A Fantastic Struggle
Lisa Miles' biography of Pittsburgh painter Esther Phillips
uncovers an artist in danger of being forgotten.
Pulp, November 28, 2002
Interview by Geoff Kelly
Until this past month, Lisa Miles has been best known on Pittsburgh ’s cultural scene as a violinist, composer and cross-genre collaborator. She has won grants from the Heinz Endowments, the Pittsburgh Foundation and Meet the Composer. She has worked with Dance Alloy, taught at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and scored a stage adaptation of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. And that doesn’t nearly represent the breadth and depth of her creative output. Miles is very much a participant in a community of artists, and she revels in that.
“I’ve been in the Pittsburgh independent art and music scene since about 1987, after college,” she says. “I played classically, studied classically since the age of 10, and played with regional symphonies – still do to a certain extent. But I discovered after college that I really like writing original compositions and playing in bands, doing studio work for bands and commercial stuff, and just really collaborating with theater, film and movement artists.”
While making a place for herself in Pittsburgh ’s arts community, Miles took a job at People’s Oakland as a vocational coordinator and job developer. Her job was to find work for people who had been diagnosed with mental illnesses – manic depression, schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder.
“It was a psychosocial rehab center, a really wonderful, colorful drop-in center for people with mental illness, who had diagnoses and were going to Western Psych, but then would come in to get social skills and to get jobs,” she says. “I had to go and sort of represent them out in the community. And I didn’t like the traditional of just getting people with those diagnoses jobs at McDonald’s or anything like that. I would go to Carnegie Mellon, or at least go to their dining service, for example, and start there, or at many different places around town that were a little higher caliber.
“I had to really fight the stigma –“Uh-oh, this person has mental illness?’ Look, they’re functioning. They just so happen to have this diagnosis.”
While working at Peoples Oakland, Miles stumbled across the paintings of Esther Phillips, and artist who left Pittsburgh for the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the 1930s. Struggling for recognition, destitute and near starvation, beset by breakdowns in her personal relationship, Phillips was eventually committed to a mental institution, where she continued to paint. She was released after 10 years of hospitalization, in 1952, continued to paint and to struggle to make a living through her art. Phillips died in 1980 at the age of 78.
Miles was first exposed to Phillips by means of a 1991 retrospective at the now defunct Carson Street Gallery on the South Side. She was immediately hooked by Esther’s art and by her story.
“I observed that Esther’s paintings from the institution period poignantly depicted scenes from what was obviously an otherworldly experience,” Miles writes in the introduction to This Fantastic Struggle: The Life and Art of Esther Phillips, the biography that is the product of her obsession with Esther Phillips. The book was released at the beginning of this month by Creative Arts Book Company. “I believed they likely showed a creative woman struggling to understand and express the machinations that brought her to temporary disease. The works vividly depicted life in the state hospital – dancing, ethereal woman-figures cornered by straight-edged, elusive doctors and nurses.”
Miles’ account of Esther Phillips follows the artist from her early years in Pittsburgh, where she enjoyed mild recognition if not financial success, to her freewheeling, intense lifestyle in Greenwich Village, where she consorted with the artists and writers and assorted characters that, in company with the eternally co-existing drives to create and to survive, made that scene a crucible.
The author will be promoting This Fantastic Struggle at a number of engagements in the coming months. She took time this week to speak with Pulp about the book, Esther and her art.
How did your work at People’s Oakland color your absorption of Esther’s story?
I think it made me aware – not aware, that’s the wrong word. I knew that people with mental illness could do wonderful things; they just so happen to have a mental health diagnosis. In a way, it just substantiated what I had learned at the mental health agency. I didn’t know anything about mental health before working at the agency.
I was intrigued, too, because it was a blend of what I knew intellectually from working at the mental health agency but also what I knew artistically – that people who were creative hit up against so many walls trying to make a living at their art, that surely it played into a little bit of the disease she felt. It was a blend of a both.
What is the relationship between Esther’s disease and her art? Can they be separated?
