NMH Magazine : Fall 2007

A Portrait of the Artist as a young genius

When Anna Schuleit ’93 was a girl, her mother told her that wearing a bandana would keep her thoughts from flying away. At many points during her artistic career—her first opening, a presentation to Harvard psychiatrists, an intense day of creating in the studio—Schuleit has wrapped a kerchief tightly around her head.

A square of fabric seems insufficient to contain the mind of this young woman,

who appears more ethereal than human. Tall, slender, moonbeam pale, she has the face of an angel, the mind of a metaphysician, and a charismatic energy that shifts in intensity depending on the task at hand.

Today she’s in low-medium gear, more laid-back European than visionary artist. I’ve brought lunch to her studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to share during our interview; she laughs like a little girl when she sees sugar cookies shaped like daisies. “Oh, how wonderful you are to bring me food! What an extraordinary treat!” Her voice, lightly touched with her native German, is lilting, winsome.

Schuleit, who comes by her talent naturally—her mother is a sculptor and her four siblings work in art-related fields—wears classic art scene garb: a black shirt, black pants, and pointy black boots adorned with metallic studs. Her eyebrows are thin, carefully plucked, with a Garbo arch.

She was, she tells me quietly, in a very bad place a year ago. She had no money, no prospects, no work permit. She’d moved 16 times in as many years and was exhausted by her life as a wandering artist. Then, in March 2006, she was awarded a yearlong fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, which granted her the use of a studio, a Cambridge apartment, and two research assistants.

“This I applied for,” Schuleit says, gesturing around her white-walled studio. “This is all I wanted.”

Seven months later, she learned she’d won a MacArthur “genius” grant—a stratospheric honor bestowed annually upon a handful of creative wunderkinds. Because recipients are nominated in utmost secrecy, Schuleit had no idea it was coming. The coveted fellowship carries a no-strings-attached $500,000 stipend and puts her among such luminaries as writer Cormac McCarthy, choreographer Twyla Tharp, and photographer Cindy Sherman. It changes her life in ways so enormous that even the hyperarticulate Schuleit struggles to find the right words.

“I can say that before I received this was one life,” she told TV interviewer Charlie Rose in January. “And since I have received this I am dreaming of new ways to do more work, and do more work than I even thought I could do.”

Now, nibbling on a daisy cookie, she elaborates. “When the MacArthur happened to me, I said to myself, ‘This is the end of all wishes—this is an artist’s dream. I will never wish for anything else again. I will just work hard and no longer have wishes driving my direction.’”

She pauses dramatically, then looks to see if I’m ready for the denouement. “One wish that has always been in the back of my mind is true love. So I gave that up; I said, ‘I yield it to the universe. Go.’ And the week after, I met him.”

She came to the United States from Mainz, Germany, at 16 to spend her junior year at NMH. She’d wanted to move to Los Angeles to be a waitress, but her parents, who never agreed on anything, agreed that wouldn’t happen. An American prep school was the compromise.

“I got off the bus at Mount Hermon late at night and there were all these crickets chanting in waves of ‘Schuuu-schuuuu-schuuuuu-schuuuu.’ I said, ‘This is my dream.’ I immediately felt at home.”

She took every art class available and signed up for Jim Block’s class in 19th-century American literature, where she read Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. She absorbed their ornate language and cadences and unconsciously made them part of her own speech.

“She was more mature than most,” recalls Block. “There was this spark of imagination in her that doesn’t show up in every student I run into. She was one of those students with whom it was easy to become good friends.”

The moment that transformed Schuleit’s life took place three months after her arrival at NMH, when she spent Thanksgiving with a host family in Northampton. They took her to a high hill where an abandoned mental hospital stood. Schuleit walked the deserted grounds, deeply moved by the crumbling brick, chest-high grass, and iron-barred windows.

“What struck me was the incredible silence. It reminded me of an indrawn breath. Here was this place where people had lived and worked, had struggled and suffered, and sometimes gotten better, for more than one hundred years. Now it felt like the end of the world,” she remembers. “It stayed in my head like a butterfly for years.”

After leaving NMH with two art prizes in tow, she went back to Germany to finish her baccalaureate, then returned to the States to go to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she majored in painting. In 1997, while still at RISD, she took a sociology course at Brown University called Perceptions in Mental Illness, taught by Phil Brown, who would become her mentor, friend, and advisor.

Schuleit had been steeping herself in the history of mental institutions while letting that butterfly flutter. She told Brown about a project that she dreamed of—an installation set in the main building of Northampton State Hospital. “I want to make the building sing,” she explained to him.

