Today we’d like to introduce you to Hilary Greenstein.
Hi Hilary, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
I got my start young– I have been drawing and painting ever since I was a child. It was always my dream to be an artist, have a studio, teaches kids, and support myself with my paintings. As a kid, I worked with any materials I could get my hands on but was always drawn to the immediacy, mess, and physicality of paint. I kept pursuing my passion, taking art classes and working independently on my skills whenever possible. I was NOT a sporty kid – I have a knee disability– so while other kids were playing soccer I was filling sketchbooks.
I knew I wanted to go to art school for college to pursue art as a professional career, so I attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where I received my BFA in Drawing and Painting. During my time there I was able to find my voice as a figurative-abstract painter, as well as strong community, mentorship, technical skills, discipline, and growth. Due to the large scale of my work and my primary medium being oil paint, I knew that I would need a workspace to sustain my painting practice when I graduated in December 2013.
Thanks to Craigslist, right out of college I was able to find a shared studio space in the California Building with several other artists. It was crowded but it was a space and got my foot in the door for when another studio opened up in the building a year later. I have been working in 206A of the California Building ever since, where I open my studio to the public monthly for Second Saturdays and for Art-a-WhirlⓇ weekend in May. I am also a teaching artist and have worked with youth and adults of all ages and abilities. I love leading workshops and giving one-on-one lessons to share my love of color, paint, mixed media, and the figure.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
My biggest challenges have always been deep societal issues and how they have come to shape my experiences as a disabled, bisexual femme. How we are perceived and treated in the world based on our identity has an immense effect on our psyche, and this violence is something I am always reflecting on and dreaming about in my paintings. It hasn’t always been easy sailing supporting myself as a professional artist. For years I was balancing my painting practice with service industry jobs, working as a server to keep the rent paid. Between my shifts I found time to paint, apply for shows and grants, and promote my work whenever possible, but the job definitely cut into my time and energy for art in a big way. Coupled with my increasing knee pain and instability in my mid-twenties, I had to leave the service industry to get surgeries on both my knees in 2016 and 2017.
Recovering from the surgeries kept me out of the studio for months, and when I was healed I had a newfound appreciation for the autonomy that comes with working for yourself as an artist. I reentered the studio full force between the two surgeries to create the body of work that I would show in my solo exhibition at the Hopkins Center for the Arts, titled The Invention of Certainty. Ever since, I have been supporting myself through childcare, art teaching, painting sales, and commission work. My portraiture and pet portraiture commission business allows me to support myself while creating custom paintings that are really meaningful to people. What started out as just a couple of memorial pet portraits has taken off, and allows me more freedom when it comes to my own paintings, without getting too bogged down in “is this marketable” because that really kills creativity.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a figurative painter interested in memory, defiance, and gendered social power dynamics. I work to challenge the patriarchal history of painting. I do this by sourcing my femme figures from strangers’ personal photos and mining our collective, intimate histories for heroines and surrogate selves. Through intentional use of gaze, color, and materials, I queer and shapeshift my subjects into abstract environments. I layer gestural marks, oil pastels, collaged fabrics and paper, and atmospheric color fields to contrast areas of dimensionality and flatness. My otherworldly figures all stare directly at the viewer within these saturated dreamscapes.
Rendered solid in concise oil brushwork, they coevolve with and merge into their limitless spaces. I situate my work in an ongoing conversation about intimacy, power, and survival in a femme body. My paintings contain visual references which include German expressionism, pornography, and tacky sweaters. I use the fluidity of painting to blur lines between reality and fiction, care and harm, self and other. Glimpses of drawn plants, furniture, patterns, clouds, smoke, and cacti lend context and become a visual language articulating hidden hurts, desires, and aspirations. “Unfinished” paintings are always more interesting to me, so I choose to leave some areas open and less worked. This gives my work a raw and haunted quality. How does one remain whole when their bodily autonomy is taken from them? When I paint I am asking unflinching questions about consent, grief, and resistance.
Within the lush maximalism of my compositions, there are moments of confident restraint: a sense of being unfinished, in process, in flux, becoming, and undoing old patterns and ways of thinking. My work is heavily influenced by the genre of magical realism, and its potential for imaginative, open-ended narratives. In each painting, I am looking for new ways to order relationships between bodies (and gazes) in space.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and are any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Covid-19 was really hard- no shows, no open studios, and feeling like my industry was dead. Northeast Minneapolis Arts Organization (NEMAA), the org behind Art-a-Whirl was immensely helpful in providing us artists a new platform for online sales when we artists couldn’t open our studios in person.
Getting my webshop launched during covid and the amazing response from everyone who bought art and prints showed me that I already have everything I need, including the support of an amazing community, even when they felt far away. Strong roots and connections with other artists and creatives in the community are everything and the Pandemic really underscored this for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.hilarygreenstein.com
- Instagram: @hilarygreensteinart
