Subsidizing a Vision

Subsidizing a Vision

Courtesy the artist

Rachelle Agundes, "Danny" (2007)

Courtesy the artist

Meghan Lantzy, "Trouble in Paradise" (2007)

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NEW YORK—The art market might be booming right now, the media brimming with news of multi-million dollar sales (such as Damien Hirst’s $100 million diamond skull) and artists who reach blue-chip status long before they hit 40. But that doesn’t mean all—or even many—young artists are raking in the dough.

In fact, the same healthy economy that fuels record-breaking sales and art superstars may be making it harder than ever for artists in their 20s and 30s, especially in New York City, to make ends meet.

“I don’t know how young people survive in New York now,” says 45-year-old painter Paul Pagk, who has watched the city change dramatically since he started his art career here in the 1980s. “We could live on nothing,” he added, recalling that in 1985, he paid $900 a month for a 1,780-square-foot apartment.

Now, with affordable rents increasingly hard to come by, and competition more intense than ever, survival often means making some difficult lifestyle choices. One of the most significant remains the age-old dilemma of whether to work a nine-to-five job and sacrifice studio time, or eschew a steady income for more hours in the studio. Here’s how three Brooklyn artists are tackling the challenge.

By Tooth and Nail
For painter, performance artist, and poet Laura Dyer, 32, focusing on her art meant leaving a lucrative day job.

Originally from Gainesville, Georgia, Dyer started college studying performing arts at Florida State University in the 1990s. However, after living with roommates who were painters, she changed her major to anthropology, studied non-Western art, and emerged a self-taught painter and a writer. She moved to New York in 1998, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when she got a wake-up call from a friend, that she left a perk-filled position as a magazine culture writer to concentrate on painting and poetry.

“I was at a friend’s art opening, and he told me, ‘You’re an artist. If you want art to give to you, then you have to give to it 100 percent,” she recalled. “That just rung in my ears, and in late 2000, I quit my chi-chi Conde Nast job.”

Since then, Dyer, whose hypnotic acrylic and oil paintings reference sacred geometry and physics, has held a variety of freelance jobs, including assisting directors at a dance company, and writing, editing, and serving as a photo stylist for various magazines.

“It’s been seven years of freelancing, and it has been by the skin of my teeth, by tooth and nail,” she said. “I have no stability; literally I never know how I’m going to make it, or what I’m going to do from month to month.”

There have been multiple sacrifices, including sleeping in a Williamsburg live/work space with no heat until she found her current apartment and studio in Clinton Hill. “Your family doesn’t understand why you’re starving and still climbing up a ladder to your bed at 32,” she said. “But you have to fight for the space to create, and you have to guard it with your life, because that’s where ideas are born.”

Although Dyer’s paintings were part of a group show at Brooklyn’s Capla Kesting Fine Art in 2005, she has yet to find gallery representation or a steady market for her pieces—something she says she’s ready to work on now that she’s had time to develop as an artist. And though she said she’s more interested in how art can transform communities than how much cash it can generate, she’d also like to see her painting, poetry, and performance art turn into a sustainable career.

“I don’t want to say I’m beyond that, because I’d love to be recognized for my work and be able to provide abundance for my family,” she said. “That’s my dream. But even if it never happens, I’ll never stop [creating art] until the day I die, because this is who I am.”

“We Work So We Can Work More”
Meghan Lantzy, 28, chose another route—a 40-hour-a-week day job, as a general management assistant at Lincoln Center Theater. After a full work day there, she usually heads straight to her studio, an extra room in the Kensington apartment she shares with a roommate, to work for at least another four hours—putting in 12-hour-plus days, five days a week.

“I’m a little bit of a workaholic,” said Lantzy, a painter originally from Patton, Penn. A 2006 graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, she works in oil, creating work that is at once macabre and playful.