Cara Perlman Bio | Part 1 - 1970s
I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973 with a BFA and came to New York. There was lots of cheap space in a very remote TriBeCa which had no name then. I rented 2000 sq. ft. on Chambers Street in early 1974, put in a bathroom and an abbreviated kitchen, painted it fluorescent pink and started making things. Initially I started dragging in found stuff from the street, nurses uniforms, boxes, books, doll parts, lumber, anything that looked interesting and put things together.
All four of us in the building were artists but hardly anyone else lived on the block at that point. There were regular shootouts at Ralph’s Bar on the corner of Hudson and Chambers. I used to hide behind a car until it was safe to move.
My first job was across the street as a security guard at the local cheese store, Cheeses of All Nations. I never caught anyone stealing. The owner was drunk everyday by late afternoon and gave me a loads of free cheese.
(Julia Hayward, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, and Walter Robinson)
The local bar, three blocks away on Duane Street was Barnabus Rex. It was a tiny place with a pool table that took up almost the entire room, a jukebox and a bar. There was beer for sixty-cents and shots. Baranabus was an artist hangout, very hip and crazy. Lots of art luminaries. Julia Hayward aka Duka Delight, Richard Serra, Kiki Smith, Mike aka Walter Robinson, Diego Cortez.
(Diego Cortez)
(Sony Portapak)
By early 1976 I sold my improvements to another tenant and moved from the loft to the new affordable housing high rise on Chambers and Greenwich St. I lived on the 24th floor facing the Hudson River. I wanted to be modern, live high up and work less material centric. I was trying things out. I got my hands on the first Portapak, the first portable video recording system, made by Sony. It had a huge reel-to-reel tape deck. An assortment of cords went out from the deck into a big heavy handheld camera. I built a wagon for the deck so I could take it outside and try stuff. It was very clumsy and tiring but it was something amazing too. I found a way to make performances and have a record. I made a video of cooking a chicken on top of the stove but didn’t put it in a pan. Artist pals John Torreano and James Nares came over and did narrations of “The Country versus the City” or “The Four Seasons”. I remember James saying, with his upper class English accent, “I don’t like the fall, everything is falling.” I started making objects again as part of the video projects and unfortunately I was damaging the brand new parquet floor. It six months later and it was time to go.
(John Torreano and James Nares)
My art pal Andrea Callard found an empty building and asked me if I wanted a floor. She had also been my neighbor on Chambers Street and it sounded great. Andrea and I and Bernice Rubin went to talk to the landlord, an older gent named Nathan Seril who had an office on Franklin Street He was a little nervous, he said, renting to girls. But he said okay finally and he put us in his Rolodex under G for the Girls. We moved to Lispenard Street, one block south of Canal Street between Broadway and Church in the summer of 1976.
(Andrea Callard)
I was still a regular at Barnabus Rex and the more upscale, sit down and eat diner, Magoos. I was also making more friends in the art world. I started hanging out with Tom Otterness, a sweet guy from Kansas and Alan Moore, a thin, impoverished lefty. We would walk around endlessly and talk. Sometimes we would be at someone’s house and then a few people would yell up (no one had door bells in those days) and we’d all hang out. A group of artists were forming. We argued lefty politics and art. The gallery system was bankrupt, predictable and boring.
(Tom Otterness and Alan Moore)
By 1978 I was part of an artist collective. The first name was Green Corporation, aka Green Corp. That lasted for a short time until it turned into Collaborative Projects, aka Colab. There were about 30 of us, white and straight, with a few exceptions. Everyone was pretty ambitious and traumatized. There was endless arguing about politics and means of getting from A to B. It was also pretty sexist, especially at the beginning. But we wanted to change the rules and make a new version of what it meant to be together. We realized that we had some power because there were lots of talented artists with strength in numbers. Colab got some grant money early on, then more and more. We put on several gallery type shows, The Doctors and Dentists Show, The Batman Show, the Manifesto Show in people’s lofts. We had a series of Access Cable TV shows; All Color News, Potato Wolf, a live show of skits that I initiated, and Red Curtain, a pre-taped movie channel. We had several versions of the A More Store, a roving shop that had several different locations at different times. A More Store sold artist multiples. There was also a catalog for the A More Store that mailed products directly to the buyer. In 1980 we mounted The Times Square Show on 40th St. right off 7th Ave. The building was in an old massage parlor. Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf were kids who showed up. Jean Michel Basquiat also showed up as SAMO with his writings on the walls. It was four floors of whatever anyone wanted to do. The rules were, that it was open to others but we had to agree that whoever was participating was basically okay, that no one else could just take it over. Materials included mashed potatoes, manifestos, drawings, paintings, sculpture and installations of every imaginable shape and form. We also had film and video shows there.
(Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean Michel Basquiat)
In advance of the show we took out 3, 30-second TV spots on WNEW, channel 5. I got to make one of those. It was a thrill to see my 30-second spot on late night TV. We also got a grant to use the Spectacolor Board to advertise the show. The board is still on 42nd Street facing Broadway and 7th Avenue where the ball goes down on New Years Eve. It was, in 1980, one of the only moving image boards on the block.