On the last day of his first return to Wabash in 17 years, Nathaniel Mary Quinn ’00 is checking his phone and smiling on the steps of the Caleb Mills House, where the College’s most honored guests stay.
“You know how much pride and joy I feel walking out of this house in the morning, watching these kids?” he asks. “That used to be me.”
Quinn arrived on campus in 1996 without a family. His mother, Mary, had died when he was 15 and studying at the Culver Academies in Indiana. When he returned soon after to the apartment at the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, his father, his brothers, and all their belongings were gone.
He spent Christmas of his final year at Wabash in Martindale Hall painting a portrait of his mother for his senior show, where professors and friends bought his canvases for a few hundred dollars.
Today, Quinn’s work routinely sells for 100 times that price. His 2014 solo exhibition Past/Present at the prestigious Pace Gallery in London introduced the rising artist to the world.
“Quinn’s portraits capture something real about our bruised senses of self,” Priscilla Frank wrote in The Huffington Post. “Something we often look away from.”
As we step inside the Caleb Mills House, Quinn plays Daryl Coley’s gospel song “When Sunday Comes” on his phone.
“This song is a metaphor for the Great Arrival—after a long, arduous journey, when you get to the finish line,” he says. “Don’t give up, because when Sunday comes, you’ll be set free.
“Throughout the 10-year period when I was a teacher and coming home every night to work on my art, once a week I’d play this song and go into my personal praise and worship session. I would think about my art, trying to make it. I would cry and shout out things I was grateful for—small goals I had achieved. Did that once a week for 10 years.
“In 2013, Marc Glimcher from the Pace Gallery came to my studio and said he was impressed [the visit led to Quinn’s solo exhibition at the Pace in London]. After he left, I jumped in the shower and played that song. I felt like Sunday had now come!”
WM: Things have come full circle for you. You’ve returned to Wabash a successful full-time artist to mentor and inspire student artists here. What’s it like to be in this place, here and now?
Quinn: It’s been emotional. Phenomenal. Surreal. Wabash was the best education I had. Culver represented my escape from poverty, but coming to Wabash was the beginning of becoming a man and learning to be confident.
It’s like I’m giving back now, encouraging others.
But I want to tell the truth. You must work hard. Working hard means you are consciously aware of pushing yourself every day. You want to be better.
People think, as an artist, I’m cloaked with inspiration—when I wake up, I just want to paint and paint. It’s not like that. It’s hours of labor.
During your critique session with students, you couldn’t resist doing a little sketching.
Yeah—the blood was moving; I had to draw—a little charcoal drawing.
They were just lagging around, and I wanted to demonstrate my process. I said, “Let’s get going!”
You have to move in order to create. If you’re not moving, you are not creating, and creation is life.
They have to see that. You can talk about it, but you’ve got to show it.
Hopefully that puts a fire underneath them.
Art was your entree into the Culver Academies— you earned a scholarship there—and eventually here at Wabash. Was it a difficult decision for you to take the leap and go? To leave Chicago behind and head to school at Culver?
The neighborhood we lived in was very violent. I was happy to leave Chicago. It was like having a chance at a second life.
Dorm life—waking up to birds chirping—I had never heard that before. I used to wake up to gunshots. Meeting other black kids who weren’t gangbangers and thugs, kids who were nice, who weren’t trying to hurt me. It took about six months for me to become comfortable with that. I was so used to watching my back. To walk across campus without worrying about a bullet flying—even eating three meals a day—that was just bizarre!
And black kids from upper-middle-class families whose parents were doctors and lawyers—I had never seen anything like that.
How do you remember your childhood?
We were very poor. My parents were both illiterate. I have four older brothers. None of them had a formal education. My parents were very loving. My father was my first art teacher. My mom was a loving, supportive woman.
She is the reason I have such a strong pillar of belief about my life.
I was about seven years old and I went to my mom and said, “Mom, I want to be an artist.” She looks down at me and says, “Baby, you can be the best artist that you can ever be.” And I never forgot that. She was the personification of hope. Hope was furiously on me. I was always hoping and believing.
How does that experience of growing up in the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago affect your art today?
A lot of my work is based on my upbringing in Chicago and people I knew.
In my studio practice, I don’t make preliminary sketches. I just work off of visions I receive. And that is much more of a reflection of my upbringing because, in a community like that, you didn’t have time to plan. You’re walking down the street and you hear a gunshot, you can’t think about what to do; you have to just respond, and my practice is very much like that now.
I don’t paint with this [points to his head] I paint with this [points to his gut]. My aim in life as an artist is to make a work that is so palpable and dynamic and so incredibly felt that my mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life. I will pursue that until the day I die.
Your first fall semester at Culver, your Mom passes away. You go home for Thanksgiving only to find that your family has left the apartment—they’re gone and you don’t really ever see or talk to them again. You have said that experience set you free.
It did set me free. It forced me to take a different path in life.
That was a serious pain, losing my family, being abandoned in that way. It’s a pain I continue to deal with. Pain of that nature never goes away. Over time, the volume goes down, but it never goes away.
Because I had nowhere to stay, going to school was a point of refuge. My academic pursuits were driven by something far deeper than what may drive most college students. It was my concerted aim to be successful. There was no Plan B for me.
You ran track while you were here. What about Coach Rob Johnson? What influence did he have on you?
“Penny for your thoughts?” That was his line. Rob Johnson was a very good track coach. Coached Olympians. He had an unwavering belief in me and the other runners on the team. He was very encouraging, very supportive.
This was my introduction to black men who were in different positions of power. When I was growing up, the black guy in the position of power was the gang leader or the pimp.
Now that person was Rob Johnson or Horace Turner. They were equally powerful, with different aims in life.
Having gone to school at Culver and here at Wabash, what did you learn about what it means to be a man?
The value of hard work. But I don’t know if that has anything to do with one’s gender. I think that’s just about being a human. I think I learned a lot about what it means to be a human being and to transcend social conditioning…I learned that at Wabash. I learned to be free at Wabash.
When you’re painting, do you walk into the studio and think, I’m going to paint, and something comes, or is it something comes and then you go to the studio and paint?
I have a Rolodex of images in my head. Visions that came to me years ago that I haven’t made yet because I don’t think I am proficient enough as an artist to actually create that work. I never forget them. Never. It’s hard to forget something that is genuinely a part of you. You don’t forget that; you don’t forget you.
You make it sound so simple.
I think it’s just about really being free. Working in a studio can be a very slippery slope. You can make works that are well received and may even sell, and a year can go by and you can find yourself making duplicates of the same thing with variations here and there. That’s dangerous, because you’re not growing.
What I want to do is always try to be present. I want to push myself beyond this.
I have a crippling level of integrity about the work. If it’s not right, it’s just not right. I keep working until it’s right.
Some people can live with it being “good enough.” There’s no such thing as “good enough” for me. That’s not something I created—it’s innate. I just believe that the work should be integral. It should be as good as I can possibly get it.
I’m never good enough. But for that moment, it’s the best I can do.
Edited from a conversation with Richard Paige. Listen to Quinn’s complete interview on the Wabash On My Mind podcast or WM Online.