It was impossible, of course. Logistics, bureaucracy, funding, her youth and inexperience—all made it just a dream.

“It’s possible,” Brown told her. “You can do it, and you’re completely ready.”

Habeas Corpus. November 2000, Northampton State Hospital. The opening notes of Bach’s Magnificat pour out of the decaying asylum. Its windows are open, and ragged curtains wisp like ghosts in the chill wind. The sound—issuing from speakers inside the main building—bounces into the interior, back out the barred windows, into the ruined arches and courtyards, and onto an audience of hundreds standing below. Former patients hold their hands over their hearts and weep. Listeners shuffle around the perimeter of the building, silent as monks, as the chorale plays for its full 28 minutes. A slender figure stands on the outskirts. She wears a kerchief wrapped tightly, elegantly around her head. Her hands are steepled under her chin and she wears a look both faraway and intensely interior.

Habeas Corpus was Schuleit’s first foray into installation art, in which artists modify the way people experience a specific environment, using media ranging from natural materials to computers. Many trace the genre’s roots to the avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp; the projects of Christo, arguably the world’s best-known installation artist, include surrounding 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with floating pink plastic and erecting a 24-mile-long curtain in California.

The Northampton installation made Schuleit something of a star. She was written up in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and Newsweek. PBS aired a documentary on the event. Just 26, she’d proved her mettle as an installation artist and a master logistician. It had taken her three years of struggles over funding and access, 106 loudspeakers, 5,000 feet of sound cable, 80 volunteers, a borrowed car, thousands of phone calls and e-mails, and a will of iron to create Habeas Corpus. When it was over, she was left with pneumonia and years’ worth of debt.

“After that first project, I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ There’s no support system that’s built into the world that allows these sorts of projects to happen.”

Schuleit was granted residency at the famed MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, a haven for artists. She did a small, haunting installation in the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, riffing on imagery from Habeas Corpus, and worked as a visiting artist at Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. It changed her way of thinking.

“I saw that people are still in places that look like the 1950s: tiled walls, underpaid staff, no bedsheets or towels. Public psychiatry is like the bottom of welfare. It’s not even an act of caring; it’s a form of housing.”

This became the seed that grew into a flower that bloomed into her next installation.

Bloom. November 2003, Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Boston. Twenty-eight thousand potted flowers carpet the hallways of the recently closed, 90-year-old building. Five thousand orange tulips crowd the first-floor hallway. Pink heather runs wild in the third-floor dayroom, while grass creeps throughout the basement. The PA system plays the ambient sounds of the institution: steps in the hallways, doors closing, phones ringing. For four days, thousands of visitors gaze at the profusion of flowers, their tender beauty in shocking contrast to peeling walls and institutional gloom. The flowers represent, by Schuleit’s calculations, all the flowers the patients never received, because, she points out, people don’t bring flowers—the ultimate gesture of hope and caring—to mental patients. After Bloom is done, volunteers deliver the flowers to nearby hospitals, mental health centers, and homeless shelters.

Given the focus of Schuleit’s installations, it seems fair to wonder if she has firsthand experience with mental illness. Possibly, she says enigmatically, but, more to the point, she is inspired by abandoned institutional spaces and the emotions and history still hovering in them. “I have a weakness for institutions. I always wanted to be in a monastery or a place of silence and withdraw from the world.”

There is something of the mystic about her, a kind of radiant glow that dances on the edge of manic energy. Schuleit admits that she often forgets to eat, and sleeping is something she does reluctantly. She has a bewitching quality that brings about miracles: bureaucrats lower red tape for her, administrators open their checkbooks, volunteers pledge their allegiance.

“The word I don’t want to use is charm, because that’s a male chauvinist pig word, but she has a compelling character about her,” says Jim Block, who volunteered to help with Habeas Corpus and stays in regular touch with his former student. “She may have cast spells on the government people she talked to.”

Schuleit ascribes her ability to realize her visions to a more prosaic process. “When people ask me, ‘How do you become a public artist? How do you make projects that are so oversized?’

I say, metaphysically I don’t know how it all happened. But physically you go to the people that you know are in positions to help you, and you say, ‘I am going to ask you one favor. And then I promise I will never come back to you for another favor.’

“And they say, ‘That’s a great deal. I don’t ever want to see you again.’

“And it works! You can ask any stranger from anywhere one favor, and you will probably get it.”

