#39. BRENDAN COYLE & AMANDA CURTIS - "Museum curators."

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

#39. BRENDAN COYLE & AMANDA CURTIS - “Museum curators.”

Brendan and Amanda by Elyssa Goodman

When Amanda Curtis first moved to Staten Island as a high schooler, she experienced a bit of a culture shock.

Before her mother, an eccentric, flighty artist, moved them, Amanda had grown up with her grandparents in an old-fashioned bed and breakfast in Maine that she affectionately calls “the inn.” Because of the inn’s theme, Amanda was dressed in Victorian clothing for most of her adolescence. Her childhood turned the already-creative Amanda into an eccentric and artistic teenager.

“All I knew was living with 80 year olds,” she laughs.

But then, Amanda’s stepfather got in to medical school on the island and so Amanda was sent to the local public high school. Where she’d come from, her school had had art classes of all different kinds. Students were encouraged to choose a medium they felt suited them best.

But at her new school in Staten Island, there was no art program or art classes. Amanda felt trapped. With no way to follow her passion sanctioned by school hours, she searched for other outlets.

“I’d cut class with the theatre group kids and we’d lay in the fields or rub paint on each other,” she says. “There was nothing else to express it.”

Her boyfriend, Brendan Coyle snorts beside her. “Classic Staten Island,” he says, shaking his head.

Brendan and Amanda are the co-creators of “Second Saturday Staten Island,” an unconventional, monthly art walk that takes place along different venues on the island; from houses to apartments to the basement of a Subway sandwich shop.

This is where I find them on Saturday night.

Brendan, 30, has lived on Staten Island for seven years, moving here because a friend had a big, excellent apartment and needed a roommate. Before that, he was in Queens and before that, he attended Virginia Commonwealth University to study sculpture. As a kid, his dad was a trucker, so he grew up as a nomad, bouncing between different cities on the East Coast.

Brendan has straw-blond hair that hangs in his face and a serious expression. He’s wearing a gray suit and a multi-pattern bow tie. Through the middle of his nose is a plastic rod that looks like a small, blue glow stick.

Where Brendan is almost overly serious, Amanda is like an exceptionally articulate, whimsical child. Brendan’s face remains affixed in a stern, concentrated look through the interview and he rarely laughs, even at obvious jokes. He does smile, but it’s a small smirk and when you’re talking, his eyes are very intensely on you. He seems more shy than judgmental, though. He almost flinches when a brightly-dressed older woman pats him on the back and proclaims he and Amanda the saviors of the Staten Island arts scene.

Amanda, by contrast, is very animated when she speaks. She’s dressed in a black lace dress and white furry coat and her black hair is fronted by artfully uneven bangs over her smart eyes. She looks like if Sally from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” had a really pretty human cousin. There is an element of shyness that Brendan mirrors but Amanda, 25, is way more excitable and she’s the one who ends up articulating the meaning behind “Second Saturdays” best.

“We’re the ‘20s tonight,” she says when I ask about their clothing.

For the first four years, Brendan lived on Staten Island but never hung out there beyond going between his house and the ferry to Manhattan. A life-long artist, he was doing shows all over the city, in other states and abroad, but he wasn’t feeling fulfilled. In all his travels, he never felt like he was amassing a consistent fan base aside from people who would come out, see a show, and never think about him again.

Plus, he started finding it weird that he lived on Staten Island but always commuted.

“I was not doing anything communal here,” he says. “There were artists here but they hadn’t connected. There were pockets of people but no movement. I wanted to sway that. There is a scene but it’s insular and disconnected and a little embittered and more than that, it’s entrenched in traditional, retiree, hobbyist art.”

Then, one evening, Brendan, who tattoos out of his apartment, was tattooing a guy and his girlfriend. The girlfriend asked for an outline of black birds in flight over her heart. Brendan did the tattoo. Amanda slips aside her dress to show me the outline of the birds.

“It was immediate,” she says. “I went into that apartment and I never left.”

Amanda moved in. In 2008, their third roommate moved out and took all the furniture with him. Instead of being pissed, the couple was excited.

“Now, it’s a gallery,” Brendan says. They reached out to small local art collectives and held an open call, before curating some initial shows in what they renamed the “Assembly Room.” It was a platform for experimentation. But with just the one gallery space, the audience began waning. People lost interest in going to the same apartment over and over.

“We realized we needed to be more focused,” Brendan says. “They could turn around and go out. We needed something with more energy, something more mobile. That way if you don’t like what you see then you’re not trapped in someone’s apartment.”

Brendan and Amanda reached out to other independent venues and decided to bring them together into an “art walk.” Immediately, there was an uptick in attendance.

There was even some press naming the St. George area of Staten Island (where we do this interview at a makeshift gallery called Deep Tanks) an “arts neighborhood.”

The problem seems to remain with real estate and finding more venues. Staten Island, Brendan says, is full of empty buildings that realtors keep empty as a way to make more money. It frustrates Brendan that they’re just sitting there unused when they could become galleries.

