Well, hello there!

I keep getting emails from Beehiiv prompting me to write my first post, and I can’t help but notice that they seem to be getting increasingly… threatening? severe? Well, something, that’s for sure. So while I was intending to write something in a few weeks, I’m getting the sense that maybe I ought to do it ASAP, for fear that this platform will delete my account if I don’t post something.

I am here to say that moving sucks, that of all the industries that have been “disrupted” over the last decade and change, I don’t understand why moving hasn’t been one of them. The process of taking all of your life’s belongings and putting them in boxes is pure bullshit, and I don’t like it at all (this is a radical take, I know). It costs a fortune and it’s the kind of money-spending that just goes into thin air, and also it takes forever. You somehow pack up what you think is your very last spring sweater, only to find your closet morphing into something from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and somehow that sweater has had multiple babies and how on earth do you have such an overwhelming number of sweaters? I pretty much live in leggings and a tank top — where did all these clothes come from??

But then it’s that multiplied by every single thing you own — oh, you thought you owned a normal amount of scotch tape or printer paper or old cell phones? You do not. You own ten times as much crap as you ever thought you did, and it’s all here and it all needs to be dealt with and bringing it costs a fortune and so does throwing it all away en masse (aka getting a dumpster). It’s hot, it’s sweaty, it sucks.

Ok I wrote all of that a couple of weeks ago when we were in the midst of packing and now that’s done. We loaded everything up into the moving van and now they’re holding our stuff hostage — which is to say, the cheap-ish (not cheap; like $6,500, but that’s cheap for moving two 50+ year olds and their various collections across country and by far the lowest, perhaps suspiciously so, bid we got) moving company has our stuff in storage in the Bronx and we’re already in Illinois. At a hotel. Because we don’t have any stuff.

We do have a big old house that I’m really excited about, and this being central Illinois, we bought it for way less than a studio apartment would have cost in Jersey City. We have to buy new stuff like a bed and a sofa because moving them would cost about as much as all that stuff cost 15+ years ago when we bought it from Ikea, only now it’s all falling apart so that didn’t seem like a smart investment. So our apartment in JC — which we still own and still have to go back to, to completely clear out, clean, paint, fix, etc., for selling, at some point? hopefully soon??? — still has those things in it while all our other things are in limbo and arriving here sometime next week, we hope. New furniture starts showing up Friday. We can only get a few things at a time, so we ordered a bed and a kitchen table and some chairs, and will just take it a bit at a time.

So now we’ve reached the “vacation” part of our journey, which is holing up at this hotel and walking the two miles to the new place to sort of gawk at it. Yes, we’ll get a car and a bike and all that good stuff too, but one thing at a time. For now, we’re just trying to detox from the last two months of utter chaos. I feel like I have been completely disassociating for the last few weeks at least, possibly way longer. Is this real? Is anything real? I don’t know anymore.

I had a few people say they thought I was keeping my new job/home a secret, and not really — or that wasn’t my intention. I changed it on LinkedIn and other places, but I just didn’t really mention it in Neighborhood Character. I don’t know — somehow it felt weird to really get into it. But we’ve moved to Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, and my new job is at Illinois Wesleyan University. I’m an Assistant Professor of Painting & Drawing and also the Director of their galleries. And yep, tenure track! Maybe the last tenure track job in the arts in the country if not the world. I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten it.

It’s hard to put into words how excited I am about this new job. The school’s art department is teeny-tiny, but the people who work there are lovely and everyone seems to really seriously care about their students, which is super important to me. And the other faculty members — there are four of us; that’s it, in the whole department — all have great educations and careers and are doing amazing work. I don’t want to dwell on this too much or I’ll sound like a ridiculous suck-up, but really: this is a good move for me.

And everyone is so nice. Just genuinely welcoming and kind and enthusiastic about me joining their community. Art school in NYC is a tough, competitive place, where you’re constantly in competition with your peers. That was honestly sort of fun for a while… and then it just got exhausting. The art world is changing dramatically. Post-COVID, it’s very different than it was before, and I don’t think art schools have adjusted to these changes. The life of a young fine artist is going to be drastically different in 2025 vs how it was when I graduated in 1995; much of the faculty of my old school is still left over from the early 1980s when the world was even more different. I didn’t feel like we were addressing those changes at all, and increasingly I felt uncomfortable about how we were (or weren’t) supporting our students.

