5 Questions with Molly Prentiss, author of ‘Tuesday Nights in 1980’

Molly Prentiss was a Writer in Residence at Workspace at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center and was chosen as an Emerging Writer Fellow by the Aspen Writers Foundation. Her first book Tuesday Nights in 1980 follows an artist, critic, and determined young woman through the explosive art scene in New York of the early 1980s when the nature and meaning of art itself is being upended.

1. There’s a whole narrative around New York City in the 1980s that’s drawn a number of writers to the subject. What do you think it is about that time period that continues to inspire creative works?

I think that people are attracted to energy and connection, and to creative exchange — and New York in the late 70s and early 80s was teeming with that kind of sexy electricity. Yes, it was dangerous. Yes, it was gritty and gross. But there was a sense of possibility in that moment, the sense that anything could and would happen — and it did, especially artistically. I think it is that possibility that has drawn writers — even those who are not old enough to have lived through the 80s in New York, like myself — to mine that time period for their stories. In a city that feels increasingly sterile and unaffordable, and as young creatives are pushed farther and farther away from any center and from each other, I think we want to feel some of that heat, that surge of community and creation. We want our possibility back, or at least to imagine what it might feel like.

2. How did you approach this novel? Did you start with the characters or the setting, or how did the setting inform your shaping of the characters?

This book started with the characters, who were initially protagonists in various short stories I had been writing. At one point, I began pulling them into each others’ stories, having them meet, drafting bridges from one to the next, and creating new characters that inhabited their worlds. It was these people — their lives and their timelines and their narrative arcs — that led me to New York City in 1980. When we all landed there together, we decided to stay.

3. Tuesday Nights in 1980 is very much about the art scene and the ways life and art interact. Can you describe how you think about that relationship? What about the interplay between art and fiction?

The characters in this book are all searching for ways to define themselves and explain themselves. Art calls to each of them as a way to do these things — it not only allows them to express their particular vision, but it also gives them a place in the world, a way to position themselves in a city and a scene and a collective history. In the end, though, each of these characters must confront the nature of their relationship to art. Though it has become the focus of their life, is it all of their life? Do they exist beyond it? Can they see themselves and the world without it? I think these questions come up for every artist or writer, and is true in the relationship to art and fiction as well. At what point does the thing you made up become the real thing? At what point does the self end and the art begin?

4. Moving back into the present: what are some of the highlights of the New York art scene today? Any favorite galleries to share?

I recently saw an amazing show by the 79-year old painter Juanita McNeely at the Mitchell Algus Gallery. McNeely was given six months to live when she was sixteen years old, and went on to lead a long life and develop a massive body of work that is at once charming, grotesque, political, and beautiful. A friend of mine runs a really cool gallery in Williamsburg called Moiety — their shows often have an element of surprise, optical delight, or humor that I enjoy; I especially loved a performance by artists Carey Denniston and Ander Mikalson that I saw there last summer called North Shore, in which tap dancers were hired to dance to the sound of chiseling bricks in their headphones. I love the new Whitney location and what they are doing there. I often like the shows that the JTT Gallery, in the Lower East Side. Though I don’t always remember which gallery is located in which basement or second floor or storefront, I love re-finding them while wandering around the Lower East side, like little surprises.

5. Critics talk about how hard it can be to write about art. How was it for you? Difficult? Easy? How did you do it?

For me, writing about art was the least difficult part of writing this book. This is for one simple reason: I just wrote about artworks in a way that felt honest to me, explained them the way I saw them. I am not an expert, by any means, in art or art criticism or art history. I just like it. I am often moved by it. It looks beautiful to me or it looks unappealing. It rings true or it doesn’t. I am often wrong in my judgments, I’m sure, although I am also of the mind that — like when tasting wine — one cannot really be wrong about their opinion about art. It tastes good to you or it doesn’t. The only “wrong” way to look at art is to close yourself off from it before you give it a chance, which is when you can actually see it. The only requirement is that you are open.

Bonus: Shaking things up a little from our usual recommendation question, what are some of the art books you couldn’t live without?

Some of these are actual art books, others just incorporate art in some way.

• With the Void, Full Powers by Yves Klein
• Hockney’s Pictures: A Definitive Retrospective
• Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda
• Let’s See by Peter Schejeldahl
• The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
• The Notebooks by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Larry Warsh
• Kahlo by Andrea Kettenman
• My 1980s by Wayne Kostenbaum
• Bluets by Maggie Nelson
• Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Henri Matisse: Cut Outs, Drawing with Scissors
• A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
• Ways of Seeing by John Berger
• The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
• Wednesday is Indigo Blue by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman

Tuesday Nights in 1980 is available for purchase here.

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