Martha Wilson Interview Part II: Money Matters
- Martha Wilson Interview Part IIMoney Matters
Since your life after 1976 has been almost synonymous with Franklin Furnace, I'd like you to give us an idea of why you chose to move to New York City and eventually dedicate your professional life to this organization you've founded.
As you know, I was living in Canada, in Halifax, with my boyfriend. He dumped my ass after we had already bought a house and restored it. Well, he was a gracious guy. He paid me the equity that he and I agreed I had put into the property that we owned in common so that I could afford to leave. He gave me $5,000 when he sold the property.
I had been tiptoeing around the idea of calling myself an artist: I'm going to be an artist and I'm going to put my personality back together somewhere else. Richards just dumped my ass, so I have to reconstruct my personality from the ground up. So I decided to go to New York and called Simone Forti. Simone had been a visiting artist in Halifax at the Nova Scotia College for Art and Design and had rashly offered to be available if anybody wanted to come to New York and crash there. So I called her and told her that I wanted to come to New York in a flash, and I lived with her for 30 days. I got to New York and had to find a place to live, ended up living in Billy Apple's studio on 23rd Street, but Jacki wanted to divorce Billy's ass. So I moved to 112 Franklin Street and at that point Richards had sold the house in Canada and had given me the check for $5,000.
What did you do with that $5,000?
I basically set up my living situation, but I used the remainder of the $5,000 as my capital investment in this new business at Franklin Furnace.
Before you started working on Franklin Furnace, where else had you worked in New York?
One year I worked in Harry N. Abrams, Inc., and one year I worked at Brooklyn College. Then Brooklyn College fired the English and Art teachers in the great budget cutback of 1975, and I was on Unemployment. And Unemployment was the first grant I ever got. I never looked for a job for a minute. I used the money to start my business and I knew I wanted to be a not-for-profit organization.
Didn't you need more money than what you got from Unemployment Insurance to run Franklin Furnace and for your own living expenses?
I needed more money, absolutely! At that time the state and federal agencies were all actually seeking out worthy projects and saying you can apply to us for money. So the lady from the New York State Council on the Arts came down, looked us over, checked out what we were doing and said, the deadline is March 1st and you can apply for money. And Brian O'Doherty took me to lunch with Richard Kostelanetz and said the same thing, you know, I'm the head of the Visual Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, we want to support budding young arts organizations, and you can apply to us for money. So I did that, and in the first year I got $5,000 from the New York State Council [End Page 55] on the Arts. The budget for the first year was $12,000 so it must have been five from the NEA. And then the rest of the money that I had to work with was $2,000 left over from this check from Richards, and Unemployment Insurance. That was the $12,000 that comprised the first year's budget.
What did you do with that budget during the first year?
Rent. Rent was a big number. Rent was $500 a month, which I was already splitting with my roommate. That was a lot of money for us! There was...