Phil Brown, Schuleit’s longtime mentor, says, “She’s an extremely compassionate person who is willing to give a lot of her self. When she did Bloom, I saw how much effort it took to get all those flowers and coordinate volunteers, many of whom were patients and ex-patients. She provided such an umbrella of caring and respect that people were drawn to her. A lot of people just say, ‘Do this. Here’s my grand design.’ But she runs around and does every single thing that has to be done. The side effect is that nothing can go wrong.”

While she was working on Bloom, Schuleit was also earning a master’s of liberal arts at Dartmouth. To survive financially, she lived as a floor resident in a senior citizens’ home and worked at a juice bar on campus, illustrating her remarkable capacity to nurture her intellectual and imaginative life while shouldering the most menial tasks.

New York was her next stop: In 2005–06, Schuleit was a consultant for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, where she curated subway stations that were being rehabbed. She also taught art at Nightingale-Bamford School and helped environmental installation artist Christo—whom she’d befriended while working on Habeas Corpus—with The Gates, a $21 million installation in Central Park.

“I was more or less penniless—making ten thousand or eleven thousand a year, which is about poverty level in New York State,” she recalls.

While she was struggling, 16 people—none of whom knew of the others’ involvement—were writing detailed recommendations on her behalf to the MacArthur Foundation.

Waterside. July–August 2007. Lovell’s Island, Boston Harbor. A light-filled yurt holds models, drawings, and artists’ books of two site-specific projects: In Intertidal, seven huge mirrors—the largest 500 feet long—in the island’s intertidal zone reflect sea, sky, and bathers. Sightlines places large etched-glass drawings of bathers (who could also pass for dead bodies) on crumbling gun emplacements from an abandoned military fort.

Trying to describe Schuleit’s installations carries an inherent frustration. It’s like pinning butterflies to a board: their beauty lies in their ephemerality. Despite the vast intellect that underlies her projects, there’s also a powerful emotional strand running through them. Schuleit has a gift for connecting viewers with the phantoms of forgotten people—mental hospital inmates, 19th-century bathers, fallen soldiers—thus coupling the emotions of past and present and mixing them into a strangely healing compound.

Landlines. August 2007. MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire. Saturday evening of the colony’s 100th-anniversary celebration. One hundred telephones, illuminated by colored lights and attached to trees, are scattered through the colony’s 450 woodland acres. As people stroll through the woods, they answer the ringing telephones. On the line is someone who wants to talk about the history of the colony or share memories of it or simply say “Happy birthday, MacDowell.” The phone calls come from all over the world, and everyone at the celebration understands their irony. Throughout its 100-year-history, MacDowell has never allowed phones on its premises.

The MacDowell Colony, which commissioned Schuleit to create its centennial installation, has been a touchstone for her. She has stayed there four times since 2000. “It changed the world for me. It was the first place where I was among artists in the working world and saw that you can live on, and with, and for the work you’re doing.”

The colony has given her something else, something entirely unexpected. A year ago she met Wyatt Mason, a 38-year-old literary critic for Harper’s and the New Yorker, while he was at MacDowell working on a novel. They’ve been living together ever since.

“He was there, I walked in, we met, and that was it,” she says. “He’s a wonderful inspiration to my life. Brilliant. I never knew anything like this.”

So she got that wish for true love, the wish she’d given up.

The MacArthur grant allows her an ease of mind she’s never known as an adult. Minus taxes, she’ll receive $70,000 a year for the next five years. She will, at last, have the money to hire a lawyer to petition for US citizenship. Schuleit plans to withdraw from the maelstrom of installation art, go underground, and return to her original love, painting. “I’m inching my way back toward painting the human figure,” she says. “I’d like to create a body of fifty to sixty canvases by the end of next year. Cross my fingers, I hope to find a really great, world-class art dealer.”

The idea of such an engaging woman painting in a solitary studio is hard to imagine, but she swears she’s ready for that monastic solitude she’s always craved. Yet moments later, she talks about an installation she dreamed up after lecturing at the University of Michigan last year.

“I came up with an idea for the city of Detroit, which lies in ruins. It would involve everyone, and the entire city would be used as a site. It’s a natural extension of all the projects, of all my work, on a huge scale. It’s so simple and incredibly labor intensive.”

Perhaps realizing how quickly she’s zooming into the stratosphere, she amends, “Maybe this could be an imaginary project, one that never gets done. It could be a book.”

Then she says, lit by the midday sun and her own reckless radiance, “Except it’s more fun if you actually do it. You risk your neck, all your assets and your energies, and all the years of your life—and you do it.”

Twenty-eight thousand potted flowers carpet the hallways of the 90-year-old building.

"I came up with an idea for Detroit. The entire city would be used as a site."

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