Having researched her life, what I’ve come upon leads me to believe that Esther was institutionalized mostly due to starvation and stress. She certainly had a unique personality, as we all do. I believe that mental unhealthy or disease affects all of us at some point in our lives, with relationship breakup, with job loss. I’m not trying to discount that she had things particular to her personality that might have made her a little more manic, or a little more this or that. But she was institutionalized because she kept battling to find substantiation for the worth of an artist, and she couldn’t find that worth, and she couldn’t find what equals money so she could have enough food in her body.
She was living so transiently. Everyone that I interviewed – and these were people who didn’t even know each other, some in Pittsburgh , some in New York – they would say the same thing about her. Like [her friend] Jamie Van Trump said, she always seemed to be searching for something but couldn’t quite get it. Others, too, said that she was living intensely but she was always looking for something that wasn’t presenting itself to her.
According to the book, there were a few instances in which Esther nearly found the patronage she needed to achieve a modicum of financial stability. How might that have changed her story?
I think Esther still would have painted prolifically. That’s what she wanted to do right from the time she got up in the morning till she went to bed at night. I don’t believe she would have done so much of the figure studies that she did in the institution. And she always flirted with landscapes later, and then the abstraction of landscapes. I think that she was so put before her with figures that she – in a very contextual sense, in the idea of what her content matter was.
Interestingly enough, in one of the early reviews, the reviewer said something like “Surely she’ll never continue on this little bent” – she had gone on a little digression toward figure studies. It’s so ironic, because she ended up doing just that [at the institution].
But in terms of her psyche, who knows. A lot of people offer the argument that the reason that some artists’ work is so good is because they’re living on the edge. I don’t want to believe that that’s necessarily the case. I think that people who really want to create do it, no matter what. But certainly her circumstances fed into her art. She was driven to portray the frustrations she felt.
It’s an empathetic portrayal of the artist. Did you find many points of identification?
I did. There was certainly identification with me, with all of my friends, with the scene that I know. When I started to see all her colorful character friends, it really felt like identification.
I use the analogy that if you lift up a rock, you see bugs, ants just thriving. The artists’ community in Pittsburgh , and sure all over this country, is the same way. There is certainly that surfacing that happens, and we’re all grateful and glad for artists who make a name for themselves. But there are so many, teeming like ants, working hard and passionate about what they do, in every city.
For my reading at the Garfield Artworks, I’ve chosen a passage from early on in the book that could be about the Garfield Artworks. It describes [ Pittsburgh artist and patron] Mary Shaw’s Number 8 Center Court, and it describes all these artists hanging out. I quote Mary Shaw [describing] all these different things, all these artists and their activity, and then I put in parentheses: “trying to sell art.” It was the camaraderie that was most important, though, because that gave Shaw and Esther and all the other artists what they weren’t getting from the big society.
The research you did – compiling correspondence, medical records, assorted documents, artwork and photographs – must have been consuming.
I started at Carnegie Library in the artist files. I dug though these card catalogs and pulled out articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I did a lot of work at the Historical society, back when it was over on Bigelow. I tried to do some work at the History and Landmarks Foundation; they didn’t have anything on Esther, but it was good for me to go over there and see some things about Pittsburgh history. I went to the Carnegie Museum of Art and saw some intriguing things, but even more intriguing were the letters [of Merle Hoyleman, Esther’s long-time friend and benefactor], which surfaced at the A-1 Self-Storage.
I enjoyed spreading everything out on the floor and seeing how these things wove together, and trying to figure out the damn timeline…For me that was great, to be able to put it all in and weave it together as a story. I didn’t want it to be just a dry presentation of facts, because it seemed to me like a story.
How do you imagine your book might affect Esther’s reputation and the disposition of her work?
I hope that it will put her on the map, because he’s really not on the map. In Pittsburgh she was known a little bit; the Carson Street show made a little ripple, but not many people know about her at all, even in Pittsburgh . I’m hoping the American Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. takes an interest.
But the big thing, of course, is the Carnegie Museum of Art. The Carnegie Museum played a big part in her story, and I hope that they lead the way to get work known a little. They have at their disposal the opportunity to purchase and/or acquire works of hers and at least have a temporary show, and more importantly to have at least a couple paintings in the permanent collection.
Where, besides in your book, can people see Esther’s paintings?
People need to contact [art and antiques collector and former rock promoter] Pat McArdle, who is in possession of a collection of Esther’s work that had been previously stored at the Carnegie Museum.