In 2005 the prize-winning historian Nell Irvin Painter put down her pen and picked up a paintbrush.
After 17 years at Princeton University, the publication of seven groundbreaking books, and terms at the helms of two prestigious historical associations, Ms. Painter said goodbye to all that. She retired at 62 and spent $150,000 to pursue a bachelor-of-fine-arts degree from Rutgers University, followed by an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2011.
And although she received a Centennial Medal that same year from the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for her historical work, the former professor, once described by some peers as an imperious troublemaker who refused to be boxed in, is not particularly interested in returning to the ivory tower.
In an interview here at her art studio, a few blocks from Penn Station, Ms. Painter, who is now 70, describes having given away all the books in her library. She says she’ll never write another word of history.
Few historians retire. Whether or not they continue to teach, some famous historians, like the late John Hope Franklin and Gerda Lerner, keep writing until they can’t write anymore. Bernard Bailyn, who is 90, recently published a 600-page book about the chaotic establishment of the Jamestown settlement in the early 17th century.
If you suggest, as some have, that Ms. Painter’s decision to abandon history writing has something to do with the famously scathing review by the distinguished historian Eric Foner of her last book, The History of White People (W.W. Norton, 2010), she will quickly correct you.
Mr. Foner said that the book failed to do the historical work that its title anticipated, that Ms. Painter’s “selective” account of 2,000 years of history oversimplified both the progressive activism of many white people and two generations of previous historical work on whiteness as a set of constantly changing ideas and insidious social practices.
Ms. Painter shrugs off the review and says her decision to close the door on history scholarship has to do with looking forward, not back.
The Unexpected
Nell Irvin Painter carved out a career by introducing lives and perspectives that had been undervalued in the master narrative of American history: the experiences of black and American Indian people, women, workers, the poor, and children traumatized by generations of violence.
In The Narrative of Hosea Hudson (Harvard University Press, 1979), she wrote about how a black Communist mobilized Southern sharecroppers. With Exodusters (Alfred Knopf, 1976), her best-known book, she captured the aspirations and dreams of ordinary African-Americans who left the South after Reconstruction. Ms. Painter was the first historian to document the westward migration of black people while chronicling the uncertainty of race relations during the 1880s, before the machinery of white supremacy had fired up. Her biography, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (W.W. Norton, 1996), provided a layered reading of the visual record left behind by that eloquent and illiterate abolitionist preacher.
“Many white scholars who were accustomed to historians’ sticking to one century and one body of research didn’t know what to do with the wide range of subjects Nell wrote about,” says her friend Mark D. Naison, a professor of African-American history at Fordham University. “She not only defied their ideas of what someone in ‘Black History’ or ‘Women’s History’ should do, but exposed the narrowness of their own body of work. I think she made some historians uncomfortable because it was impossible to pigeonhole her.”
“Which suited Nell just fine,” Mr. Naison adds. “I think she enjoyed defying people’s expectations.”
But defying expectations and struggling to be heard finally wore her out. “I thought the battles we fought in the 1970s were settled, but they were coming back in the 2000s,” Ms. Painter says. She won’t revisit the details but will say only that a few of her Princeton colleagues did not want to hear her vision of how scholars today should examine issues of race, class, and gender.
Ms. Painter sums up her sentiments about those battles and being called a troublemaker: “I’ve often felt invisible because I’m not a pathetic black person.”
Still, given the freedom she now enjoys from membership in a faculty, why not pursue her first love? Why insist that she will not attend conferences or even read the latest history books? She parts the air with her palms down, shakes her head with a faint grimace, and says: “I’ve moved on.”
Everything in Order
Now, she says, she is fortunate enough to pursue her other love because she saved money, she does not carry the burden of supporting adult children, and her ailing 94-year-old father made sure she wouldn’t have to shoulder his health-care expenses.
She recently settled into her art studio, an enviable 2,200-square-foot work space in the Ironbound section of downtown Newark, in a four-story brick building that was once a toy factory. Her Social Security benefits cover the monthly rent. Her husband, Glenn Shafer, a mathematician and dean of the business school at Rutgers University’s Newark and New Brunswick campuses, is her patron, she says.
The studio is bright, and every inch is organized. There’s a wall of tools with brushes, rulers, putty knives, and a hand-held mirror. Aluminum cabinets are lined with jelly jars full of nails, razor blades, clips, and glitter. A postcard tacked to the wall above her computer in a separate office reads, “Alles in ordnung” (“everything is in order”)—a reminder, she says, when things around her get crazy.
The day after Barack Obama’s re-election, Ms. Painter, who has deep brown, unlined skin and a close-cropped gray Mohawk that belies her age, sits down on a plush green carpet. Outside, the streets are alive with the voices of people speaking Spanish and variations of Portuguese as pellets of sleet fall from the sky and the downtown traffic churns in all directions.
Under the bright lights and warmth, she carefully lays out 25 self-portraits, one by one. As she hovers above this collection, she talks about how her parents told her she could do anything she wanted as long as she did it well, about how she always threw herself in places where others didn’t think a black woman belonged, and about the difference between being a scholar and an artist.
“As an historian, I would take your hand, and I tried to make things clear so readers could go from A to C. Clarity was my great strength. As an artist, it’s not my job to explain.”
Hanging on the walls of a petite gallery within the studio are eight colorful maps that merge places associated with the slave trade from antiquity (Ukraine, the Crimea, the eastern Mediterranean) to modern times (West Africa, the Caribbean, the southern United States). “If you look at my work and say, ‘Gee, those are nice colors,’ and that’s all you take away, then I’m fine with that,” she says.
The names of countries and rivers are in the wrong places. “As a painter,” she says, “I face no verisimilitude requirement.” She says she doesn’t get hung up on other people’s criticisms of her work and is unapologetic about leaving the edges rough, or notes to herself visible on the canvases.
Stanley N. Katz, a former colleague at Princeton, points out that Ms. Painter’s artwork “plays with your historical mind.”
“Nell’s work strikes me as purely someone who was historically trained applying that sensitivity to the visualization of a problem. I don’t see that as an evolution away from history but toward it,” Mr. Katz says.
And he doesn’t believe that Ms. Painter won’t write more history. “There’s a strong possibility that some issue she cares about along the line will provoke her to express herself historically,” he says.
For now, far from the fray of academe, Nell Irvin Painter lifts paintbrush to canvas, bringing her artistic visions to life. After spending her career researching, analyzing, and interpreting the past, her eyes are fixed firmly on the future. “I do this,” she says, crossing her arms over her chest with a smile, “because I can.”
