Local Artist Highlight: Jerry Gretzinger

As if to prove you never know who your neighbors are…Michigan-born artist Jerry Gretzinger lived in a Soho loft during the time we all wish we had been there, making hot designer handbags and what you might call “1980s New York street fashion” for Saks and Bergdorf Goodman. Now he’s enjoying Maple City, Michigan, mapping a world with the materials of life. Finding it well worth the drive, Avenue for the Arts took a trip with Jerry through his history, his process, and his lifelong art project, “Jerry’s Map.” This map has been shown several times. But, as a next chapter, Jerry is preparing a digitized version, printable onto acrylic panels and suitable for large, permanent public installation. If we are fortunate, we may see the results soon, even closer to home.

When I arrive at Fake Rocks Farm, Jerry’s wife (the sought after fashion designer Meg Staley) lets me in the door. Jerry appears in the farmhouse kitchen, announcing “Come on in! It’s a zoo in here today. Come on through.” When we get to the studio, Jerry introduces his assistant, artist Nik Burkhart at a desk on one side of the studio “doing digital things.” Jerry says, “This is where we do it!” The room has various work surfaces and shelving units filled with stacks of meticulously organized map panels. He brings me over to a standing height desk in the corner.

So, what is the map? It started out as a map, yeah, of an imaginary place, and now it has turned into something pretty different from that. The overall thing has just a little over 4000 panels, and each panel is about the size of a sheet of paper. I started making it in 1963 at my boring job at the Hoover ball bearing factory in Ann Arbor one summer. I think of it now as an “analog generative piece” because you have a system that generates what’s next. The full map is over 50 feet in diameter. So, I’ll just show you what I am doing right here.

Jerry walks me through his process, which is embodied in a set of playing cards wrapped in a rubber band. Each card seems like an artistic work in itself, but also functions as a set of instructions on what to do next in the mapping process. The card that he drew from the deck this morning indicated he should select the next panel for reworking by counting down 34 panels from the last panel he worked on. The card also told him to spatter 9 panels with paint. So, earlier that day, Jerry had drawn the surrounding 8 map panels, laid them all on the floor, and spattered paint. When he adds or reworks a portion of the map, Jerry considers how the new portion will function aesthetically in the existing map, lapping paint colors onto adjacent panels for example. If he collages one-inch squares of imagery onto the map, he carefully color matches the images to the underlying color on the panel. Each time Jerry reworks a panel, the panel is scanned and color printed, becoming part of a new “generation” of the map. Each panel is coded so that it can be placed in the overall map. The back side of each panel records what generation that panel belongs to. The fully assembled map includes panels from multiple generations, because the map is continuously evolving with reworked panels. A Generation III panel could very well sit next to a Generation VII panel in the assembled map, depending on the last time each panel was reworked.

You said the map started out simple…when did you get all complicated with it? Well, I put the map away at a certain point. I stopped working on it in the early 80s. We lived in New York then. We were living in a loft in Soho. That area was zoned for artists-in-residence, which meant that I had to be licensed by the City of New York as an artist. You had to go to the Department of Cultural Affairs and present a portfolio or some evidence that you were a bona fide artist. Yeah, so I took the map, such as it was at that point, and laid it out on the floor. I got up on an 8-foot step ladder, took pictures of it, and presented it as my evidence. They said ‘Well, I don't know because you've never shown, and you don't have a degree of Fine Arts so maybe we should come and visit your studio….’ So, they sent somebody down to see if I really have the studio, and I had to fake that a little bit, because my work surface at that time it was on my desk. I only worked on one panel at a time with paints and stuff. I borrowed an easel from somebody, thinking you need to have an easel to be considered an artist. So anyway, we set the place up, and they said ‘OK, yeah, I guess you're legit.’

So, at about that same time, I stopped working on the map, and I boxed it all up. My wife and I had our own business—we made women's one-of-a-kind clothing, art-to-wear clothing. Also, I wanted to analyze the stock market and see what I could do with that, so I spent all my spare time doing that instead of this…and the map got put in a box. Then, we moved from Manhattan to a village, Cold Spring, on the Hudson River. The map went up there, and it got stored in the attic. One day in 2003, our older son found it up in the attic and that triggered me into wanting to work on it again.

Twenty years had gone by—technology changed so much from 1983. There had been a place in our neighborhood in Soho that made photocopies, but they were expensive, and they weren't very good. So, before, I never copied panels and reworked them—a panel was just done when it was done. I had always wanted cities to grow bigger, but I didn't want to just keep adding new blocks to the existing panels. I wanted for cities to undergo renovation in an urban development sense—tear things down and build new things. So, all of a sudden, with the new technology of color photocopies, I was able to do that.

