The Sign Painter
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Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 6 July 2021
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ilona Granet was a New York art-scene fixture who won the praise of the art world when she put up anti-harassment street signs in lower Manhattan in the mid- 1980s. Her career seemed like a sure thing, but three decades on, and so much more art later, it still hasn’t materialized, even as her contemporaries are now hanging in museums. This episode is not about the familiar myth of making it, but the mystery of not making it. What happens, to an artist—to anyone—when they’re good enough, but that’s not enough?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before we start, I want to let you know that this episode contains multiple descriptions of sexual assault and a reference to suicide. |
| 0:15.4 | I'm sorry. I, um... |
| 0:18.8 | You didn't do anything wrong. |
| 0:19.7 | I didn't do anything. |
| 0:39.7 | Okay. My first words, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I, um... You didn't do anything wrong. I didn't do anything. Okay. My first words, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That's the artist Alona Granite. She's greeting me and Ben, Dakota Rings producer, as we arrive at her studio in New York's East Village back in 2019. Are you taping me already? Apparently a rule of recording is you're supposed to tape the entranceway? |
| 0:43.2 | Alona's lived and worked here since 1982. |
| 0:51.5 | When she moved in, she was in her 30s, a performance artist, a sign painter, and a part of what everyone called the downtown scene. |
| 0:53.1 | I just walked by Moises again? |
| 0:53.6 | You know? |
| 0:54.6 | The Bob gets there. And the chocolate, these long cigars, Iises again, you know? The bubka's there. |
| 0:57.9 | And the chocolate, these long cigars, I'm like, you could die. |
| 1:03.5 | I think if you saw her today, a very petite woman strolling down Second Avenue, |
| 1:07.6 | in blue suede booties, her white hair piled atop her head, |
| 1:13.3 | walking her very slight Italian greyhound, you'd think, New York character. |
| 1:18.5 | And you'd be right. I've known her my whole life. She's one of my mother's oldest friends. |
| 1:23.6 | So, yeah, I thought I'd go like in order of the signs. |
| 1:29.4 | Her studio is jammed with decades of work in stacks and piles and milk crates. |
| 1:35.9 | There's a bank of windows on one wall and a huge pale blue painting with small ghostly figures on it, on another. |
| 1:39.9 | But most of Alona's work is not paintings on canvas. |
| 1:44.1 | It's signs, graphic images painted onto metal. |
| 1:49.2 | But this one is from a series men who were acting poorly towards women. |
| 1:52.3 | So they were actually about sexual harassment. |
... |
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