EDIT DEAK

My first day of Art Criticism class, SVA, fall of 1980.  My teacher's hair was a raspberry red bob, and she wore a girl's sailor dress.  Her accent was eastern european, and she insisted that we hold class in a nearby Blarney Stone.  She asked us all to write a brief critique of a piece of art we had recently seen.  We all sat silently, some with a beer in hand, some with something stronger or nothing at all.  Starving art students don't usually have liquor budgets.

When we finished, she read each one aloud, and then told each student that their writing was not an art criticism, and explained why.  When she finished mine, she told the class, that this was a good piece of art criticism.  Then she asked who wrote it.

This was the beginning of what was to be a long and adventurous relationship between myself, and my mentor, Edit DeAk.

Edit introduced me to the world that was to become my home for the rest of my life.  A world of artists, writers, performers, designers, and generally acutely individual humans of every sort of stripe which were to make up my view of the world.  She took me to the Peppermint Lounge when her friends the Bush Tetras were filming their video for Too Many Creeps.  I didn't want to be in the video because I didn't like what I was wearing.  But I still see Edit in the video every time it is played somewhere and smile at her face in dark red lighting or the lack therof.  She took me to club Berlin when it was on Houston and Broadway, and told me to say my name was Maripol so I could get in.  I did.  She introduced me to John Howell, the editor of Live, a performance art journal, who was the first person to publish my writing.  She hired me to be her assistant and I spent hours every week in her loft while her then roommate Rene Ricard and Keith Haring drew things on huge rolls of paper on the walls.  She filmed me walking across her rooftop after telling me to "walk like a woman" and corrected my walk by showing me how.  The list of moments is endless.  So much of what I understood of life came from her unusual way of thinking.

Eventually I went off on my own... took a job with Diane Von Furstenberg who became my second and only other mentor.  What a remarkable couple of women to show me the ropes of adulthood.  I wish I had paid more attention back then, as the lessons of just watching how they functioned in life were amazing.  

But it was Edit who had my heart.

Over many years I would run into her at openings and events, and she would always introduce me as her most brilliant student.  When we lost her not too long ago, I wish I had been there... something intervened to prevent me.  I'm sure the memorial was filled with brilliant minds, and creative geniuses as she had a habit of knowing them all.  I would not be the brilliant one in the room... but perhaps the closest to a daughter she never had.  

The child of a radiant child.

Love you madly Edit, wherever you may be.