Episode 379- artist Linnéa Gabriella Spransy – growing up in a commune, Yale grad school, working as a living artist in Kansas City, and co-founding the gallery Bridge Projects

Introduction

0:00this is the conversation it's a podcast that goes behind the scenes and between the lines of the contemporary art worlds welcome to the show i'm michael shaw this is episode 379 with pasadena-based artist linnea sprancy the website for this show is theconversationpod.com where you can see images of linnea's work over the last several years maybe some images from

0:33growing up on a commune in oregon that remains to be determined but go find out i want to tell you more about the artist advice podcast that i have been working on and hope to put out soon i'm i'm getting itchy to put it out i could use some more questions for it i will tell you more about that in a moment but first let me just give you a quick overview of what you're going to hear in this

Linnea Sprancy's Background

0:59public 379 episode with linnea sprancy you're going to hear about her growing up on a commune in oregon her experience at yale in grad school where she had her work just like everyone else including kahinda wiley's work eviscerated in crits which she then proceeded to process and had a very clear idea of how to move forward when she moved to kansas city and worked as a living artist for seven years

1:33before moving out to los angeles pasadena and where she co-founded and ran the gallery bridge projects which opened unfortunately just a few days before the pandemic hit so you'll hear all about that and more in addition to all that in the full episode you can also hear her talk about how she puts this existential crisis we're living in in historical context so ultimately it it seems as though it's

2:06something people in past histories have lived through before uh what it's like living in pasadena and how it compares to altadena i have a lot of similarities perhaps counterintuitively the question of whether she should invest in a bigger studio downtown than the at home garage studio she's currently working out of and she in response to my request to ask a question for the future artist advice podcast she does kind of ask but also kind of answers one and she kind of asked one again as well

2:40so you can hear all that on the full bonus available on patreon where you can support the show for as little as a dollar a month you can find that via the support page of the website or directly via patreon patreon.com slash the conversation pod and again you can hear twice as much episode there and so just briefly the artist advice show is currently as of now called the intrepid artist and yeah there have

3:11been other titles that people liked but this is the one that's in the lead so far maybe it'll change again maybe this is it but i mean you can't please everyone right i think it's an improvement upon the conversation which i kind of love but it's also awfully generic right so this is a chance to be very specific and have a specific tone and where you come in if you haven't already is i would love your questions and you can ask a question anything about the experience of being an artist even if you are not an artist but you somehow participate work in the art world curator dealer collector writer etc

3:49anybody can ask an art art world related question just by going to the conversation pod.com slash intrepid there you will find a google form that you can fill out completely anonymously if you are so inclined i would love the top of the hierarchy for people asking questions as you can probably imagine is somebody who actually leaves a voicemail the recording with your own voice asking the question and saying who you are and where you live then your question that is the top of the hierarchy i know that's pretty rare and it might

4:25take some time to kick in but if you want to do it that way and you're ready if you go to the conversation pod dot com slash contact you will find a couple of different ways to leave a voicemail uh thank you to any of you who are so inclined to contribute to this future i know the challenge at this point is wait your show hasn't even launched yet why am i going to ask a question what if it doesn't even go that's a good point fair enough um well you could help that future show out now by leaving a question one of those ways or you could just hang tight and leave one or ask one i should say

5:01when it does come out hopefully the first sort of beta if you will or alpha beta episode will come out soon all right so let's get to the conversation with linnea again if you want to listen to the full episode hour and 20 minutes got to go to the patreon page and contribute to the show for as little as a dollar a month five dollars would be great i'm gonna start giving some bonus content and bonus prizes to people who are doing five dollars and up on patreon so stay tuned for that if that's

5:34you all right let's get to the conversation with linnea thank you very much for listening i don't take it for granted i appreciate it i hope you are holding up okay all things considered and i will talk to you again soon until then ciao for now where are you from originally what's where where did you go well i was born in wisconsin a little town called okonomowoc okay classic indian names right which they use

6:08liberally to name all these towns and counties and it's a lot of fun to name to reel them off unlike california where everything's spanish right there's not a single indian name well maybe a few but it's kind of noticeable yeah um i was born there but then i was raised in a commune in oregon