Also, back in the early 80s, I had started to do some collage onto the map. I cut out limbs from fashion magazines, and then I tried to justify it in terms of ‘Well, maybe they look like sand dunes.’ I had this itch to do something other than just plain map stuff. That was also the time when I developed the cards, and they were initially just a random number generator. They would tell me which panel to work on, but not how to develop that panel further like they do now. Occasionally, I add a new “blank” to the edge of the map, and blanks can be a lot of things—this one is a photo I’ve taken on the farm because we have a little over 100 acres here and there are trails through with benches where I sit and take photos.

When did the map hit the 4000 panels and when have you shown it? Oh, just recently. When it got put away in the 80s, it was around 800 panels. I never really tried much to show it, but an artist friend told me ‘Boy, you gotta show this thing,’ Meg was a co-president of the board of a little art center near us in Garrison, New York. We showed the director of the arts center what I was doing—she got enthused and gave me a show. They had a little entryway gallery where the map papered the walls and part of the ceiling. Meg had a college friend whose son made a short film about the map. That was chosen as a Vimeo staff pick, and it went viral. Well, 70,000 views was considered viral at the time.

Joe Thompson, who was director of MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) saw the film and said ‘let's get this guy here.’ So, we had an appointment with Joe for me to choose a wall for showing the map. The walls weren’t big enough, so I said ‘how about the floor?’ of their black box theater. That's what we did, and it was a very cool show. That's the only time the whole map has been shown. It was roped off, and they built a catwalk around it 6 feet off the ground. People could get up and get a little perspective on it, but the cool thing was they moved my studio to the stage in the theater. They came to Cold Spring where we lived and picked up everything...the rugs on the floor even…and recreated my studio. The show was only up for 10 days, because they had other things booked into the space, but I was there for the full 10 days working on the map while people were looking at it. They were excited about the map and wanted to talk to me—so I didn’t get a whole lot of work done. And one show led to other shows.

What’s your hope for what’s next, other than the public project we aren’t allowed to talk about? My dream is for MOMA New York to set me up on one of the mezzanines facing that big atrium wall, which is big enough for the whole map. It's…you know…delusions of grandeur...but it would be very cool.

What do you think your map means to people? A typical response is like ‘Oh my God, that must have taken him a long time.’ They're kind of overwhelmed by the scale of the thing. I look at the individual panels as compositions. Because it's generative, the panels are not all interesting. Some are embarrassingly boring—not what I think of as art. But some are really interesting, cool. Most people don't see it as individual compositions, and it's this massive thing. Some people really get into it. There are inscriptions all throughout it. People start reading some of those things—old cancelled checks, people's e-mail addresses or phone numbers are in there. These are the things that Nik has to blur out for the digital version because the public venue we’re getting ready for has rules around what text and images can be in there.

It seems like this process that you’ve created is totally immersive for you—you're just completely immersed in this map, and you're sort of existing in it somewhere. Yeah, I have used it to incorporate all this stuff I'm trying to clear out those boxes. They're all full of old letters and whatnot. I did the archaeological work in North Africa, and these are photos of Roman mosaics that we were working on…they're bad photos and nobody's interested in them…so now they're going in the map. So, your own history is going into it.

I’m also reminded of the artists who would specify a process so that somebody else could produce the art piece according to the instructions. Yeah, exactly, Sol Lewitt. Your process is so deep, though, I'm not sure somebody could follow your instructions. You’re so much a part of the process that I don't think you could be extracted. Right, now I think you're right—because there are all these instances of…you see that little section with pink and blue bands. It was because of the printer was not printing properly. So, I have to decide on the spot, is it going to be pink or is it going to be blue. There's no rule that tells me that, so there's a lot of interplay there. But the fact that there are these instructions means that I can roll along with it. I don't step back and think.

What do you remember about being a kid in Grand Rapids? Well, we lived outside of town. We grew up in a real kind of mainstream middle of the road Protestant household. My parents bought 5 acres on East Paris Road, which was gravel between Burton and 28th Street. They built their own house, and we had 5 acres. There were woods behind the house that didn't belong to us, but all the kids played back there. I went to one-room old frame schoolhouse with a bell at the corner of Burton and East Paris. That's how old I am. Anyway, after 6th grade we had the choice of our district. Our little district paid tuition for its students to go to other high schools. I had the choice of Lowell, Caledonia, East Grand Rapids, or Ottawa Hills. My mother discounted the first two as farmer schools. East Grand Rapids, she said, was too fancy. So, I went to Ottawa Hills. It was good, it was great for me in those days. I went to University of Michigan for three years. Then, I decided I was tired of Michigan and needed to see more of the world. I transferred to Berkeley and went there just for one year in architecture. I had a four-year scholarship, and that was my last year of scholarship money. I couldn't afford to stay on. The Vietnam War was also heating up, so I went into the Peace Corps. I did that for two years in Africa.

What was your path after that? Well, I married a woman I met in Peace Corps training, and we moved back to Ann Arbor where I finished school. Our first child was born. We moved to Grand Rapids, and I worked in an architecture firm in Grand Rapids for a year, but I got a call from a woman at the University of Iowa who was setting up a team to catalog Roman mosaics in Tunisia. She asked if I wanted to be the architect for that team. I said ‘sure,’ so then we went back to Tunis. Our second child was born over there, but we split up in 1973.

