Develop thick skin so that you could listen to criticism, not accept it as truth but to hear it and learn from it. When Leon Golub visited my studio he asked me about another artist. I said I thought his work was a little grotesque. Golub laughed and said “yes we always prefer our own grotesque to others.
As a part of our series about “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Became An Artist” I had the pleasure of interviewing Lenny Silverberg.
Lenny Silverberg, born in Brooklyn in 1937, studied painting at Brooklyn College with notable artists like Ad Reinhardt. In the 1960s, he collaborated with Bruce Conner and Ben Van Meter on experimental light shows that influenced visual performances for iconic bands like The Grateful Dead and The Doors. His work is featured in major collections, including the Library of Congress and SFMOMA, and his most recent show was in 2020 in NYC. Silverberg has taught at various institutions and now resides in both the Bronx, NY, and Los Ojos, NM.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born in 1939 in Brooklyn N.Y. Brooklyn was a wonderful place to grow up after the war. It was a world of children, There were kids everywhere. We lived on the streets playing games, Cor Cor, Ringo-Levio, Johnny On the Pony, Kick the Can and in the schoolyard, we played softball, punchball, and handball. We played whenever we weren’t in school. We’d play till dinnertime and then after dinner, we’d play till dark. It was safe the whole neighborhood lived on the street and looked after everyone and knew everyone’s business. I’m still friends with some of those guys, meeting once or twice a year for lunch. We lived in a three-room, three-floor walkup. My sister and I slept in the living room, her in a crib and me on a fold-out couch bed. Later, we had two fold-out beds.When I was a teenager, we moved to Canarsie, a section of Brooklyn, to a two-family house, and my sister and I each got our own rooms.
Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?
Rather than a career choice I made a life choice. It wasn’t a straight path, more like a winding road. I had always made drawings from a very young age. When I was in the first grade, I was restless and a distraction for the teacher and the other students. She knew I liked to draw so she put me in the back of the room and gave me crayons and paper and that’s what I did all day, draw, play with my crayons. I continued to make drawings till my teenage years when sports, bowling (I thought I was going to be a professional bowler but I was delusional, I wasn’t good enough) was what I spent my time doing. Around the time I was 18, my girlfriend Judy Matloff started taking art classes at the Brooklyn Museum. That stirred up the artistic juices again.
I took a painting class but it was life drawing classes that I was really drawn to, I studied Life Drawing at night at the Museum for 3 years while attending Brooklyn College in the day. I entered Brooklyn College as a business major but that didn’t last long. I bit the bullet and became an Art major but in reality, I knew very little about Art. I knew I loved to draw, I knew Van Gogh but not much else I had been to MOMA once and saw a Joan Miro show and couldn’t make any sense of it. I was a blank page or rather a blank canvas. I was hungry and I cobbled all up. I listened to my teachers, famous abstract painters, went to museums, and galleries. Read art magazines “It Is” Art International, Art News. I joined the art/literature magazine of Brooklyn College “Landscapes” and became its art editor in my senior year. I made life time friends with poets and artists. I started reading Art history books, learning everything I could. At the same time, I started reading the Beats and hanging out in the Village and going to Jazz clubs. All this solidified my desire to live the life of an artist.
Three shows at the Museum Of Modern Art changed me. The 1959 show “New Images of Man” had some of the artists that would influence me my whole life. Bacon, Golub, Giacometti, Dubuffet, De Kooning. It also opened up the possibility that I could use what I was learning about Abstract Art in making figurative art. The use of paint color and ideas could make the leap to painting the human being. The next show was the Monet solo in 1960. It was very beautiful but the thing I went away with was that he painted some of his best paintings when he was in his 80’s. I was struck by a life well lived.
The last show that impacted me was the 1964 Max Beckmann retrospective.It was a show of someone digging deeper and deeper into each year he painted. I was very moved. These events solidified my desire to be an artist.
Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
A major event for me was leaving New York. I thought I would go to Mexico for a short trip and then come back, but it didn’t work out that way. My plan was to see all the paintings of the Mexican muralists, Orozco, Rivera, and Siqueiros, and go to the Mayan and Aztec temples. They were wonderful, but I also discovered Frida Kahlo, who was mostly unknown in the U.S. in 1965 and unknown to me. Her paintings in the museums in Mexico City knocked me out.
After spending 6 months in Mexico traveling around I decided I wasn’t ready to go back to N.Y. I decided to go to San Francisco. I arrived just as the Hippy era was happening. A friend from Brooklyn College Allen Cohen was starting the Psychedelic paper The Oracle and I became one it’s first artists. Another friend from the Lower East Side was living with Roger Hillyard who was starting a light show to provide the visuals for the rock and roll dances at the Avalon Ballroom. He asked me to join and so for 3 years I was a member of the” North American Ibis Alchemical Co.” after my hippy days were over, I got a job teaching at the De Young Museum Art School. In 1975 I had a one-person show at the DeYoung and that show and a later show at the Oakland Museum enabled me to get teaching jobs at the College of Arts and Crafts and at the Architecture Dept. of the University of California at Berkely teaching architects how to draw — fulfilling my early idea to teach and make and show my Art.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?
My wife had dementia and I cared for her from 2006 till she died in 2012. During her dementia she would spurt out saying, many were funny. Some sad and some profound. I wrote these down on any paper available. A few years after she died I started a series of watercolors dealing with the time I cared for her. With the help of the graphic designer and catalog creator for the Metropolitan Museum Laura Lindgren, I turned them into a book, “Either Way It’s Perfect”. My present project is to make a film of that book.
It is a family affair with my Granddaughter Eve Windbiel reading Noni Reisner, my wife, sayings. My Grandson Bix Windbiel saying my lines. My son- in- Law Bob Windbiel has composed the music that is played by the Trio “Out Let” which consists of Bob on Guitar, Harvey Sorgen, drums and Steve Rust bass. The movie will feature My watercolors, Noni’s sayings and Bob Windbiel’s music. We hope to finish near the end of the year.
Who are some of the most interesting people you have interacted with? What was that like? Do you have any stories?
Ad Reinhardt was the best and most important teacher I had. He was a severe abstract painter whose last paintings were shades of black. I was never an abstract painter, but he taught me to challenge everything, to trust my process, to listen to my paintings, and to let them tell me where I needed to go. He was an unassuming-looking man who disliked artists dressing like artists and had a very dry, droll sense of humor.
For my final seminar with him, I spread out my paintings on the floor leaning against the wall. He and I sat on the floor and with his finger he went over my paintings inch by inch, saying things like good, bad, different problem, this is a new direction, doesn’t belong here, good color sequence etc. etc. It was exhilarating. I knew what he was saying. It all made sense.He helped me become the artist I am.
Bruce Conner, a Beat artist and filmmaker, was known for his dark sculptures and later became a key figure in Hippy light shows and the San Francisco Punk scene. I first encountered his eerie sculptures before meeting him while teaching at the DeYoung Museum, where I got to know him through our work in “The North American Ibis Alchemical Co.” Together, we created improvisational visual performances for rock concerts, with Conner adding unpredictable, provocative elements. Despite creative tensions, such as when he disrupted a show at SFMOMA, our friendship endured, and his posthumous fame has only grown with major exhibitions and publications.
Robbie Conal, the underground poster street artist. I met Robbie at Brooklyn College when he was 17, and I was 22. He was interested in the art department, and after he told me the kind of paintings he wanted to make I told him this was the wrong place for him. He left and went to S.F. State. I met him again a few years later through Steve Kowit who was also at S.F. State. We developed and friendship and in the 70’s shared studios first in Richman Calif. Where we rented an old bakery that was scheduled to be torn down, it was $35 dollars a month for 5000 sq. ft. We had to pay for getting the electricity and it had a broken pane in the skylight that was too high to fix so rain came in when it rain. I stored my drawings in the old brick oven to keep them dry. Our next studio was in Emeryville before it became upscale. Here, we started the journey from abstract expressionism to figurative art. Robbie political, and myself, humanistic.
