In 2018, Kunning Huang abandoned art. The Chinese-born, New York-based photographer had just graduated with a BFA from the Cooper Union, which he paid for through a combination of grants and scholarships, but the demands of making ends meet outside the walls of the institution proved to be difficult.
“I basically stopped making anything for three years,” Huang, now 31, says. Back then, his days were defined by endless applications and interviews. “I thought it would be easy to find a job with this degree, but it turns out it doesn’t mean anything.” Eventually, Huang landed an internship doing design for a start-up food chain, which in turn led to a series of gigs photographing food for Chinese restaurants. At one point, he was driving a delivery truck for an ice sculpture vendor.
Then the pandemic hit. The market for ice sculptures melted overnight, as did Huang’s other money-making prospects. But while he lost work, he also regained the time and he put it to good use, converting his small Brooklyn bedroom into an ad hoc studio where, for the first time since college, he began making art again. The momentum outlasted the lockdown, and now Huang splits his days doing installation photography for galleries and making work in his shared Sunset Park studio. (He pays around $3 per square foot.) A series of the artist’s inky, graphic prints on rice paper and canvas are included in Canon, a show of work by three Cooper alumni on view until 11 May at Kapp Kapp in Tribeca.
Juggling odd jobs is not just common for most young artists in New York, it is an initiation rite—an age-old gauntlet through which all strivers must pass. For a long time, the resources proffered by the city offset the sacrifices required to live here. In New York, contemporary art is palpable, plentiful and mostly free. There are elite colleges, world-class institutions, even old-school artist communities like Westbeth. You can make it here.
Kunning Huang, who abandoned his photography career for several years, now shares a studio in Sunset Park Courtesy of Kunning Huang
But Huang’s hustle illustrates a new set of challenges facing young, city-bound creatives today, particularly those trying to course-correct careers waylaid by the pandemic and its economic aftershocks. Even by the standards of recent generations, this cohort’s New York is dauntingly expensive and competitive, a mecca of soaring studio rents, dwindling jobs and virtually no affordable housing options. Why do they stay?
Infectious energy
The painter Carrie Rudd did not come from a wealthy family, but she won a rare scholarship that allowed her to attend graduate school for free. In 2018, she entered the MFA programme at Hunter College in Manhattan. Tuition was free, as was the school-owned studio that came with it, but life in the city was not. Things only grew tougher still in 2021, when she graduated and moved into a shared, 500 sq. ft studio on her own dime. (She and a friend split both the space and its $3 per square foot rent down the middle.) “It was a stressful, stressful year,” she says. “I busted my ass working as many jobs as I could to support myself.”
Carrie Rudd had to take on multiple jobs to hold down her studio at first but the decision has paid off
Photo: Adrian Cardenas Courtesy Polina Berlin Gallery
The investment paid off, allowing the now 29-year-old artist the space to work more freely and confidently as she honed the vocabulary of gestures that jangle and compete in the cramped space of her paintings. The upstart art dealer Polina Berlin offered her a solo show in 2022, and Rudd’s third exhibition with the gallery, The Narcissism of Small Differences, is on view until 4 May. “There’s great art and wonderful galleries and institutions in other cities, of course, but the amount in New York—there’s no place like it,” she says. “The city doesn’t overwhelm me. It excites me. It makes me want to be better and do more and be a part of more.”
Rudd’s sentiment echoes a common refrain cited by artists when asked to reflect on the perks of New York. Access to world-class art is a popular response; so is the infectious energy of city life. The latter quality is critical for Maggie Ellis, 32, who paints kinetic crowd scenes that recall the bebop swing of Ernie Barnes. “The drive that I feel comes from being here,” says Ellis, who recently downsized to a shoebox apartment in Chinatown so that she could upgrade to a 600 sq. ft studio in Dumbo ($3.17 per square foot).
There is a practical reason so many artists flock to the Big Apple, too. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” the saying goes, but for contemporary artists, that is not necessarily true. New York is not just the best place to be an artist; it is one of the only places. “I can actually imagine myself making enough money to be a full-time artist here,” says 28-year-old Thomas Blair, another one of the artists in Kapp Kapp’s Canon show. Brown is at present saving on housing rent by living with a relative so that he can devote more money and time to his 600 sq. ft studio (the rent is around $2.50 per square foot) in East Williamsburg. “To me, New York offers the greatest chance at that type of life,” he says.
“Someone said to me the other day, ‘To survive in New York, you either have to be rich or creative,’” says the author Bianca Bosker, whose new book, Get the Picture, recounts her recent, semi-undercover experiences trying on various art-world jobs—studio assistant, gallery guide, museum security guard—to understand, in her words, the “bloody business of art history getting made…before it gets cleaned up and romanticised”.
“Over and over again, I met artists who were juggling one, two, three or more jobs so that they could squeeze art into whatever hours were left in the day,” Bosker says. Some she witnessed skipping meals, doctor visits and trips to dying parents so that they could focus on their work. At least one gallery intern turned out to be homeless and would sneak away midday to shoplift lunch. “I met artists who had to do mental math to figure out if they could afford a bagel. I met artists whose art lives better than they do. It sleeps soundly in the studio while they wake up on a friend’s couch covered in cat pee.”
Sacrificial horse trades
Through her research, Bosker developed both an appreciation for the sacrificial horse trades artists make with the city and a real respect for those bold enough to continually pony up. “On one level, it doesn’t make any sense at all to move here as an artist. On the other hand, there’s a way in which it makes all the sense in the world,” she says. “The grind of the city can be hell, but it’s also this Edenic garden of inspiration.”
But Bosker is wary of the danger in glorifying the grind, too. “While it’s incredibly impressive how resourceful artists are, it would be a whole lot more impressive if we could make their lives easier so they could get back to focusing on what they do so well.”