Commune Experience

6:29um we left left for that place when i was three and then left them when i was about 12 um and tried and i guess succeeded in the end settling back in the midwest back in oconomowoc there were some you know some seesawing between different locations for a little while as we found our feet but my family so so you left your family left wisconsin for the commune in oregon and then you were there

7:04until you were about 12 and then your family moved back to another part of wisconsin to the same part same part yeah the little town huh so it was like let's let's try this uh utopian experiment you know we'll give it a go and it lasted a decent amount of time and then i was like all right let's go back to the midwest yeah i think at that time in that era there was a lot of experimentation with lifestyles yeah and i don't think that their thinking was that complete like let's experiment with this i think

7:40they were all in okay i mean because it was an intense commitment you know like we were a family well we became a family of four at the commune but you give everything up materially you know and where and where in oregon was it tiny little town called wilderville which i don't really think is a town it's unincorporated i think to this day and the most you could really say of it is it like had a fish hatchery and it had a post office that was a combination gas station slash grocery store

8:16and then a you know a collection of people that lived around it and we were on a large piece 25 acre piece of land kind of nestled in the cascades the whole area is and there's a river called the apple gate that runs through that area um and so yeah it was called wilderville it's about a mile from the coast and a mile from the california border i'm sorry not mile hour an hour from the coast and an hour from the california border so the um kind of in the

8:55middle of this uh if you go up from california um you go it's towards the middle um as far as uh longitude but latitude it is kind of in the center a little bit uh the the place we used to go shopping for groceries was cape junction so okay okay i don't know cape junction i'm trying to i'm doing the best to recall my oregon geography from having been in the southern and middle and upper left part of the state but yeah um it's my experience as a child i remember

9:30mount saint helens blowing and he's seeing that way off in the distance the plume yeah wow so was the commune experience um what might now be considered a a social housing situation or was it quite a bit more than that do you think it was it was a bit more than that definitely i so the backstory is there's there was this movement in the 70s called the jesus people

10:01movement and it was kind of this alternative christian like away from the stuffy or very conservative ways of thinking about living out a christian life so these people would start communes or i don't know all kinds of crazy things my parents first met through it because there was this traveling theatrical production that was um based it had been produced out of hollywood and basically the story was uh that a hippie had uh an acid trip and on that acid trip he had an intense vision of jesus

10:39and was trying to figure out what to do with his life and that's kind of the substance of the theatrical uh production and it was multimedia and my parents it it toured throughout europe and that's how my parents met each other because my mom's from a little fishing village just outside of gothenburg called fiskebeck and then my father's from this small town called oconomowoc right in wisconsin so they met in london as a part of this production and they have all these crazy stories yeah lots they

11:11could entertain you for hours of traveling around and doing this and um so this commune was like another experiment so it sort of birthed out of these ideas of like how do you kind of radically counter-culturally live out the claims of christianity and so this idea of like genuinely giving away your possessions and living with all possessions in common kind of communist but it's also kind of christian if you look at acts so um at any rate it was based around that idea

11:52and then connected with that we had um different kinds of i guess things that we did that were for people like for instance we had a a program helping to relocate um refugees from cambodia and vietnam and um teaching them how to live in america and one of my earliest memories was having a group of women who were who were you know freshly come to the united states and i had platinum blonde hair at

12:27that point and i was sitting on the grass and they sat around me in a circle and just wanted to play with my hair for hours and i remember feeling a little frightened by it but um my mom was like it's okay what this they seem content and happy and you you can be happy too it's all right you know um but cultural difference and all that kind of stuff and then um my father was in a christian glam rock band that toured the whole world and recorded seven albums and had one of the first lazy laser light

13:01shows and he was one of the first men i knew that like pierced his ears and had crazy hairdos and wore lab coats and moon boots um so it was unusual yeah say the least definitely yeah that's that's that is wild and then we had a one-room schoolhouse um so when we weren't on the road with papa because we had a tutor who would go sometimes with us he was gone a lot like nine months

13:34out of the year it's too much um but when we came home it was very like you know earthy and yeah we had a garden a huge organic garden two full-time gardeners to feed everyone so when you when you went back to wisconsin you're talking about now we went back to oregon after traveling on the road oh okay and our huge double-decker greyhound converted bus which had a huge rainbow painted on the side and so do you i'm sure it's nuanced and there's there's

