A Peek at the Art that Artists Live With

Artists Living With Art provides a peek into the homes of 30 New York-based painters, sculptors, and photographers — and a window into how they think about their art. The book, by Stacey Goergen ’90 and Amanda Benchley ’91, features more than 200 color photographs of the lofts, apartments, houses, and a former Harlem church where the artists live, along with interviews with each artist.

“It’s very delicate to ask somebody to go into their home and photograph their personal things,” says Goergen, who is an independent curator and journalist. But seeing the images and objects they surrounded themselves with provided “great insight into the artists’ practices.” Those who had their homes photographed “were very interested in seeing what the other artists featured in the book lived with,” says Benchley, a freelance filmmaker and journalist.

The book includes photographs of the duplex penthouse of Cindy Sherman, the loft of John Currin and Rachel Feinstein, and the East Village home of Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in a former rectory where he and his wife have lived for more than 35 years. Couples in which both people are artists provided some of the most intriguing material, says Goergen. In the case of Carroll Dunham and Laurie Simmons, “they each curate a floor: she gets the ground floor entry hall, he gets the second floor foyer.”

Chuck Close’s living room houses his collection of Old Master paintings and masks of all kinds, including several from Africa and a collection of 1940s welders’ masks. His foyer teems with photographs, paintings, and prints by friends and other artists whose work he admires.

Goergen enjoyed seeing the works the artists owned because they were “largely removed from the market,” she says. “These artists aren’t buying art to sell it and make money. This is work that inspires them, influences them, or is made by friends. They want to live with it.”