“My thought is that real estate will be more conducive if they see it’s already been happening in a more D.I.Y., gritty way, in apartments and small cafes,” he says. “Maybe that’s how it has to start out and then real estate will catch on.”

The area as it stands doesn’t seem like an “arts neighborhood.” If I hadn’t been told to come downstairs, I would have never known there was a gallery under the street.

“There are tons of artists living in and around NYC, but we’re all hunkered down in our own studios,” Brendan says. “Staten Island is in the cultural shadow of Manhattan. It’s a depressed area. You walk around and it’s dirty and barren. The shops are rundown. It’s not healthy and it’s neglected. But what changes a neighborhood? An influx of artists.”

Brendan says he and Amanda’s goal is to start the initial stages of the gentrification of the St. George neighborhood; an organic growth into an arts district. They say they’ve had little help from politicians and the aforementioned realtors.

“We’ve done as much as two people can do by themselves,” Brendan says.

And they’ve done a lot. The past year has been insanely busy for Amanda and Brendan. Their work consists of curating different spaces, cleaning the houses, hanging the art, promoting it, designing and printing materials, making maps, creating viral marketing and commercials, updating the Flickr account with photos for each opening, going to other people’s events, creating a new website and doing studio visits with artists to pick out what art of theirs to show. The couple also has to then find other artists that fit in with the other pieces showing. Since the Staten Island pool is limited, they also go out and make friends in other boroughs to pimp out the idea of an arts scene in Staten Island.

“It’s a lot of schmoozing,” Brendan says. “We have to talk it up like it’s huge, and basically fabricate a scene out of nothing. You know say to artists, ‘Oh, we’ll give you a shot,’” he gestures into the air as if to say ‘at what?’

He adds that they find artists for “Second Saturdays” through “chaos magic,” a subconscious thread that connects them. He mentions age differences, choice of materials, and mythology as examples. It’s much the way these 100 Interviews interviewees are found — haphazardly, yet always making sense. “Their worlds mirror each other in some way,” Brendan says.

At the Bay Street gallery I meet them at, Deep Tanks Studio, plenty of people have gathered (I’d guess a good 45) to look at black and white photographs of ropes and door angles and colorful Picasso-esque paintings. My favorite work is a wall of glossy photographs of two eighteen year old girls dressed in outrageous outfits and face paint by a photographer named Kristopher Johnson. Both girls have asymmetrical haircuts and bright red, bright orange colors. They’re wearing outfits like metallic goggles and army fatigue stockings and lipstick on their cheeks and white grandmother wigs and shirts with feathers. They look otherworldly. They look gorgeous.

“It’s taken us on this ride,” Brendan says. “It’s like, you make a suggestion and people say, ‘That’s a great suggestion and now you lead it.’ We feel a demand and pull and we have to go with it.”

But being the puppet-masters of “Second Saturday” hasn’t been all burden. Both Amanda and Brendan have been getting more attention as artists because of it.

“People are looking at me differently as a ‘community organizer’ and it does get you noticed as an artist,” Brendan says. “It bumps up your level of involvement.”

“Second Saturday” is truly a community endeavor. Brendan tells me most of the people in attendance on Saturday night are artists. One woman tells me enthusiastically that Brendan and Amanda have resurrected the scene. Brendan tells me in the past there’s been bitterness between older artists and younger artists because of grant money allotments, but that recently that tension’s dissolved.

“It creates connectivity, and it’s consistent,” Brendan says. “It gets them cross promoting each other.”

Amanda sighs wistfully, “I wish all of society would change to be more like this everywhere,” she says.

Brendan nods, “People don’t do it for the money. They use themselves as the art.”

I ask them what kind of art they do. I only have a loose idea since Brendan mentioned studying sculpture. Brendan says he does performance art citing a performance he did where each person was 20 years apart - 30, 50, 70 - to interlock the generations. He laments that since he started organizing “Second Saturdays” he hasn’t had as much time to create his own art as he would like. Amanda says she does illustration and performance art, but more specifically she makes art from diaries she kept as a child and pieces of her environment and people from her past, from her collections. Brendan says they have a similar artistic vision and that one running theme in both of their works is the idea of light leading people out of darkness.

If I were the sort to draw parallels, I might draw one here.

“We’re both normally shy people,” Amanda says, “but if you put yourself out there then it inspires other people to put themselves out there.”

“And Staten Island could be a better place if it was cultivated more,” Brendan says. “It’s a communal kind of thing. We lived here but we never did anything here. And art, especially, is communal because it has to be seen and absorbed and has to have a function in the world. It’s function is to help a degraded community out of the dreck.”

“It gives us power as individual people to create our own entertainment and scene,” Amanda says. “We don’t have to rely on big companies for entertainment. And even if they hate it, it’s important for people to be uncomfortable. Okay, so you made them hate it but at least they’re confronting emotion and it’s not complacency,” she pauses, and I mention her own isolating school experience. She nods. “Right. And there’s a place for people to find themselves, and to be individuals, and to connect with people.”