Carol Joyce, Textile Design Artist, Teacher, Author, 93
First published April 14, 2020;
last edit June 22, 2022
In 1960, I took the elevator in a nondescript office building near the northeast corner of 42nd Street and Broadway, walked across a drab, gray hallway, and opened the door of Prince Studio. There I found the boss, Jack Prince, whirling clutsily around the office demonstrating pirouettes observed the night before at New York City Ballet. I felt like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, opening the door of her house in a black and white world and discovering a Technicolor universe outside.
Jack Prince ran a textile design studio where artists Paul Thek, Joseph Raffael, Irene Maria Fornes, Carolyn Brady, Audrey Flack, Anita Lobel, Robert Quijada, Julius Perlmutter, Bob and Lois Adler, Estelle Lavin, Malcolm Spooner, and others mostly worked free-lance, creating designs for printed textiles, and hoping for sales. Jack's Studio provided a free-spirited fairyland where artists could make a small income creating commercial art during the day and their own, noncommercial art at night.
The designers' visiting friends, lovers, and ex-lovers included writers Susan Sontag and Alfred Chester, photographer Peter Hujar, set designers Beni Montresor and Peter Harvey, and Eric Braun, a principal dancer at Ballet Theater. They were gay, straight, and undecided (me, then). But Jack’s openly gay flamboyance made Prince Studio a queer countercultural oasis smack in the middle of New York City’s then flourishing Garment District.
Jack's was casual. Somebody said: "There's an empty desk, sit down -- try it!" I sat down and tried it, spending 14-hour days learning textile design under the tutelage of Carol Joyce. The pale-faced, jet-black-haired, impeccably dressed Carol appeared promptly at 2 pm each workday and occupied a desk directly opposite mine. Since her husband, Bob, was employed since college on the late shift at The New York Times News Service, “C and B” were known by marveling friends to breakfast at 1 p.m., lunch at 5 p.m., and dine at 12 am.
Working late into the evening with Carol after most others had gone home, I learned to concentrate, draw pretty little flowers, and gab with the smart, talkative, inquisitive woman who began mentoring me in my new trade. Carol and I talked about art, movies, plays, music, food, politics, people, and sex -- and more sex.
One evening Carol described her experience as a young woman of repeated, unwanted advances from men in New York’s streets and subways. She told of breast gropings, ass grabbings, and penis displays that horrified me, a male who valued my privacy and kept strict boundaries between myself and others. Carol's story was my first, first-person education in feminism.
The curious Carol, during another late-night chat, was the first person to ask me if I were gay. I took this as an extremely nosy but caring attempt to know me better. But I had been schooled for years in keeping to myself My Big Horrible Embarrassing Secret. So I hemmed and hawed and finally answered haltingly: "Well . . , uh . . , I'm going to . . . uh . . , a therapist . . . to uh . . , try to . . . uh . . . change" -- or something pathetic like that. With Carol, I first began to drop my protective shield and enter the world of human affection.
When Paul Thek also worked late one night, Carol, the long-experienced designer, advised both of us fledgling freelance artists on how to create saleable designs. I well recall her repeated, commanding injunction: “No poison ivy, no Deadly Nightshade, no Venus Flytraps, no amoebas, no snakes, no sperm, no testicles, no penises!” Under Carol's tutelage, for the sake of sales, Paul and I conquered any inclination to include phalluses among our flowers.
Once, when Paul Thek required hair to attach to his weird meat sculptures, the respectably outfitted Carol accompanied the countercultural Paul to the shops of consenting barbers on the Lower East Side. Collecting hair from the barbershop floors to include in Paul’s art, they ignored the strange looks of guys getting haircuts. We could not have imagined then that Paul's hairy meat sculptures would one day end up in collections of The Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art.
In the early 1960s, before anti-war activism had become a mass movement, I joined Carol, Paul, and several other Prince Studio artists on an anti-nuke march. On Fifth Avenue, on the edge of Central Park, we heard a loud call from the sidelines: “Commie, kike, queer!” To which Carol immediately and quietly quipped: “Well, I’m two out of three, but I’m not telling which two.”
As a young woman, angry about the inequality of rich and poor, and discrimination against Black people, Carol joined American Youth for Democracy, organized in 1943 by the Communist Party and declared subversive by the U.S. Attorney General.
In the 1950s, when Carol took an auto trip South with an interracial group of friends intent on protesting segregation, the group was stopped by an armed sheriff on an isolated country road. When the cop demanded to know who the hell they were and what the hell they were doing, her male comrades were tongue-tied in fear. Carol proudly recalled dissembling, responding calmly to the officer who then, miraculously, let them drive on.
In the mid-1960s, Carol joined me and other textile designers in an attempt to unionize artists in the field, working with Wilbur Redet, a tough organizer assigned by The Textile Workers Union of America, to increase the fees paid for designs and the available benefits.
I vaguely recall a loud political discussion about the U.S. war in Vietnam participated in by Carol and Susan Sontag, and others at a dinner in Paradise, a huge Greek restaurant once on 41st Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, in the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Joyce’s joust with Sontag ended with neither conceding.
Born Carol Kaisler in the Bronx on April 1, 1926, Carol grew up during The Great Depression, but because her father, Morris, was a butcher, the family usually had enough to eat. Morris died when Carol was young and her mother, Rose, remarried.
Carol graduated from Washington Irving High School and immediately fled home at age seventeen, determined to escape as soon as possible from her jealous mother’s repeated, violent physical attacks on her rebellious, assertive, talented daughter. On many occasions, her mother appeared suddenly in her room, in the middle of the night, and beat her.