14:12no clear-cut way of putting it but what do you think the takeaway or more specifically that the sort of net result of you going through this experience was in terms of where you wound up now um was there at some point a rebellion against a socialist you know socialist lifestyle i don't think so i think i saw the logic of it i was like i remember the first time so i bought it i

14:45lived in kansas city for a while and i bought a house there and i remember the first time i had to buy a lawnmower and i remember looking around at my neighborhood and being like every single person on this block has a lawnmower why do we each buy a lawnmower yeah moments where i'm like what is going on you know um in terms of just capitalism and how insane it is um yeah so i think that it kind of permanently put a little kink in my thinking um at the same time that right now i think i live

15:17pretty conventionally um by now yeah in terms of like i try to you know every opportunity i have to kind of be generous with things because things are things but people are much more important than things but still you know it's like inevitably you become a part of the machine um so i think that i i kind of got it in terms of the structure of things um and i mean i had a good experience i know a lot of people who have grown up in communes or in context where where religion is a big factor

15:54it's been really harsh and so i'm i'm really fortunate the people in my direct life my parents some of the people who really felt like guardians over my life were very sane yeah that's because it's a petri dish for insanity in some yeah right a petri dish for a cult yeah yeah yeah yeah that's so that's amazing that you got to go through that and not not have to be that version um but you

16:25mentioned um in passing inevitably you know um becoming part of capitalism and just prior that i was thinking that of a type of person artists are generally more likely to be questioning you know or pushing back against capitalism but i think the way that you describe put it so briefly but i think accurately is inevitably you know you get on with it kind of um which is i mean i think

17:02it feels like there's more pushback maybe not necessarily from artists because artists who are at least quote unquote part of the art world or you know leaning that way there is such a capitalist um organizing structure you know and it's more in activism you know and organizing and things like those kinds of cultures where people are really pushing back but you know it's something that i think

17:35a lot of artists think about and want to not be so complacent with don't you i agree i completely agree yeah um but then there's the question of surviving in the world yep and of responsibility for other people when you start to have those responsibilities yeah yeah and um it's difficult because the world doesn't see the value of other possibilities yep there's there are so many agreements that are just

18:06tacit that i remember as a child being so mystified by you know like we we run off to these jobs and give the life the the vital marrow of our lives i.e. our time jobs um so that we can be paid to squeeze our real life into weekends yeah you know and i remember as a kid being like wait everyone agrees to this how yeah um and it feels silly as an adult to say these things that feel childish you know but

18:41those wonderings are still somewhere deep buried deep in there i think and um i think that yeah anyway we can get very full of philosophical about it but i think having a carefree childhood where i was removed from a lot of the the gear work of capitalistic life had an effect on me and i thought that art was a legitimate possibility for me and so did my parents and you know there was never

19:13friction about that etc so that's a good that's a good outcome from it you know yeah you mentioned kansas city and um it's a good segue to talk about the fact that we talked about a number of different things we could discuss and certainly one of the bigger ones was you doing the mfa program at yale

Yale MFA Program

19:39and then after that you go to is it right after that that you go to kansas city and live for a while what tell just tell me about the period in kansas city because you were living as a working artist at that time i was and it was it was possible that's the thing in a in a town that's off the main grid of artistic kind of culture and career making um i had an opportunity to kind of get my feet under

20:10me and sort of make sure that the work i was making uh was stable grounded would last me a lifetime and uh there's also this sifting process too i think with grad school especially one as intense as yale is uh kind of figuring what out what voices deserve to stay and which ones maybe should be sifted out and given you know shown the door at least of your studio and uh i think that

20:44my time there was really good because i figured out oh i can i can do this i can make money at this at least enough to own a house and have a nice studio and have a really great community um and i was there for seven years and it was a really supportive artistic community as well and one great thing about cities of kansas city's ilk i.e industrial and big enough but nevertheless like

21:15a second or third tier seat city since we're all obsessed with ranking things um these places can be incredibly um productive for artists to occupy because if you have an idea typically you can do it the hurdles aren't as immense as they are in la and new york and london so i think that there's something really wonderful about having that sense of freedom and the resources are much more

