Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over Hardcover – 19 Jun 2018

Editors' Spring Pick: 1 of 34 Titles to Wave a Flag About (Library Journal)

"Nell Painter's masterful, disarmingly witty, and profound book Old in Art School will change your perspective about what is possible in the full arc of a life. Her probing book about [her] art school journey, as sage as it is humorous, revels in the untold magic of exploring how beginnings can happen at all stages of the journey. This book is indispensable nourishment for the creative soul." --Sarah Lewis, Harvard University, author of The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery

"Nell Painter has courage and intelligence. She reminds us that the only option as we grow older is to grow younger. Never forgetting our curiosity and passion, we are well armed for the challenge." --Maira Kalman, author of The Principles of Uncertainty and Beloved Dog

"Old in Art School is Nell Painter's journey from famous historian to humble art student at age sixty-four. Along the way, she chronicles her own family history, including a mother who reinvented herself at the same age! Painter blows up treasured clich's about what it means to be 'an artist' and who fits that role, presenting us with comic scenes of questionable pedagogy. This book should have a corrective impact on art education--it deserves to be widely read and hotly discussed!" --Joyce Kozloff, artist

"Even before a teacher tells her, 'You'll never be an artist, ' Painter's story wins us over with its contrarian premise. Among twenty-somethings, Painter proves herself a sharp observer--not just of art school partying, pedagogy, and process, but also of generational, sexual, and racial blind spots. Painter has produced a cheerful and beguiling memoir, one that will inspire readers of any age to consider starting again." --Alexi Worth, artist

"Reading Nell Painter's Old in Art School gave me immense pleasure. Memoirs by black women artists are extremely rare, and this one is so beautifully written, so perfectly formed in terms of its storytelling trajectory, with so many delectable details about art techniques and subject matter, the relationship of the work to her previous projects as a celebrated historian, and her life struggles as the daughter of once-perfect parents, now aged and with health difficulties. Old in Art School seems both definitive and unforgettable. The idea that this brilliant woman would move from a field in which her accomplishments are regarded as superlative to one in which she is constantly plagued by self-doubt and the shortcomings of her 'twentieth-century eyes' alone makes it worth the price of admission." --Michele Wallace, author of Dark Designs and Visual Culture

"One of our most distinguished scholars of race and racism has written an incisive, surprising, eloquent, and often wry account of what it means to go back to school at 64, the age at which most academics contemplate retiring from it. Along the way, Nell Painter helps us to see the world as art, art as the world, and to understand arduous, creative self-transformation as toil worth the trouble. Old in Art School is as edgy as a contemporary work of art: bold in form, assured in line and shape, unflinching in its textured analysis of the ways race, gender, and age color how we perceive the world and how the world perceives us." --Cathy N. Davidson, author of The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux

"With wisdom, insight, brutal honesty, and flashes of humor, Nell Painter shares her journey to become an artist in this fascinating, original memoir. Old in Art School renders both the insecurity and elation of embarking on this path after a long and distinguished academic career. Her courage, sensitivity, and keen observation offer a rare and needed portrait of an older woman determined to live a creative life on her own terms." --Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

"Old in Art School is a glorious achievement--bighearted and critical, insightful and entertaining. This book is a cup of courage for everyone who wants to change their lives. This is not a story about starting over; it's about continuing on the journey. Nell Painter has taken the coming of age story to a new level--this is what you get when a wise person gets even wiser, when a true artist spreads her wings." --Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage and Silver Sparrow

"Old in Art School is brilliantly written. A rare reflection of an artist and scholar who combines her voice and vision in this extraordinary work. Painter masterfully weaves a highly personal story into one that situates her art making with her history making . . . It is a book about belonging and longing; expectations and disappointments; beauty and humor. It is engrossing and heroic." --Deborah Willis, New York University, author of Envisioning Emancipation

"We all dream of starting over, but Nell Painter really did it. This unsparing account of inspiration and the creative process takes on racism, loneliness, self-loathing, the hazards of aging, and bad manners in the art world. Funny, edifying, and always mesmerizing, this book is also about searching for--and finding (most of the time)--happiness." --Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln

Praise for The History of White People

"Presenting vivid psychological portraits of Emerson and dozens of other figures variously famous and obscure, and carefully mapping the links between them, Painter's narrative succeeds as an engaging and sophisticated intellectual history, as well as an eloquent reminder of the fluidity (and perhaps futility) of racial categories." --Booklist (starred review)

"Painter reviews the diverse cast in their intellectual milieus, linking them to one another across time and language barriers. Conceptions of beauty (ideals of white beauty [became] firmly embedded in the science of race), social science research, and persistent North/South stereotypes prove relevant to defining whiteness. What we can see, the author observes, depends heavily on what our culture has trained us to look for. For the variable, changing, and often capricious definition of whiteness, Painter offers a kaleidoscopic lens." --Publishers Weekly

"Deeply researched, intelligent, and wonderfully common-sensical, this is a ground-breaking book, and if we're ever going to get to that so- called 'post-racial' society, a necessary book. It locates race where it actually exists, inside our heads, and shows us how recently it came to reside there." --Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter and Affliction

