MBE

I moved to New York from New Orleans in summer of 2015 with an English degree and two years of waiting tables under my belt. I came to the city to move in with my boy friend and to attend graduate school part-time at Hunter College. My immediate goal, however, was to never wait tables again. Through a stroke of incredible fortune, I found a job within a month in an industry I had only a cursory knowledge of, but a great interest in—art. I found myself a full time paid internship working at Garth Greenan Gallery in Chelsea where I spent the summer as a gallery assistant working on the archives of Rosalyn Drexler and Howardena Pindell, among others. Much to my dismay the job ended in September and I was back to waiting tables. About a year later the gallery gave me a call. They were taking on another artist, a famous feminist named Mary Beth Edelson who had recently lost her studio assistant and needed someone to archive and inventory the work that lay in obscurity in the depths of her massive SoHo loft. The pay would be 30$ an hour, full time. I immediately informed the manager at the upscale Red Hook pizza restaurant where I worked that I would be leaving. The next day I would be in SoHo sitting in the living room with the Garth Greenan, his husband, the gallery director, and Mary Beth Edelson. The loft was located on Prince and Spring, above a woman’s Yoga-wear store and it was a space like I had never seen before. It was massive, flooded with natural light, and filled with art and art supplies. The space was a call back to a time in downtown Manhattan that hadn’t existed in 40 years.