During the 80’s Robbie decided to make posters out of his paintings to get more people to see them. He would go out late at night with a glue bucket and past them around L.A. In the early days when I was in L.A. or he came to N.Y. I would go postering with him. We were posting in Beverley Hills and had only just begun when a cop with a dog in the back seat drove up. He asked, “What is that?” Robbie said “it’s a political poster” The cop responded, “I’ll tell you what it is, it’s an abomination, and if you don’t remove every one you’ve put up I’ll find you and put your ass in jail” The dog was barking at us the whole time. We’re still lifelong friends.
Quicky meets; I once sat down next to Ornette Colman on the subway and on the trip uptown we talked about painting. I had dinner with Sam Shepard and my friends Murrey Mednick and Katheleen Cramer, and we talked about the Jazz Sax players Lester Young and Sonny Rollins. Had dinner with Peter Coyote and we talked about our times in the Haight Asbury. Had lunch with Tom Albright, author of “Art in the San Francisco Bay Area from 1945 to 1980 and Art Critic for the San Francisco Chronical and we talked baseball.
Thelonius Monk asked me if my red hair was real or did I dye it. Talked with Charles Mingus about playing the wrong note at the right time.
Where do you draw inspiration from? Can you share a story about that?
From the world I live in. One of the roles of the artist has been to be a witness. For the last 40 years that has been my guiding path. Cezanne said that he saw nature through his sensibility, I see the events around me through mine. I’m not a realist, I don’t copy. I report through my sensitivity with as much honesty and integrity as I can. I may exaggerate, elaborate even make things up but it’s as Picasso says, Art is the lie that tells the truth.
How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?
Two separate areas that my Art has dealt with, homelessness and dementia. My work has appeared in Newspapers that are written by and for the homeless, such as Street Spirit. A S.F. Bay area paper that is sold on the streets by homeless people to make a little money. My images have appeared on book covers such “Old Men of the Bowery” for Guilford press. They have also been illustrations in Progressive Magazines such as Heartstone. They have been exhibited in places such as Galleries and Museums where people don’t usually see difficult images of this sort. I see them as confrontational in the sense that they force people to look at images they would prefer to ignore.
My wife had dementia, and I cared for her during that time. After she died, I started a series of drawings and watercolors that dealt with that experience. With the help of the book and catalog designer Laura Lindgren I created a visual memoir of my years taking care of my wife and watching her slip away from. The book was named “Either Way It’s Perfect.” It was exhibited at the Center for Book Arts and on Dementia websites. As an artist I can only help people to “see”.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
1 . Trust Yourself and trust your paintings — I don’t remember who told me that but it stuck with me!
2 . Develop thick skin so that you could listen to criticism, not accept it as truth but to hear it and learn from it. When Leon Golub visited my studio he asked me about another artist. I said I thought his work was a little grotesque. Golub laughed and said “yes we always prefer our own grotesque to others.
3 . When I was thinking of getting a degree in art history so that I could support my desire to be an artist. I was told “Don’t hedge your bet” — I did it anyway
4 . “Dress for your hair, wear plums, salmon and pink.” From Thelonious Monk, commenting on my red hair
5 . You can absolutely store artwork in an oven if you need the space
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I have no idea. Look at art, learn from it.
We have been blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she just might see this.
Three people come to mind, Alice Neal because she’d make me laugh. A formal dinner with Max Beckmann. Both of us in tuxedos smoking big cigars eating oysters and discussing the madness of the world. And Thelonius Monk, we’d share a good meal in silence.
What is the best way our readers can follow you on social media?
@lennysilverberg
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Lenny Silverberg: 5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me When I First Became An Artist was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.