I went to New York at that point, and that's when I started making things. Not the map…that had kind of gone around the world with me. I didn't want to be in the academic world anymore—I didn’t like it. I had this naive notion that I'll just make things and sell them. We could afford to do that in those days in New York. I shared an apartment that was $83 a month. It was down in Soho, so it was ‘cool.’ This was early, early Soho…1973…there were a lot of galleries, a lot of artists living there, but very few restaurants or stores.

The one thing that took off was I designed a kind of shapeless shoulder bag—I designed that in the mid-70s and it really took off. So, I hired people and had a little factory. We worked in the same building that we lived in, which was right on Broadway between Grand and Broome. I went from this cheap apartment to a loft on Broadway, and then I teamed up with a woman who's my wife now. I was getting tired of making the handbags, because it was the same thing over and over and over. We started making one-of-a-kind clothing, and they SOLD. We were able to merchandise these one-of-a-kind things into a line. We did that for 25 years. We rented a big loft in an old mill building with 5000 square feet.

It was a lot of fun what we were doing in the heyday—we were trying things that were outlandish. We took white Hanes T-shirts, and sewed bands of fabric on the front and then laid them out on the floor of our loft building and spatter-painted them. Then, we washed them, so they got tattered. I’ve told this story a million times. The merchandiser at Saks bought these and had reordered more. Meanwhile, the manager had been on vacation. She came back riding up the escalator, and right there, front and center, was that ratty T-shirt on the mannequin. She went marching into the buyer’s office, ‘Get those rags off my selling floor!’ And the buyer said, ‘That's our best-selling item right now….’ So, that's a fun story. Yeah, we just did outlandish stuff. Bergdorf Goodman was our big customer—because it was so unusual—it didn't look like anything else in Bergdorf. Most of it was rebuilt used clothing. I think they call that “upcycling” now, but you were doing it way back when. I just discovered that, well it was a lot easier to take a shirt and save the button placket and the buttons and the collar and sew something new around it. The collar and placket are what take all the time and cost all the money. We would shop all the salvation armies and goodwill stores in the New York area. The more successful we were, the more we needed these things. We found a company in Boston that had bales of white cotton men's shirts—perfect for us, because we could dye them, silk screen and roller print them. That was also around the time that all the street artists were active in New York probably in that same Soho area, like Keith Haring, right? Yeah, that was cool time to be there. I'm grateful to have had that time there.

What was your first art experience like…what hooked you into making art? Well, when I was a kid, I liked—not necessarily drawing things—but I made maps. I was really intrigued with architecture, so I would design houses and schools and buildings. This would have been 5th or 6th grade, maybe, and there was an art supply store in Grand Rapids. There was only one place to go—Anderson Art Supply store on Ottawa. I would go in there drooling over colored pencils and paints. I was intrigued by colors, especially. My mother called me a ‘musser,’ because she said I was always mixing things together. I would get modeling clay for Christmas and take some yellow, some blue, and massage it all together, just see what color I can come up with. We didn't have much money, so I couldn't ever indulge in the stuff heavy duty. That led me into architecture. My freshman year, I started as an architect, and I never thought of myself as an artist until probably the show as MASS MoCA.

What does your workday look like—do you work all day? Off and on. I can't stay on one task for very long. My pattern is to have stations around the house. This is station #1 here. That's where the work actually gets done. I move from there to folding clothes, and then I go outside and work in the garden. I wash some dishes. I go to my TV chairs—we watch a lot of tennis. If it's not tennis, then it's Bloomberg because I’m still intrigued by the stock market. I post things on social media in the morning—I post the map image every morning.

Oh yeah, there’s the paint process. Each day, I mix today's paint. You see each of these bottles in the tray has a date on it and they’re lined up, sequentially. Tomorrow, what I will do is open up this bottle and mix in color from the prior day. So, that I get a gradient of color, and that unifies things. Then, there is a card in the deck that asks me to put a new bottle of paint in. These bottles on the side here are all lined up in ‘the waiting room.’

When I was in New York last year sometime, I found this great store that sells dry pigments. It was like a wonderland…this whole store…I bought their sample set of basic colors. I'm sort of teaching myself how to use them—I don't like standard learning. I thought, I'm just gonna buy these pigments and mix them with water—well, they don't mix with water. It's like they’re allergic to water. Now, I’m reading about egg glair and that process. That’s a medium that you can use with dry pigments, and that did work.

Jerry has been generous with his afternoon. His engaging stories weave his own past into the history that was happening around him—in a way, it makes you feel like you were right there with him. And all of life seems to work its way into his map, whether as a fragment of a cereal box logo or a bit of an old letter. The samples of acrylic panels that he and Nik have printed have a beautiful luster that complements the map imagery. With any luck, we’ll see this gorgeous map soon, assembled in Grand Rapids as a public installation.