Having been eliminated from Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, Judith Braun, spoke to ARTINFO about being cast as the token veteran (read: old) artist, Bravo banning her from Jerry Saltz's Facebook wall, and how she enjoys sweeping the streets of the Lower East Side.

What have you been up to since your turn on the show?

I’ve been working really diligently, as usual, in my studio. I just got back from Berlin, where I was in a show at DUVE Berlin gallery — I did a large wall drawing. Actually, since I got back I’ve done two other wall installations with fingerprints here in New York. So all of those have taken up a good amount of the last two months, and I've been working on an installation at Fruit and Flower gallery on Eldridge. Now it’s actually going by the name of Eldridge Optical. I’m doing a one-person installation there that will open at the end of the summer.

So you haven’t exactly been sweeping the streets of the Lower East Side like you said you’d be doing when you got kicked off.

I do that! Not the whole Lower East Side but my live/work space is on the ground floor on Rivington Street, where I’m the building manager because I need the extra buck. Part of how I live is that I rent out half my space — I live in my studio, and I rent out the rest of the really nice apartment to tenants. They’re my patrons of the arts. And then I have to take care of all the repairs that have to be done and make sure things are always kept up around the building. So I sweep the sidewalk. I literally go out, and I love it.

Now that you and Trong Nguyen have been kicked off the show, it seems that Nao Bustamante is pretty much the only one left who has had any prior visibility in the art world. Do you think there's a reason why the better-known artists are getting kicked off first?

Well, you know, I’ve looked at it from a few different points to try and understand just why they invite you on and then they get rid of you if you’re bringing this kind of experience to the show. The impression I’m getting — and I say impression because this isn’t backed up by facts — is that there are some people who are real believers in the show, like Abdi [Farah] and Jaime Lynn [Henderson]. They feel like this is going to make their life, and they really see the show — not just reality TV in general, but specifically this show — as being like a bridge, a stepping-stone opportunity. That’s really great, that’s part of the mission of the Bravo show, to make people feel that way and to get the public to go along for the ride with those artists, hoping for them. But I don’t think that Trong came across that way and I’m sure I didn’t either. I was never caught in an interview saying that this is my big opportunity. I was working on my art career for many years. So I did not go on the show with that kind of belief — that it was going to give me that break.

So if you didn’t expect the show to make you or someone else the next great artist, what did you expect to get out of it?

I don’t think I expected anything in particular, but it sounded like a really exciting adventure. And that might sound really silly or too easy to say, but I went to auditions to see what would happen, whether they would put me through. And they kept putting me through, and some of it was really fun to do, and I thought gee, they’re the ones that called me. They said, “We want you to be the person that we’re casting as the older artist” — that’s not what they said, but you know. And I thought, "Good, I’ll go on the television as me." And that’s all. You know, you want to see yourself on TV, play a game. I played a game.

Do you think they pegged you as the older artist? Do you think you and your work came across in a multidimensional way, or do you think everyone on the show becomes kind of a caricature?

I do think that I was prompted to make comments about my age and then they edit in lots of comments about it, but it really doesn’t bother me. Everybody is born on some day in the universe, it’s not a competition or a lifestyle choice. And it’s just silly. So I’m very happy and proud to be having a great time at 62, and I think my art career and my activities are more exciting now than they were my first time around when I was younger. This is just fantastic, I’m so proud of myself for managing to get back into the contemporary art scene.

Another thing that they played up was your tense relationship with Jaclyn Santos. Did you really annoy each other that much or was a lot of the seeming conflict a product of the editing?

Well, we didn’t see eye to eye. I couldn’t understand her explanation for what she was doing. [C.f. episode three's recap.] But it’s not like every day we were butting heads, you know. We were busy. I wasn’t her roommate, most of the time I was just running around working on my own, so it’s not like we were constantly having fights. It really wasn’t like that. We just didn’t have a meeting of the minds. It’s part of TV. It’s entertaining, I guess.

Did you have any allies on the show?

Yeah, I think that in the show it’s pretty evident that Nicole [Nadeau] and I had a fun relationship. She calls me nutty or whatever, and crazy or whatever, but I don’t think that that’s negative at all. I think you can see it on one of the clips where I’m complaining to her, or she said I was freaking out or losing it because I didn’t have anything done, and we were kind of joking, and in that room you could see how we were all joking around. I had a great relationship with Trong, I had a great relationship with Nao, and with Nicole. The rest are more incidental, we’re not really crossing paths or talking all the time, or anything.

Tell me about how you feel now about the piece that got you eliminated. You spelled Pride and Prejudice backwards for a book cover?

When I got home from being on the show there was an exhibition at the Morgan Library here in New York City that had Jane Austens manuscripts exhibited. And the review in the New York Times from November 7, 2009 said that Jane Austen used to write letters to her 8-year-old niece, Cassandra, and every word in the letters was spelled backwards.

That’s amazing!

Isn’t it amazing? I could not believe it when I read that. Because that’s just what she did and it says she did it because she “knew it would give her pleasure.” I didn’t know that when I did the piece, but I just found it so interesting that if you dig just a little deeper beyond whether it’s a perfectly logical book cover or not, there are other things going on. I thought it was just great so I made t-shirts that say “Edirp and Ecidujerp” and last night after the viewing party that I had at my house I opened the box and threw them around and everybody was grabbing them up.

The whole book challenge was kind of strange in general because it was very commercially oriented. You seemed to be pretty upset last night when the judges clearly leaned towards things that looked more like pulpy paperback covers. Was that challenging?

I was frustrated by it. I guess it looked like I was being condescending about the challenge, but I just didn’t get enthusiastic about the idea, let’s put it that way. I think Jerry Saltz said in his recap that I threw in the towel on the piece, but I really didn’t think that was true. You could see everybody was like “I’ll do this, I’ll do that, it’s not working, I’ll start over again.” So everybody’s working furiously and I did my piece in the hour that I had in the morning. I cut out all the stencils and I rubbed the charcoal around it and I made the letters come up and I finished the last letter of “Jane Austen” in the last second when they said stop. So I didn’t throw the towel in, I just got to where I got.

And you still managed to spell the author’s name right.

Yeah, I managed to even spell it right working that quickly.

So have you been reading Jerry Saltz’s Facebook page? Is that a place that the artists go to vent or to read criticisms of the show?

I was on Jerry’s page before the show, because I knew him before. His page was just a really great place, kind of a village square for artists. And I think it was phenomenal how it kind of grew up from that. It was really great. Then, when you participate, it can also be a little time-consuming and a little frustrating because you’re writing and then there are these long, long threads, and you just can’t read them.

So you’ve stopped commenting on Jerry’s wall?

When the show was beginning publicity it was requested — which is reasonable — that we, the contestants, not be on the page anymore because it’s just like too much, too much. So first I thought, “Oh, I don’t like being told that I can’t be on the Facebook page.” But honestly, it’s a relief. I’m over it. A lot a lot of the stuff is just the same people repeating things over and over to each other, which I’m not criticizing, but I’m glad that I’m not spending time on it anymore.