By Sally Eckhoff
What would you give to shoot the moon in the greatest city in the world?
F*ck Art (Let’s Dance) is a chronicle of ten slam-bang years in a very slam-bang part of New York City, and of one a young painter's crusade to make that place her own.
This memoir, by a former Village Voice writer and critic, starts in 1977 with the Summer of Sam and ends with the Tompkins Square Park riots—two notorious incidents that defined an age. After a last, desperate summer in the beach towns of Long Island, the naive young wannabe artist borrows her dad’s El Camino, finances a trip to Manhattan with the change on his cufflink stand, and rents an apartment on East Tenth Street with a floor so crooked that everything that falls off the kitchen counter rolls under the bathtub. And then she begins to paint, eat, dance, and feel her way around New York.
F*ck Art (Let's Dance)
"Priceless both as a time machine retrieving in full color the good/bad old days of the New York art scene and as a meditation on the hopscotching of enchantment and loss, this irresistible memoir is finally to be recommended for its remarkable juicy sentences: its ironies, honesty, jokes, asides, aphorisms and worldly wisdom drawn from bittersweet experience."
-Philip Lopate, To Show and to Tell
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About the Author
Sally Eckhoff, who hails from a family of seven in a shore town on Long Island, grew up loving New York, horses, and art. Beginning in the late 1970s, she lived in the East Village, remaining there for seventeen years. Early on, she became a founding member of Painting Space 122 Association, and also an occasional performance artist at PS122, Club 57, Great Gildersleeves, CBGB, and Tier 3. Although her eclectic painting style draws from German Expressionism, Dutch landscape painting, and American cartoons, it belongs to no accepted category; the artist herself has been termed a “retrofuturist” by Dutch writer Bart Plantenga. In addition to painting, Sally Eckhoff’s artwork includes typographical drawings and collage, and has been shown at home and abroad, most recently at the Sideshow Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Sally Eckhoff lives, teaches, and paints in Philadelphia.
