GATHERING WORMS AND WIGS WITH BETH HUMPHREY

I can’t remember the exact moment I met Beth Humphrey, but I distinctly recall encountering her art in the 2010s at my favorite gallery (now a Kingston, NY ghost) cheekily named KMOCA (Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art). It was a gallery galvanized by people who cared about working class artists, outsider artists, self-taught artists, and community activist artists. It didn’t seem so much interested in prestige as connecting us to one another. I took in some of my favorite shows there ever. The curators were approachable, considerate, and passionate about weird art. There was that staggering, lush show of Warren Schmahl, which no one who attended will ever forget. It was there I first fell in looove with Beth Humphrey’s exquisite art. I also had one of my first ever solo shows there. They took a chance on someone who had come out as an artist late in life, self-taught and self-conscious, and gave me the kind of encouragement that powers my reserves to this day.

At some point Beth and I became friends, I paid a visit to her studio, fell even more in love with her art, wanted everything but left with nothing, overwhelmed by her prolificity, a state I often reach when presented with an embarrassment of riches. I am continually awestruck by her art’s dreamy flamboyance. Someday I will make a decision about which one shall come home to live with me.

Somewhere down the line, one of Beth’s kids was in an all-teen band we asked to play the only four songs they knew for my partner’s 40th birthday. The crowd went wild and wanted more. Now Beth works at D.R.A.W. as a coordinator for the Teen Workforce Program. She certainly feels like a touchstone to an artistic community in a place I have called home for thirty years. I see her cheerful smile across a room filled with strangers, hundreds of new faces from other places, feeling a bit up-anchored because my town has changed so rapidly that many of my friends can’t find affordable housing; and it feels like there is at least one solid shoulder to touch. It was Beth and her team of teens who reached out and asked me to be part of Fervornova, currently on view at D.R.A.W.

Beth contributed a short, sweet, evocative story-memory to the book Latchkey Township about being a latchkey kid in New York City. It reads like a poem birthed in a cloud that floats around a restless city, stopping to notice only the moments children seem to detect.

FERAL CHILDHOOD BY BETH HUMPHREY

​​I grew up in NYC.

Beth, age 9, exploring her Guncle Paul’s wig collection with her BFF Betsy.

I swam in a water tower, danced with a friend to a jukebox when we were seven for change at a lunch counter, gathered worms in cardboard boxes to bring home and study, rode the Staten Island Ferry back and forth for hours, listened to the radio on rooftops.

FERVORNOVA / DRAW / KINGSTON

on view through July 20.

Opening night of The Hideaway Grove Apartment Complex at Fervornova.

XO Jacinta