21:50at your fingertips in terms of space and manpower and even just community and people being into it you know and not torn in a thousand directions because they have responsibilities in a thousand directions because that's what life demands of you in certain zip codes so i think there are things i miss it's true but i think that um here in la there are also things that just weren't present there and one of them was a real push in terms of who your peers are

22:29in cities like that you find a handful that you can run with and that's great and that might be sufficient but for me after about seven years i felt like i could see what my life would look like a decade in the future and that was claustrophobic to me i needed a sense of maybe a little fear maybe a little challenge why did you choose why was kansas city the city you moved to friends yeah

Kansas City Period

22:59um and i helped start another kind of little artist group slash commune um through friends and um it was a good kind of immediate nest of friendship if that makes sense it kind of feel stabilized and at home um and i also knew it was likely i could figure things out there yeah and speaking figuring things out i'm really uh curious about i'm wondering logistically how

23:36you can both be making a living maybe this happened over the course of the seven years but the concept that you're making a living selling the work and you're also determining what your sort of mature work is going to be and showing the other work to the door right is roughly how you put it i think voices or internal pressures that you carry over from from your education it's a long detox

24:08process to sort of remember why you do what you do and what matters to you and and um for me i just needed this space i think it's really impressive when people can do that in the midst of the cacophony of buying and selling um in big urban centers when there's a ton of pressure and there are collectors telling you that you should make only this kind of work or this work is valuable why would you change or why would you experiment um what's interesting though in in kind of like discovering i think my

24:43mature work is i stayed the course i didn't have to but i did um and um i think that was revelatory to me is like oh this actually has substance if if there is no pressure i still do it and i think that that was an important lesson to me um i needed to know that if there is no pressure i still do it so in other words this is what i'm motivated to do most yeah i can do anything at this

25:16point you know no one's shouting at me right um and yet this is what i do so that's kind of truth telling and you use you use the word detoxing and i presume that that's essentially from these intense crits and studio visits in the yale program that um some of which may have been uh very intense

25:47that oh yeah you know you there's a lot of harshness there yeah yeah so did you have crits where you know you were getting oh yeah that and and did everybody essentially from your experience as far as i knew there were no darlings right okay so even so everybody the the the quote-unquote best of the crop we're getting we're getting yeah yeah people that are really have uh incredibly visible careers right now my classmates would just get chewed out you know and you never know when we were kind

26:24of in that formative state anyway like so many other factors besides the work itself play a part in building building a career but um the work itself was all there really was to talk about right and that's the value of a grad program well now looking back on it you know if these generally i mean maybe you can do a case-by-case kind of thing for a couple of examples but were these peers that you now

26:54describe as stars or you know big names or what have you um getting chewed out because their work wasn't there yet because they were still in their student level slash phase there i think their work was there it maybe just didn't suit the professors oh okay and you have to deal with that you know you have to recognize okay my work's not really is really not for everyone or it might be commercially really really viable but you know so and so is really not gonna like it um like i came in doing

27:28figurative work and so did ken de wiley and my work changed and his didn't and uh he had to face a lot of heat and he did it he's he's you know he's fine but sorry i have to ask do you have any opinions about the allegations against him i cannot speak to that no because you don't know anything about it i know about it and i'm not surprised given the world we live in and i don't know about these

28:02incidents or moments right okay so i would i would refrain from speaking to it yeah ken de is a very gregarious warm outgoing person and that really helped him it continues to help him it's a it's these are good ways to be in the world but i can't speak as as an artist or as a uh entrepreneur exactly because that's what you are you're an entrepreneur you're representing yourself

Artistic Personality

28:31yeah and he could do that well i i can't i can't underscore enough i mean i it rarely it has come up but it rarely comes up with that kind of clarity how how beneficial being extroverted and a people person and a performer is and conversely how much more of a how monumental a struggle it is when you were on the other side yes of that personality type that's right and and being around uh you know a lot

29:09of future stars at yale and and run you know co-direction gallery and being in la and kansas city and so on you know what what are your thoughts on those kinds of uh gifts you know like when people talk about yeah oh they're he or she or they are so talented you know that's kind of like a really uh fundamental not fundamental it's a really sort of basic uh not very sophisticated way of describing

