6
When the staff elevator doors open, Yegina, Kevin, and I rush through the permanent collection to reach Still Lives. All the galleries feel large and cold and secretive tonight, even as I pass familiar white slabs and cubes of light, the red flower of a smashed car hood that’s always on view. The air smells like nothing—not disinfectant, not paint, not wood or plastic, just pure absence. I look over at Kevin, and he’s a wash of fluorescence and shadow, patting his tweed pockets like he forgot something. Beyond him, Yegina wears the cool, keen look of a cat about to be fed.
“Not mobbed yet,” I say, but neither of them answer. Our footfalls are the only sounds, fast and ominous, as they approach the black-painted rooms of Still Lives.
I’ve read the hyperbole about Kim Lord’s talent. Heck, I’ve been writing it for months, ripping adjectives like stunning, harrowing, shocking, edgy, and stark from reviews of prior shows, and coupling those words with the gory stories of the eleven murdered women depicted in Still Lives. The more praise I penned, the more it rang false to me—to be so stagy in your subject matter, to take another woman’s victimization and make it your material. Not until today’s undisclosed press release about her gift has Kim Lord ever acknowledged that she, too, might be capitalizing on these horrific crimes. She seems to think it is her right to depict the victims, to paint herself into their lives and stories, just as she—a well-heeled Canadian—feels it is okay to toss out damning statistics about Los Angeles and its murder rates, and the way Hollywood sensationalizes female homicide. “I picked this city deliberately,” she said. “I want this city to see what it is doing.”
Fine. Let’s see it.
I am wary when I step inside the first black room.
Stabbing victim Roseann Quinn hovers over me with her curls and her wistful grin. Lord based her painting on a well-known photo of Quinn in a loosely tied head scarf and round librarian glasses, grinning at something beyond the camera. In the original photo, Quinn looks as if she’s strolling down a suburban street, past a white house and a yard, the photo snapped just when she’s spotted a friend and beams in recognition. Kim Lord painted as Quinn has the same clothes and sweet expression, but the background to her face is old newspaper clips, their headlines: “Teacher Found Nude and Slain,” “Teacher Victim of Sex Slaying,” “Drifter Held in Roseann’s Slaying.”
Roseann Quinn’s 1973 murder exploded in the national news because it was a timely I-told-you-so to the new generation of women choosing sexually liberated lives. Quinn was a New York City teacher who lived alone and allegedly went out to bars at night and brought home men. One evening she made the wrong choice. She made the wrong choice. The words in the headlines: Nude and Slain, Sex and Slaying. How important it was to use both words, in that order.
Their message is so loud that I almost miss that the painted Roseann Quinn has thin red stab wounds all over her throat.
I move on to the next female face: close-lipped smile, head tilted, her pretty eyes lined in black, her blond-streaked hair arrowing beneath her chin. Everything about this subject’s posture suggests a readiness to be viewed: she is posing; she is composed; she has practiced for this picture. Lord captures this preparedness in precise paint that blurs only once, smudging a high elegant cheekbone all the way to the frame of the canvas. This is Gwen Araujo, one of Lord’s last subjects, a transgender California teen who was allegedly beaten and strangled by four men last October, after two had had sex with her and then discovered she was biologically male. The perpetrators are awaiting trial. I study the long smudge again, its slight red tinge. It works. The distortion makes the face’s calm beauty hurt.
On the far wall, a monumental Kitty Genovese sprawls in a hallway, bloodied, her face turned to the viewer. Genovese was stabbed outside her Queens apartment at three in the morning in March 1964. She cried for help, loud enough for many to hear; someone in the building shouted back. But no one emerged. Her attacker left the scene. She crawled to the apartment’s back entrance but could not get in. Her attacker returned, raped her, and robbed her, and still no one came to her aid. Later, reporters estimated that thirty-eight people had heard Genovese but failed to save her. She died that night.
This painting is the first time in Still Lives that real gore appears, and at the same time it draws my eye, I find my resistance rising. I’ve seen too many lurid photographs of the victims in our exhibition catalog. I was expecting blood, its cheap horror.
I look dispassionately at the crumpled body of Genovese. Unlike the other two works in the room, this is a depiction of a slaying. Her back is bleeding; her hands are crossed with red slashes. The dull light in the hallway bleaches her panicked face into a ghastly mask.
Ghastly, but familiar. I look back at Araujo and Quinn, and it feels like someone shot a bolt into both of my knees.
The paint thickens and thins differently around each of the figures, but the women’s expressions all have the same eerie clarity, like they’ve been rinsed clean. They stare back into the galleries. Hard. The likeness flashes out—the way Kitty is also Gwen is also Roseann is also Kim. All are Kim. In each of the paintings exists a dead woman—identified by her hair, her eye color, her clothes and gestures—and also, inexplicably, Kim Lord, wearing that death, the way the shamans of old donned the masks and cloaks of spirits.
I am not painting myself.
No. I’m starting to see that now.
I am aware of Kevin and Yegina behind me, also looking, but they seem far away. We don’t speak as we move into the next dim room together: Bonnie Lee Bakley, the Black Dahlia, Nicole Brown Simpson. All Los Angeles murders. Our city’s murders.
Bonnie Lee Bakley, blond, doll-like, is painted in multiple, a half dozen times, her expression shifting from young and perky to fearful and sagging, but always smiling. Two years ago, Bakley was shot in a parked car outside a restaurant. Her murder doesn’t have the same visceral brutality as many of the exhibition’s other deaths, but the leading suspect, her actor-husband Robert Blake, played a famous killer in the movie In Cold Blood, and this has magnified the story’s impact in the media. Robert Blake is on house arrest now.
In Kim Lord’s painting, Bakley’s murder is not acknowledged at all, only her aging face and fading confidence. Bakley’s dark, perfect arching brows and bared teeth never change, but her cheeks swell and sag. Her curled yellow hair straightens and darkens. Before meeting Blake, Bonnie Lee Bakley made her living with a mail-order business, sending nude pictures of women, including herself, to men. She also asked her male correspondents to support her. With her proceeds, she bought several homes, but she dreamed of a celebrity life. Bakley was forty-four when she married Blake. It was her tenth marriage, and a loveless one, arranged so that Blake could have legal access to their child.
I don’t understand this artwork yet, but I have some idea of what Kim was after. Bonnie Lee Bakley had traded on her face all her life, and the progression of the images reminds me that growing old must have terrified her. I remember something Kim Lord said about paint, her chosen medium: “The Lonely Hearts Killer, the Original Night Stalker, the Grim Sleeper—Los Angeles serial killers get these profoundly cool names. Meanwhile, their victims look like models. There’s this glamour that glosses their suffering and their humanity,” she said. “Photography is partly to blame, I think. It’s an instant medium and only captures the flash of surfaces. Which is why I wanted to paint these women.”