It was pretty clear that everything in my studio had been completely destroyed: the side of the building it was on was absolutely gutted. The only object to survive was a steel chair I made in metal shop, shaped like a bottle cap. Three friends recognized and saved it from a pile of charred rubble in a dumpster, after cleanup crews began to haul out all the wreckage. The floor below us, where the juniors kept their paintings, had a lot of water damage, but some things were saved. Students whose work suffered water and smoke damage were told they would be connected with art restorers who could fix their work up, but the cost was prohibitive: Pratt wasn’t going to pay for it.

There were reports that someone was injured, but refused treatment and fled. This was widely believed to have been “Tent Girl,” who was probably a former student, who once lived on campus in a tent, and later camped out in the junior classrooms and made elaborate chalk drawings on the blackboards at night. There were no other reports of anyone being hurt, or being there at all. The fire escape in our studios had been nailed shut because someone had reported seeing a homeless person climb in through the window to sleep in the studio, on a cold winter night.

It was February, about 2/3 of the way through our senior year. We were supposed to be just about finishing our thesis work, getting ready to curate small group shows, mostly in groups of three or four, which we would install and promote ourselves. A few students had already had their shows. We had no materials, no space to work, and were tired, angry, traumatized, overwhelmed, and so on — for the most part, we didn’t want to keep on doing the sort of work we were doing before, or to try to remake that work, like nothing had happened.

Some of us picking through donated items.

Donors began to send us boxes of art supplies, which we picked through, trying to approximate what we had before. But donations of traditional art supplies could only do so much: students worked with things like priceless family heirlooms, power tools, and found objects. Not to mention the furniture, books, and supplies for other classes we stored in our studios. Art supply stores gave us gift cards for a few hundred dollars. Williamsburg Oils even sent their high-grade paint, which I use exclusively today, and because my paintings are small, I’m still using the same donated tubes seven years later. Monetary donations were eventually used to buy us a few specialty items. This was all generous of the donors, but the materials we had lost were accumulated over years, worth thousands, and could not be easily replaced. As far as I can recall, donations were the only compensation the school voluntarily offered.

A Golden paint t-shirt that was in a box of donations, which I wore until it was totally wrecked then cut out and kept the front. Someone told me this was a rare shirt.

Pratt rushed to provide us with space: first, we were put in an empty gallery, with tape lines marked off on the floor and walls to divide the space. The work we did in that space was largely experimental, and the lack of dividing walls meant we communicated and influenced one another heavily— basically all I did was throw things into vats of dye, and encourage my classmates to throw their things in before I dumped it out. That’s where the red paper came from: somebody had given Maria de Los Angeles, (who, if I recall, had not yet begun to make dresses) a bolt of white silk, and she gave me a few pieces of it. I decided to dye them red and blue in a cardboard box lined with a shower curtain, and made it large enough that I could also soak some heavy printmaking paper. Susan Luss put a few yards of folded canvas into the red dye vat after I was done with it, and that’s been a major part of her practice ever since.

My studio in the gallery with dyed silk and paper. The first thing I bought was a wheeled cart, since we would be moving studios a lot in the next few months. The second thing I bought was a new copy of Borges’s “Collected Fictions,” which I had been in the middle of reading.

We were eventually moved to a more permanent space that was built in half the gym, on top of the basketball courts, with real walls, sinks, and ventilation. There were meetings where we had to argue for these things, for basics like sinks and ventilation. I often felt my concerns weren’t being taken seriously because I was a student. In the eyes of those who would remain at the school after we left, the fire and reconstruction of the building were matters that affected the faculty and administration long-term, but would only affect the graduating seniors for a few more months. The faculty likely felt that we were wasting what little time we had left arguing, when we should be in our studios, working. And it was there, in the gym, that we began to make serious work.

Studio spaces in the gym, with plywood flooring covering the basketball court

I made silkscreened posters for the dates our senior shows were supposed to be and posted them all over the school. I copied the names from a printed list and apparently spelled some of my classmates’ names wrong. The hands I drew for this poster were re-used by students from Parsons to create a poster for the show they put on for us at NRM gallery.

Since we no longer had enough work or time or space to go on with the self-curated group shows which seniors traditionally have, our school president Thomas Schutte announced he had something big in store for us instead: we were going to have one show together, sponsored by Larry Gagosian — the man who may be the the world’s most powerful art dealer, if no one else has usurped that title at the moment. He makes nearly a billion a year in art sales, in any case. It was a big deal; at least, it sounded like a big deal.

A professional curator was going to come and choose pieces to put in the show. The curator seemed, to me, biased toward work that was the least like traditional painting: we were being taught that painting was thought of as uncool and old-fashioned in the art world. I’m not sure if that was true. We were also being taught that “identity art” was dead, right at the rise of the contemporary trans rights movement.

One of the pieces she chose was an eight second video in which I threw a slice of pizza into a toilet in the photography lab, something that was kind of bullshit, but is kind of less so when contextualized as the first time I, as a transgender person, felt safe doing something kind of (innocuously) fucked up in a public bathroom. (My previous experience with gendered college facilities: on my first night in a UCF dorm, my roommate called security on me while I was asleep.) I didn’t provide any context with the piece. I never provided context for anything, at the time, wanting to be validated in the idea that my work was good without it. I do not think this strategy was good for me. I offered hand-silkscreened DVDs of the video (they had menu screens and everything) for sale for something absurd like $100.