This Historian Gave Up an Ivy League Professorship. Now She Says She Is ‘the Uncoolest Artist in the World.’

Nell Painter rose to the height of success as a historian. When she gave up her Princeton University professorship to reinvent herself as an artist at age 64, pursuing a B.F.A. at Rutgers University, she nursed high ambitions for her new career.

She hoped to become a serious painter, just as she had been a serious historian — the leader of scholarly associations and the author of notable books like Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (W.W. Norton, 1996) and The History of White People (Norton, 2010). To achieve that, she dreamed of attending graduate school at the elite Yale School of Art, within a university that years earlier had offered her a chaired professorship and awarded her an honorary doctorate.

Yale’s art school flat-out rejected Painter’s application.

That dismissal “measured the miles separating the world of art from the world of history,” Painter writes in a forthcoming book about her painful yet rewarding late-life metamorphosis, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over (Counterpoint).

She ended up at her second choice, the Rhode Island School of Design, earning an M.F.A. in 2011. Her memoir of those years is many things: an appraisal of artists living and dead, a hymn to her home state of New Jersey, a meditation on her parents’ deaths, a reflection on the travails of leading a scholarly association. It’s also a sharp critique of the teaching methods and social environment in M.F.A. programs.

Painter, now 75, spoke with The Chronicle about her transformation and her life since.

You write in your book that your motivation for going to art school was partly “freedom from Truth.” Tell us why you wanted that.

In history, the larger question was always, Is this representative? Is this person, or this event, or this phenomenon, reflective of a larger truth? Does it stand for more than itself? And in art, it doesn’t have to. For me that was very freeing, because I don’t stand for a larger group. Obviously I am a black woman, and my body and my experience in life reflect that part of my identity. But there’s so much else about me that doesn’t fit. So as an artist, I don’t have to fit. I don’t have to be a good black person. I don’t have to ask myself, What does this mean for the race, or for black women?

You started off as an undergrad at Rutgers. How did the students react to your presence? And what did you make of them?

Mostly they were beautifully self-absorbed. And that is one of the gifts of youth. I never could rise to their level of self-absorption because I had so much else going on. In graduate school, it felt a little off, because I was not forming a club. I was not in the club.

You say grad school was euphoric but also consistently humiliating, writing that the first year “ground me down into a pathetic, insecure little stump.” What makes you say that?

Well, let me say, it wasn’t just RISD. Everybody I’ve spoken to, practically, either had such experiences or knows of people who did. And it wasn’t even just visual art — people who were in creative writing and so forth. There’s something about art graduate school that can be pretty pernicious. I had a teacher who would start every crit with, “You can’t draw, and you can’t paint.” I didn’t feel that I knew the steps in the occupation of a visual artist. But mostly I felt I was just so bad at it.

It’s a mismatch between what the job of teaching art is and what the criteria are for being a teacher. For one thing, there are no clear standards. There are all kinds of ways of being a visual artist. And there are all kinds of ways of being a visual artist who has gone to graduate school and has the M.F.A., which is a terminal degree. So on the one hand, there are a billion ways to do this. And on another hand, how you get chosen, or what the criteria are for imparting the knowledge, is in visual art having a gallery, and being shown, and selling your stuff, and having your stuff bought in public collections. But that is not the same as wanting to teach or being interested in what the skills are. Or even thinking that there are skills. Many people who teach both in undergraduate and graduate school are convinced that you cannot teach art.

Your book offers a glimpse into the social world of this super-elite art school. It’s not a flattering picture. You describe RISD as a “blinkered” and socially disengaged institution. “This was not my place,” you write, “and these were not my people.” Could you talk a bit about why you felt so out of place?

I was so old. I was not only older than the students, who could have been my grandchildren, I was older than my teachers, who could have been my children. And so the huge impediment was one of age and generation.

And I was really far from home. New Jersey is really a melting pot. And Newark is a very black and brown city. Providence was very, very different. So you could say it was the demographics also.

And then the other thing, which was kind of an American issue, is the segregation of the knowledge. So for instance, I had done a book called Creating Black Americans before The History of White People. I had, with the help of friends and colleagues, kind of given myself a course in black art. The book is not an art history. It’s a narrative history. But the images are black fine art. So I knew about all these artists. And all those artists, almost to a person, were not in a) the art history I studied and b) the world of contemporary art.

You describe being bypassed by a faculty-patronage system that operated outside the formal curriculum. How did that system work, and how did that compare with history?

It was just much more intense — once again, because of the lack of standards, or the lack of engagement in teaching. Certainly in history there were steps that you could take, and that you could see. It felt to me much more mysterious and hidden in art school. Now I may be wrong about that. Maybe I just was very lucky as a historian and unlucky as an artist. But my sense is that because the art world is so much more dependent on personal relations, that patronage system is much more important.

History comes off well in comparison with the art world in your book.

Yes, it does. And my art colleagues jumped on me about that.

Except for one thing. For academics, one interesting aspect of your memoir may be your description of the “torture” of being president of the Organization of American Historians. You talk about battling your “adversary,” the former executive director. Can you talk about what he did that so angered you?

No. No. No. No. For a reason that is very short.

What is your life like now?

I graduated in 2011 from RISD. And then for a year after that I was in residence at Aferro, a nonprofit artist space in Newark. That’s where I found my community of artists. And then, in 2012, I got my own studio, in an older industrial building in Newark. So we live on the fourth floor, and my studio is in the basement.

I had the great pleasure a year ago of being artist in residence at the Brodsky Center, back at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers. And I made several prints. There’s one series that’s called “You Say This Can’t Really Be America.” It’s sort of the conversation that I had early in 2017 with friends who were just astonished and appalled. They were saying this is not the America they know. And I say, Yeah, yeah, this is the America I know. Last fall, the Smith College Museum of Art bought a piece. And just now the Minneapolis Institute of Art bought one as well.

Do you feel like you’ve achieved your goal of being as professional a painter as you were a historian? Have you found a place in the art world?

No. I’ll never have enough time. And it’s just so uncool to be an old artist. It feels wrong to be an old artist who doesn’t have the skills of say, 20 or 30 years of work. I’m the uncoolest artist in the world, and always will be. But that’s true of the vast majority of artists.

But you show your work regularly and get paid for it.

Yeah. So the difference is that if I walk into a room of writers or historians, people will know my name. If I walk into a room of artists, no one will have heard of me. They may have heard of me as a historian, because The History of White People is a very popular book among artists. But they will not know me from my hand.

Are you OK with that?

No. But that’s how it is.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.