#49. TESSA HULLS - “Someone with a gallery showing of their art.”
In March, Tessa Hulls broke up with her boyfriend in Seattle. With no immediate future plans and nothing holding her to the city anymore, she took off on her pink and white bike to cross the country she’d been born in but never really seen.
Starting in San Diego, she skirted the Mexican border, went through Texas and Alabama and turned up to New York, stopping for a week to visit with friends here. On average, she bikes 90 miles a day.
“I’ve got this horrendous glove tan,” she says, shaking her wrists at me.
Tessa is originally from Northern California, where Mary Schmich warned to “live just once, but to leave before it makes you soft.” Tessa doesn’t seem soft, which I’ll get to in a bit. She attended UCLA for a year, but hated it and transferred to Reed College in Portland to study art. As a kid, she tells me, she was always drawing.
“Growing up, I was pretty isolated because I had no friends that lived within 20 miles of me,” she says. “I did a lot of hiking and I read my way through the public library. I drew. I knew I could always entertain myself with a piece of paper.”
#39. BRENDAN COYLE & AMANDA CURTIS - “Museum curators.”
Photo by: Elyssa Maxx
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.