Anyway. Midlife is a good time to make a big change, right? Maybe?

I guess we’ll find out.

I was frustrated at how corporate and geared towards the super rich NYC was becoming, and with it, Jersey City.

I want to write more about how I saw NYC/JC go through two huge changes in my time there — first after 9/11 and then during/after the pandemic. I’m going to leave that for later, but for now I can say that the changes I saw post-COVID really concerned me. There was this moment in 2020 where I really thought the world might just shift and change and become something really beautiful and great, and then it didn’t. And instead, I kept watching high rise after high rise with huge retail spaces opening up, wondering who could ever rent there — and realizing it was all going to be chain stores. It bothered me to the point where I was just getting angry walking down the street. This probably goes without saying, but it’s not the chain stores I object to, but what they represented — the loss of opportunities for average people, the possibility of being limited in my choices, fear of boredom and mediocrity while also going broke paying a fortune to survive.

Time to leave, or just become one of those JC people who hates everything new. You know the type. I developed worry lines that popped up on my face at some point — plastic surgeons call them the “angry 11.” They’re two little parallel lines that appear between your eyebrows and make you look unhappy all the time — no one else in my family has them but I sure do. I’d go to bed pissed off about the world and wake up with my forehead aching. I joking called them my Fulop wrinkles. But listen, he’s not the cause — he’s a symptom, not the disease; too many people blame Fulop for issues that are way bigger than he is, or JC is, or anything of the sort. The disease is something much bigger and much more insidious.

My choices were: accept things as they are (this was never going to happen; I tried, believe me), get Botox (I thought seriously about this option), or move. Add in my frustrations with my job and, well, I am now sitting in a hotel room in central Illinois while my husband watches Superman on tv.

Bloomington-Normal is… not anything like that. This place is the most adorable college town you could possibly imagine, and everything feels very mid 90s/Gen X coded. It’s a time warp. I absolutely swooned over this store right near our hotel — I swear, I didn’t know places like this existed anymore:

I gasped at the sight of it. I’m too old to go in (erm, I think), but I’m so happy it exists. Hell, it looks like something from Montclair in the mid to late 1980s. I can’t believe it’s real.

There are punk rock posters on street lamps everywhere. The only major chain I’ve seen is CVS. (To be fair, there’s a Target and other places at the edges of town. But I can pretend they don’t exist.) I’m in a time warp and I love it. I need a little escapism right now, for my sanity.

I don’t want to escape forever. I want to write challenging things and make tough artworks and put together exhibitions that make people rethink all their life’s choices. I want to push my students to be great artists who also go on to do tough things and raise hell in the name of social justice in whatever communities they wind up in.

Right now, I just want to move into my new place. And chill out a bit.

Anyway, I don’t know what this new blog is going to be like, but I’d imagine it’s going to be something like this. Also, I want to add a few “culture picks” to encourage you to check out some cool things, so I’ll add some below. Eventually some politics too. And I’ll write about my own work as well. So if that’s your sort of thing, please stick around — and if it’s not, I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe. I’ll still chime in to Neighborhood Character now and then, and I’ll be back to Jersey City eventually and we can say hi.

Until then, greetings from central IL! I hope you’re doing well.

_{Culture picks!}

Ok I have done nothing of any interest other than put things into boxes for weeks, but the song that saved my life during this time was Alice Longyu Gao’s 100 Boyfriends was a song I listened to approximately over and over like a crazy person. “Everyone’s jealous of my one hundred boyfriends!! Mmmmmmmmm mwhauh!!!!” I would quietly repeat to myself as I laid awake in bed, trying to calm my mind from spinning out of control thinking of all the things that were still not packed. It didn’t really work but it did make me laugh, which was a great start.

I want to add a link in case you want to subscribe and I don’t know how to do that yet in a way that looks cool and inviting. But here’s the link at least!!!

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xo - Amy