After I told Carol about my mother's early psychological abuse, Carol and I began to argue who had it worse. I had to agree, Carol had a good case. We finally agreed not to compete in any Abuse Competition. Each of us suffered what we had suffered.
Well into my friendship with Carol and Bob, one lonely night coming home late from the Studio, I picked up a guy on 8th Street and Broadway who, after one-way sex, claimed he was a cop, took my money and my camera, threatened to arrest me, and told me I was lucky he didn’t beat me up. As soon as he left, still shaking, I called Carol and Bob, ran to their nearby home, and they took me in and listened to my frightening tale. They helped me regain my courage to return home – and move on. How lucky I was in those closet days to have such dear, supportive friends.
Carol’s early alliance with her similarly rebellious and beloved step-brother, Vincent Beck, helped her and Beck transcend difficult pasts and move on to creative work and community service. Beck became an actor in numerous Broadway and Off-Broadway plays, television shows, and films. He served as an official of Actors Equity starting in 1982, and president of the Screen Actors Guild’s New York branch starting in 1983. Carol was devastated when he died from cancer at age 59, in 1984.
Carol took her mother, Rose, to see Beck in the Broadway production of Gypsy and was astonished when her mother showed no identification at all with Gypsy's jealous, furious Rose, who sang: "Give 'em love and what does it get ya?"
Carol spent her adult life in Lower East Side rentals. In the 1980s, she and Robert Joyce founded the E. 7th Street Block Association which had trees planted, increased street safety and garbage pick-ups, and brought neighbors together at street fairs. Carol fought against gentrification, sometimes winning long battles to keep the heights of new buildings scaled to the neighborhood and protecting old brownstones from being demolished for high rises.
As art lovers and collectors, Carol and Bob showed me art they’d just purchased simply because they loved it, unlike collectors for whom art was an investment. Carol loved Asian art and folk art, and I called her living room The Museum and she The Curator.
As an author, Carol published Designing for Printed Textiles: A Guide to Studio and Free-Lance Work (Prentice Hall, 1982), a how-to text. She also authored Textile Design: The Complete Guide to Printed Textiles for Apparel and Home Furnishing (Watson-Guptill, 1997), an appreciation of textile design as “art” as opposed to “mere craft.”
Carol taught textile design for many years at the School of Visual Arts, inspiring many students, and worked to find talented student designers employment in the field.
I always viewed Carol with a bit of awe, as a wondrous, fantastical creature, a quintessential New York character. Bob Joyce said it this way, recalling his wife as “a New Yorker born and bred, with no tolerance for hypocrisy, anti-establishment, outspoken, a free thinker, compassionate, kind-hearted and witty.” Her only shortcomings, he noted, were that “she did not drink wine or eat pasta.” He called her “the love of my life.”
Carol's first cousins, Ruth Soffer and Charlotte Skrobe recalled Carol seeking refuge from her mother in their home. The older Carol “schooled” the sisters in social justice politics, taking them to political meetings, and encouraged Ruth to become an artist.
Forced by the coronavirus pandemic to vacate the safe-house she occupied with her husband, Carol moved with Bob and a beloved cousin, Isabel Soffer, to Soffer’s country home. There, Carol, who had withdrawn in old age into herself, was agitated. She died of cardiac arrest on March 22, 2020, at the age of 93.
Today, sixty years after I first opened the door of Prince Studio, I recall dear Carol's laugh as we giggled together at a magazine photo of a man in a purple dress, with a big hat, lots of jewelry -- a Catholic bishop, in full bishop drag -- who had denounced the unnatural, perverted acts of homosexuals. Laughing with Carol at this absurdity stays with me still. *
After finishing this appreciation I realize that Carol has been mentoring me one last time, teaching me that my love for her might help me, finally, love myself. Thank you, my dear Carol.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31, 2021
Remembering Carol Joyce on 7th Street, EV Grieve: An award-winning news site covering the East Village of NYC.
Carol spent her adult life in Lower East Side rentals. In the 1980s, she and Robert Joyce founded the E. 7th Street Block Association which had trees planted, increased street safety and garbage pick-ups, and brought neighbors together at street fairs. Carol fought against gentrification, sometimes winning long battles to keep the heights of new buildings scaled to the neighborhood and protecting old brownstones from being demolished for high rises.
I always viewed Carol with a bit of awe, as a wondrous, fantastical creature, a quintessential New York character. Bob Joyce said it this way, recalling his wife as "a New Yorker born and bred, with no tolerance for hypocrisy..."Her only shortcomings, he noted, were that "she did not drink wine or eat pasta." He called her "the love of my life."
You can read the full essay here. Bob Joyce is now living upstate with relatives.
Thank you to Dinky Romilly for the photos!
7 comments:
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wonderful essay and ha ha her "shortcomings"! RIP!
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Anonymous said...
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Beautiful
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Anonymous said...
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I hope and pray to be remembered as Anti-establishment. Godspeed Mrs Joyce. I don't get what is so great about wine either.
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Anonymous said...
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Didn't know her yet after reading the essay I miss her, what a interesting person and a fantastic neighbor!
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Anonymous said...
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Beautiful - RIP
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Anonymous said...
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I miss you fairy godmother. I will love you forever. Happy Birthday!
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Anonymous said...
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I remember Carol from taking her textile design class at SVA. She wore chic dark sunglasses always , even though it was a night class. She was brilliant, kind, talented and a fantastic educator. Bravo