In college, my school signed me up for a one-on-one visit with Kara Walker, who had an exhibition in the Corcoran at the time. I was thrilled. I knew just enough about Kara Walker to love her work.
Walker entered my studio, which was about five by five feet, and situated herself gingerly on one of the tall metal stools. She glanced around and raised her eyebrows. “This is your studio? It’s so small,” she said.
I laughed awkwardly. “I’m, um, I feel pretty fortunate to have a studio at all,” I said. I was homeless at the time, and the studio doubled as my sleeping quarters. Walker snorted. I remembered that she was a professor at Columbia and had herself gone to the Rhode Island School of Design.
She took out a bag of trail mix. “I hope you don’t mind if I eat in your studio. I’m starving.”
I pointed to the grocery bag of Cup Noodles nailed to the wall. “I eat in here all the time.”
Walker ignored me and gestured at the large paintings of gaping mouths on the walls. “These are watercolors, right?”
I nodded. She rolled her eyes. “Watercolors are so pastoral,” she said. She emptied some of her trail mix into her hand. Some of it scattered to the floor. “If you’re going to do watercolors, these paintings are not up to par.”
I wiggled in my seat, uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. “I was thinking maybe I should put, like, a wad of gum in the mouths-“
“No.”
I shut up.
“If you’re going to do watercolors, you have to do something like…make your own, maybe.” She thought for a moment. “Actually, there’s this German manufacturer that makes pigments that you can use to make your own paints. You have to call them or write to them. You can’t get them online. Their products are that high-end. You should be writing this down,” she said harshly.
I had been staring at her blank-faced. “I’m not going to be making my own watercolors,” I said. The watercolors I was using were from the student-grade palettes I’d scavenged from the school trash heap.
Trail mix dripped to the floor in the awkward silence. Kara Walker bored holes through me with her eyes as she chewed. Desperate, I said, “I actually was hoping to hear about your work.”
“Oh!” Walker brightened up immediately. “I have no problem at all talking about that.” She began a monologue about the depiction of race in contemporary art. I nodded along. My nerves were too shot to hear a word she said.
Finally, fifteen minutes had passed. “Looks like it’s time for me to go,” she said. She stood up and looked around at the floor. “Sorry about the mess.” She began prodding at the seeds and Chex bits on the ground with her iPhone, half-heartedly pushing them into a pile.
I cleared my throat. “Um, you don’t have to worry about that,” I said.
“Oh, okay.” Walker straightened up immediately. “Well, you can just tell people you have an original Kara Walker in your studio now.”
I laughed too loudly. “Wow,” I said. “Yeah. Wow. You’re so right. Amazing.”
She left. My studio neighbor poked his head out from under the rubble of his own work. “So,” he said. “How was it?”
I pointed at the messy, scattered pile of trail mix on the floor. “Look at this. She left an original Kara Walker on my studio floor.”
My studio neighbor looked. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You should put it up in the exhibition with her other stuff and sell it for a million dollars just to piss her off.”
“She hated my stuff,” I said.
“Of course she did.”
Soon after that, Kara Walker began doing a series of watercolors. I was flattered and annoyed.