"In this wide-ranging and passionate book, Nell Painter makes the story of American history into something new. Her array of writers, artists, and politicians, some familiar and some surprising, struggle mightily to create a concept many Americans of all backgrounds now take for granted: 'white people.' " --Edward Ayers, author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies

"The History of White People is a brilliant meditation on the invention of the idea of 'whiteness.' Deeply researched and elegantly written, Painter's presentation will certainly spark conversation and controversy--as it should. Painter's high-octane intelligence makes her perfectly suited to the task." --Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello

"Nell Painter's The History of White People is an amazing race-bending narrative. With grace and energy, she confronts the myth of white people as race-less. She offers an eye-opening examination of slavery, the creation of white-ness, and the way in which racial categories have been both false and destructive. This is story-telling at its best." --Ellen Goodman, syndicated columnist, Washington Post Writers Group

"Not since Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man has there been such a synoptically provocative appreciation of the myths by which a now demographically challenged people sustained themselves and restrained others." --David Levering Lewis, professor of history, New York University Abu Dhabi, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race

Praise for Creating Black Americans

"Princeton history professor Nell Irvin Painter brings her considerable skills and insight to Creating Black Americans. Her excellent introduction to the black American experience will serve any interested reader well, though it will find its largest audience in college classrooms. History, the author notes, exists in both the past and present. What we wish to know and how we understand it changes over time. And Painter's compelling use of black art, mostly created since the mid-20th century, to illustrate earlier times, emphasizes this point to great effect. Drawing on the research of a generation of African-American historians, Painter also sets the record straight on a number of questions of the country's past. She re-emphasizes that slavery was not just a Southern problem. Racial slavery in North America developed over several decades in the 18th century, laying the foundations for the entire American economy. Slaves grew the commodities that Americans exported across the globe, of course. But slavery and the Atlantic slave trade were the bedrock of vast fortunes in the North, too, including the precursors to the Bank of America and other financial houses. Artists--like historians, like ordinary people--sift the past to make sense of it for our times. Through word and image, Nell Irvin Painter has produced a narrative of African-American history that will profit its readers." --New York Post

"Painter, a Princeton professor of history, integrates art and history in this fascinating book, filled with powerful images of black art from photographs to paintings to quilts that tell the story of black America. The book begins with the history and imagery of slavery through the Civil War and emancipation, then traces the cultural influences of the civil rights movement, the black power era, and ends with the hip-hop era. Through each period, Painter offers historical context for the artistic expressions and examines how more contemporary sensibilities shaped remembrances of historical events. She explores the ways that context and historical interpretation influence the artist's perspective and is subject to great variation over time. Although most of the works presented were created after the mid-twentieth century, they reflect a broader historical span as black artists have attempted to fill in the void of black images from earlier American history. Readers interested in black American art and history will appreciate this beautiful and well-researched book." --Booklist

"Nell Irvin Painter is a towering intellectual figure and pre-eminent historian in American life. This overarching narrative is the best we have that makes sense of the doings and sufferings of black people from 1619 to 2005." --Cornel West, Princeton University

"A brilliant historian, Nell Irvin Painter has written an innovative account of African Americans from the colonial era to our own. She challenges us to think critically about the historical meanings conveyed via artistic creations. In other words, Creating Black America offers a new way of knowing, imagining, and visualizing the past of our present." --Darlene Clark Hine, co-author of The African-American Odyssey

"There is a philosopher's axiom, 'To be is to be perceived.' Nell Painter's fascinatingly significant Creating Black Americans captures its subject-matter through the self-images people of color have produced over time. She has written a critical history of self-perception that deserves wide review and lively discussion." --David Levering Lewis, University Professor and Professor of History, New York University

"Utilizing her pathbreaking approach to historical writing, a hallmark in her brilliant career, Nell Painter interweaves straight-forward narrative with the vivid portraits of black artists to record how an unloved people created a vibrant but still endangered black America." --Derrick Bell, author of Silent Covenants: Brown v. Board and the Unfulfilled Hopes for Racial Reform

"From the Triangle Trade to Russel Simmons, this comprehensive review of African American history is a lively, lucid and indispensable resource. Nell Painter is our foremost chronicler of the black experience in the United States." --Patricia Williams, Columbia University School of Law

"This new study by Princeton historian Painter aims not merely to provide an updated scholarly account of African-American history, but to enrich our understanding of it with the subjective views of black artists, which she places alongside the more objective views of academics. The result is a book that contains both a compelling narrative and numerous arresting images, but that does not always successfully tie the two together. To be fair, Painter is a historian, not an art critic. Her primary purpose in including artworks is to illustrate historical points and to show black Americans as creators of their own history. Nevertheless, readers will likely be frustrated by the lack of analysis accompanying the images--Painter simply summarizes most of the art works, leaving much of their complexity and ambiguity unexplored. Thus, she inadvertently diminishes their power as complicated pieces of individual expression. Painter is clearly adept at writing straightforward history, however, and on this front the book is lucid, engaging and topical. It does an excellent job revealing both the African and the American dimensions of African-American history. And her work has the additional merit of following the past into the present, tracing the history of black Americans all the way up to the hip-hop era, the controversies surrounding black voters in the 2000 presidential election and the ongoing issues of incarceration and health care." --Publishers Weekly