In 1959, about 1% of American women were divorced; about 9% of children were raised by single mothers. Imagine how daring it was for three divorced single moms to move into a three-story house and raise their kids together. Now imagine that these women are also accomplished, ambitious artists who convert each floor into its own separate studio. Finally, consider that the house is in New York’s (then) gritty Bowery district.
Such was the case for painter Lois Dodd, printmaker and illustrator Eleanor Magid, and the late sculptor Louise Kruger, who, for over 50 years, forged their families and careers at 30 East 2nd Street. The fascinating — and delightfully eccentric — trio are the subject of Katie Jacobs’s new documentary Artists in Residence, a clear-eyed chronicle of the sacrifices demanded of women who had the audacity to prioritize their creative lives over their roles as wives and mothers.
The film starts with a tender montage that juxtaposes contemporary and historic imagery of the Lower East Side with colorful swatches of a painted canvas or quilted fabric — gesturing to the ways in which the neighborhood came alive in the women’s artwork, just as the artists and their children livened the neighborhood. “Once upon a time I had a bed in here,” recounts Dodd, now 98, seated in the third floor, which she still occupies. “But I needed the space [for art] more than a I needed a bed.” The eldest of the women, and the first to move into the house, Dodd is wiry, wry, and quick witted. “Ten dollars more a month? Are you out of your mind?” she jests about the rent hike that prompted her and Magid to first attempt a tenant strike, and then, ultimately, purchase the property from their landlord. “He was easy to boss around, which was unusual,” she adds.
Artists Eleanor Magid and Lois Dodd pictured on the steps of their building.
Magid, 92 — who retains a spunky, bright-eyed vigor that belies her decades teaching at Queens College — brought up her daughter Gabriell on the first floor of the home. Now a mother with her own adult children, Gabriell does not mince words when it comes to the ways in which the arrangement was not ideal. “There were times when there wasn’t enough food in the house,” she shares. “[Mom’s] go-to was a cigarette, rather than food.” At the same time that her mother’s boho lifestyle may, as she put it, “not have been the best for a young girl to see,” Gabriell and the other children were not automatically doomed to a life of maladjustment.
The brood’s kinship network expanded dramatically during the public school strike of 1968, when Magid opened the house to local children, inviting them to partake in printmaking and bookbinding in her studio. “There was dancing and African history,” Gabriell laughs, “the things we wouldn’t have gotten at regular school.” From these early experiments in collective creativity, the Lower East Side Printshop was born, later becoming the largest openly accessible printshop in the city.
Lois Dodd’s bedroom.
As Louise Kruger passed away in 2013, her life and creative legacy are relayed by her friends, family, and gallerist Lori Bookstein, who relaunched the sculptor into the spotlight with an exhibition in 2007. “I remember her saying [about the exhibition opening] ‘People are gonna laugh at me,’” Bookstein narrates, “but people went bonkers … there was a line out the room of young people who just wanted to shake her hand.” Though Kruger arguably experienced greater critical acclaim than Magid and Dodd, her life comes across as the hardest. As enigmatic as she was hermetic, she evidently couldn’t provide her sons the attention they deserved. “My mother had to do her work and raise children at the same time,” shares Kruger’s oldest, Josh. “When she was doing her work, we were not to interrupt, but she was doing her work nearly 12 hours a day.” The last years of Kruger’s life were marked by a grueling battle with dementia, and she ultimately died in a nursing home, unaware that her second son had passed away in the same building the year earlier.
Where many filmmakers might relay such a story with a heavy hand and implicit judgment (Kruger was also in denial about her son’s addiction problems), Jacobs deftly mingles the harsh content of her characters’ lives with their more luminous edges. Yellow curtains billow from Dodd’s small Maine vacation house, its walls painted with bright branches to mimic the woods outside. Magid and Gabriell walk arm in arm in a sunlit park like comrades who’ve lived through it all. Josh shakes a dirty martini for his loyal cadre of friends. While the women’s choices came at a cost, the film suggests, they also paved the way for so many creative and social possibilities — no less true for single mothers making art today.
When Dodd visits the Bruce Museum in Connecticut for her first major museum retrospective, at 96, she sports a blue knit cap and walks with a cane. “If you live long enough,” she concludes, “people begin to realize, ‘I guess this person really means to do this! … Maybe the work’s not bad.’”
Eleanor Magid (left) and Lois Dodd (right) in conversation.
Artists in Residence screens at the Village East by Angelika theater (189 Second Avenue, East Village, Manhattan) on November 20, followed by a Q&A with writer/director Katie Jacobs, editor/producer Henry Hayes, composer Emily Wells, and artists Lois Dodd and Eleanor Magid. The film is available to stream as part of Doc NYC through November 30.
