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She also changed my life.
I would continually moan a litany of poor-me complaints to anyone who would listen.
She was a big deal even then.Famous even.
Of course, I imagined I was gifting them with my magnificent, famous presence and stellar intelligence.
(Insecurity, arrogance, appetite, and resentment wear many masks.)
Kind was different from the other commercial gallerists in Chicago.
Really, she was different from everyone.
She showed a roster of superlative outsider artists who were only then coming to light.
She showed prison artists, people working in homes for those with mental disabilities.
She wasnt only about so-called outsider artists, though.
Imagismwasnt cool or chic; it wasnt featured inArtforum.
(It often is now).
Critically, it didnt blend in with the material/conceptual-based abstract post-minimalism that was going on in New York.
Moreover, while all their work was figurative, narrative nevertheless played a very small role.
Imagismis tinged with mysteriousness, irrationality, and still somehow annexed to everyday reality.
Their work now hangs in museums around the world or is only now featured in major gallery shows.
Suddenly Kind snapped, Shut up!
Move to New York and Ill give you a job in my gallery there.
Just like that, she called my bluff.
Itd be hard to describe now how totally she annihilated my internal hologram of self-pity.
Six months later, I did.
And Kind gave me a job in her New York gallery.
I was a fuck-up.
Kind must have known.
And, slowly, she sort of broke me again.
Soon I started doing my job.
Not much cocaine for her.
But it was fun.
A total break with my Chicago past that I could never have predicted and didnt even know I needed.
Kind was giving this to me free, in fact paying me for it.
I felt like I was melding into some kind of New York.
I wonder if this is still remotely the norm among gallery workers in our more professionalized art world.
I dont remember leaving but at some point I drifted away, got and got fired from other jobs.
She was a formidable live wire, an incessantly expanding force of nature, a powerhouse.
I was afraid of her; I loved her.