29:41somebody's abilities but then couldn't that just as easily be used although it isn't to describe their um uh their savviness slash um you know personality oh they're a very talented person uh a social person you know or something like that yeah yes and i think that that is an incredibly powerful tool and very rare in the artist population because you know by nature and tendency most artists are very

30:14observant i.e. quiet and watching people maybe less engaged um because they're observing and uh but nevertheless there are these occasional people that are just their flares of light when it comes to social ability they just they can remember everyone's name they love a party they love you know long conversations you know and um you know most artists are ambiverts

30:46well you know a lot of artists i know really like people but they can handle them only in limited doses right yeah and so and then there's business savvy which is a whole other thing you know you hear things about like salvador dali saying i'm gonna make x amount of money every day and i'm gonna figure out how to do that you know and uh so that's on top of their capacity to make work that people want yeah and that's really and indeed sometimes the personality is an added layer or an integral layer

31:27of making the work that people want yes and again i'm gonna emphasize this is in a capitalistic world because we have these you know in art art history these legends of you know uh people who really are misanthropes you know and uh they don't experience much success in their own lives or if they do it's like prickly always always kind of fraught or people that just run and hide

31:59uh in the desert or in the you know whatever they have their studio in some like crappy part of town and never leave or whatever it is um so but the thing is you have to recognize with those stories is that those lives are typically very uncomfortable um because something is you know something is awry with living with other people and it doesn't work

32:30for them well you know it i'm going to push back on that a little bit because it doesn't even have to be that extreme i mean the ambivert to use your word you know that alone you know not even mentioning the misanthrope yeah that's often challenging isn't it because um there's the pressure there's the expectation slash pressure self-pressure even to go out to openings and and then there's also the

33:01the resistance to not so those i mean i can speak from i i'm there that's me that's pretty much me um i believe it's a fair amount of people listening how you know how many you use the word m and reverse you know or do you feel like it's a majority it's like more than 50 of the artists that you can think of i i the people i'm i think of off the top of my head would be yes the thing about that term that's helpful is it's not fully introvert and that's not fully extrovert like i really enjoy

33:37people um but i needed a limited dose and beyond like a certain amount i kind of taper off in my capacity to interact well yeah yeah and um you know a lot of times i would prefer my projects over socializing and i have to make myself go socialize and i enjoy it when i do i don't i almost never regret it because people are great um but man um it's really hard for me to peel myself away from what

34:11i'm working on mm-hmm so for other people it's the opposite

34:19right and but there's also um a different version of what you describe for yourself in which people aren't always wonderful actually i'm sure there are a lot of people hearing you say that and going really is that that's not my experience especially in the art world i mean especially if you go to certain openings you know you feel like a total peon yeah i understand that yeah um and that's fine like people can live that way if they want to if they want to be that kind of person that's their choice but

34:50i don't have to hang out with them so i don't oh you're talking about the the negative or the the negative side hmm people in the art world who are

35:06yeah maybe just a little more difficult or intractable or selfish or yeah just any hostile judgmental uh judgmental yeah any number of adjectives those yeah yeah and in the world and like if you continue to do your work and connecting hopefully maybe this is idealistic of me but it helps me do what i do and that's therefore is helpful but i tend to believe that if you connect with like-minded people who have yeah generous spirits and you make work that's good you might end up at a

35:40place where you're interacting with people like that but um yeah you're kind of resting on a bedrock of of relationships that really are more nourishing yeah depleting right right that's what you want indeed yeah i think so and it might take a really long time to do because i'm not i'm not saying these people are everywhere yeah for sure for sure so you did co-direct you co-ran this this gallery right in

Co-Directing Bridge Projects Gallery

36:11hollywood for a few years what were some of the takeaways from doing that and what was i guess also maybe a preliminary question is what was the uh impetus in the first place uh first of all i have so much respect for gallerists oh my gosh what a job um and what an important job and uh i think it was really educational for me to be on the other side of the desk um and the motivation was i'd been

36:44having over the years over my lifetime as an artist so many discussions with artists where you know they were their work was really concerned with deep questions of spirituality or various religious traditions or art history or deeper kind of sense of history and oftentimes that kind of footing that their work drew from was not openly discussed was kind of an embarrassment or just people didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss it in an educated way or a curious way and so

