father became increasingly preoccupied with
photography.

The next decade started on a low but ended with a high note. David
died of AIDS, my mother at his bedside, holding his hand. Her first
grandchild -- my son -- was born, and, motivated by the desire to live
to see him grow up, she quit smoking. In 1994, Marcia included my
mother's work in the New Museum's "Bad Girls" exhibition, a feminist
critique of sentiment and sentimentality. My mother hired a studio
assistant and had a handful of gallery shows, one of them in Paris.

Then, in 1999, after 22 years at the helm of the New Museum, Marcia
stepped down, having learned she was sick, and she eventually moved to
California. My mother offered to visit, but Marcia declined, making
excuses. My mother was baffled and hurt.

Yet she continued on course. Last year, she sold her loft and bought
an apartment in the Flatiron district with two bedrooms, one of which
now serves as studio where she draws obsessive, eccentric images of
deformed and crazy people. Her work has become a deeply private,
fulfilling form of self-expression. And against the odds, my parents'
marriage has survived.

What is ironic is that despite my brothers' and my fears -- despite,
truth be told, my jealousy of the attention my mother lavished on
Marcia and the impenetrable intimacy they shared -- my mother's
pursuit of her own creative impulses didn't lead to a broken home. Her
liberation gave her the room she needed to stay married to my father;
in fact, her art was partly their collaboration. She came to see him
as a talented photographer.

The inadvertent outcome of Marcia's intervention in my mother's life
is that our family is now richer and very much united. Who could have
imagined that the death of a bohemian interloper would make me wish
I'd had the chance to thank her?