ALI FUDERER

 

Several months ago we sat down with emerging artist Ali Fuderer. A lot has developed since then. Not only has she gotten much deserved attention from her kindergarten series, she has also pushed her art well into the public forum and curated the well received "Atmospheres" show for the Brooklyn Arts and Design Center. Here we delve into the motivations behind some of her very well known kindergarten art as well as some of her lesser-exposed and very personal dental works.

 

What got you started on the kindergarten series?

Kindergarten teaching. I just started teaching this year. [Ali now works at the Cummer PRI and Mitchells Gallery] There are three, like, subcategories of the kindergarten series. I paint my kids kind of straightforward, like one with one of my kids napping on a mat. I only have seven kids in my class and I want to do one show of just a portrait of each of them. Then I wanted to do another show with the tile floors and different character studies of them. And then, I have the series where I take their drawings, like drawings that they have given me and reinterpret them. I’ll just kind of switch up the images from their drawings, and maybe add to it.

Working there has been a little strange. It was weird at first because I felt like a giant, like the chairs are all tiny. My kids would be like, “You’re huge.” They have little cubby dividers, and cinderblock walls, colored tile floors. My classroom was first in a preacher’s office, then was in a supply closet, then these images are from when it was moved to the cafeteria, which is where my classroom is now. I had to move classrooms three times.

I went to school for painting. I went to Douglas Anderson. I went to UF for painting and just moved back last year.

I also have a dental series. I had lots and lots of dentist visits in my childhood. I had TMJ and had traumatic surgery. I had jaw replacement surgery where they broke down here and up there and laid it back together.

Ouch, yeah, I’ve always had some horrible dental nightmares.  

Well that’s what I was thinking too. A lot of people can relate to that. Like the teeth rubbing away nightmares and stuff like that, or breaking off.

 

I’ve had some pretty horrific ones where my teeth are strange formations. Like monstrous almost.

Oooo. Yeah, I broke my two front teeth actually riding my bike. Then I had a dentist give me one big front tooth, for a little while. A big yellow front tooth. That was in middle school. So, kids are especially cruel then. And then I had to get those grinded off, once I went to a real dentist not like a back alley dentist. He was like,’ Who did you let do this to your teeth?’ So they grinded those off and gave me two separate ones. And I guess, maybe it was that later hurt my jaw. But it still affects me. And then this, (points to small scar) is from when in surgery they opened my mouth too wide and ripped my face.

 

Oh no! That doesn’t sound like fun at all. So you’re dealing with it through art therapy?

Right, exactly.

 

At least the trauma has become something constructive. That’s the beauty of art.

But yeah, and I’m trying to keep busting out the smaller kindergarten pieces. They’re very accessible. They’re almost like business cards. It doesn’t take too long to make them, and it gets my name into people’s homes.

But they’re cool, because by the end of the year they were enjoying it. It’s just getting past the discipline part of it.

It feels like, I mean six years ago that I got out of high school. So It’s instant karma. Because like the 14 year olds that I teach will be eating glue, or jabbing each other with scissors. I’m just like, ‘What are you doing? Are you eating the paint? I can’t believe you!’ And I totally did the same kind of stuff in high school. I was banned from a few of my art classes. Like in printmaking, I think me and my friend tried the mineral spirits just to be retarded. Now I’m getting instant karma because now I see what they went through.  I think every obnoxious student should have to be a teacher for a year, so they can see the other side.  

I remember teachers saying, ‘You don’t realize, but we hear everything you say about us.’ And now, I’m the one going, ‘I hear you.’ The four and five year olds in my kindergarten class are the coolest inspiration. The bizarre things they say. I like that. And their temper tantrums are not cute, but interesting. And my students all have special situations. Like one, both of his parents are in jail, and they just come from hard, hard lives. So their drawings, you can tell, are very emotionally charged.

It’s funny being a practicing artist and an elementary school art teacher.

Trying to get the student grade watercolors or the tempera paint to work, I can’t really do anything with them, so I feel like they should have nice materials to work with. But then they eat it, so I guess they can’t, I guess they are on that level.

But the age group I teach, and I guess it has to do with being young and uninfluenced, because the older kids stuff didn’t impress me as much as the younger kids, but the four and five-year-olds artwork was just so much cooler to me. Less restrictive I guess. Less trying to look like something.

www.alifud.com

YOU ARE AT MOVEMENT MAGAZINE.COM