37:20i felt like it would be really interesting to have a space that kind of specialized in that um and so we did these exhibitions it was a large gallery about three thousand square feet we had a really generous donor uh who helped run it or who ran it financially and uh we came out with kind of exhibit like museum quality exhibitions and these incredibly beautiful catalogs my gosh i have our collection right over here

37:54um and uh we had the misfortune of opening um two days before the pandemic

38:05so we were open the whole time during the pandemic and then by the end of it we're like okay well i guess we're done uh-huh it was called bridge projects and um we kept the website kind of archived and up just so people can see that something like this did exist yeah it had a lot of amazing art truly amazing artists included uh really some phenomenal ideas and uh practices represented some

38:36names with a lot of name recognition and art history historical pieces as well as younger more contemporary artists it was all kind of mixed in uh artists from all over the world it was very cool

38:50so was it being open opening just at the you know at the emergence of the pandemic was it

Pandemic's Impact on Gallery

38:59it essentially everything shutting down being part of the the equation because in theory you know if you held on for a couple years people more people would have started coming and so on you know i know um i think it was like consistently also just doing shows we we stayed open by appointment mm-hmm so in the beginning i would say a number of shows were never not really seen the way they

39:30should have like right we did this incredible philip k smith the third uh installation it was a light installation in the space before any walls were put up and so you i don't know it was just incredibly sensory and incredibly beautiful and um it was tragic how few people saw it yeah and how did you what was your curating uh approach so as a team we did that the two of you or more there was so we had uh

40:01vicki smith and um kara kara megan lewis both of whom now work at different museums and myself and we would work together and kind of molding an idea and having some key concepts or uh things that we were drawing from and we'd have shared kind of documents and proposed names and kind of do pitches and uh and

40:33things would start to coalesce and then we'd you know sort out specific pieces from there it's it's it you know it's from going it's going from a vague kind of vaseline focus to a laser focus

40:47vaseline focus that's you know no no no that's that's really that's really uh nice wordsmithing there um so as an artist of the three of you or or even not necessarily that being a factor i'm just curious of your approach was it on some in some occasions i've really been thinking a lot about x artist and i really want to see if i can get them into something or was it more oh i have this idea about this aspect of spirituality yeah sometimes it would be that i'm thinking of this

41:22artist and i really think that there are more there's more to it than this one artist i think right other people are doing this right and something or it might be we come up with an idea and i make discoveries and both are really fun because you're you're both discovering both are forms of discovery um but one can start with the seed that's a specific practice and the other can start with a hunch about a cultural tendency so and did they raise up your i mean obviously the three of

42:00you grew through the the process of making putting these shows together but i guess you know you mentioning that they went on to have gone on to work at museums you know when you're an artist i you know it's only natural to wonder oh did they raise your visionary uh abilities as an artist yeah oh my gosh what incredible incredible women we worked really well team and they're they're just insanely i mean i mean i mean they're doers to the max you know and uh you know working during that time with them was it was

42:37hard there were a lot of pressures but i i really marvel at how much we got done and how beautifully it all happened um yeah i'm sad the world missed it primarily mostly yeah that's really that's really sad

Legacy of Bridge Projects

42:53isn't it yeah and on a practical level was the project only viable with the the funder that you were able to get and is that sort of what led to the project we we would make sales and whatnot we were not we were not a non-profit right yeah um but we looked we looked and acted a lot like one uh-huh like we had really long shows and uh very considered programming uh wide diverse slate of programming

43:27and then these extraordinary catalogs so yeah we kind of acted like a non-profit and yeah i think that showed up yeah and we had sales but also it's such a weird time yeah i don't know i what to call normal or possible or a good idea or bad idea or a bad idea and were you so aware cognizant of i want to see what it's like on the other side of the desk or was it a little more organic and you know just kind of

44:00happen improv improvised kind of situation that you got into it i think it was more like yeah accidental in some ways yes i i was the one that kind of had the idea for the thing and the friendship um to kind of

44:19pull people together friendships things together so i i ended up in the mix um just because i i'd hoped that something like this could exist in the world and it did for a while that's great so