ADDISON STONE (from ArtUnite): In the fall, I fell in love. I was painting happy things. My brain was in dreamland—I wanted to feed grapes to my boyfriend. And so that’s why I started some pencil studies that would become the painting of my friend Marie-Claire, who is so refined and delicate.
But I’d also met Dom and Cam Lutz, the brainpower behind some really avant-garde and very cool installations that had been cropping up all over the city. I’ll always love street art and pranks and creating a spectacle. So we conjured up this idea to do a billboard collage of twelve people who’d been imprisoned for their political beliefs, all around a Thanksgiving dinner table. From Bobby Sands to Aung San Suu Kyi to Mahatma Gandhi to Maria Alekhina from Pussy Riot. We wanted to give thanks for these people. Look, I didn’t want to make money from it. I didn’t want to sell it privately. I didn’t even want to sign it. I wanted to make public art. From me, for everyone. That’s the beauty of it.
Dom and Cam were famous vandals. They were pulling fun, big-scale stunts. Their latest thing was screwing around with statues of old war heroes. You know those statues you see in the parks? They’d spray-paint ’em, dress them up so it looked like they were all in ballet costumes.
Once the Lutz boys got on board, we assembled the collage with blow-up photographs and decided to plaster up the whole installation at the Queens Midtown Tunnel, which links midtown Manhattan with Central Queens and the Long Island Expressway. It’s a thick traffic artery. And Dom had found an empty billboard. If a corporation is running an ad on a billboard and you replace it with your own shit, you’re screwed. The company has a big temper tantrum, and then their lawyers make you take it down. But an empty billboard? Gold mine. We determined that the least amount of traffic was between three and five in the morning. Good weather, no rain. Just cold November. All systems go.
There’s a rush of getting an installation up before daybreak, sweaty and hoping not to be caught. Then seeing it, truly seeing it, for the first time in public. It’s sorcery! And knowing how pissed Max Berger was going to be—hell, yeah, that added to the fun. But we had a few hair-raising moments. I slipped out of my harness, for one. But all’s well that ends with you alive to see your work, and not getting caught in the process.
MAUREEN STONE: Addison called me very early in the morning, the same morning that she’d put up that billboard. She was hardly ever in touch anymore. And she’d been ignoring my emails and voice mails, all my questions about if she might be coming home for Thanksgiving. She said I nagged her. Lord knows, I didn’t mean to nag. Of course I wanted to give her the space she needed. Gracious, I was too scared of her not to give it.
“I almost died on the freeway, Mom!” she said. Then she told me she’d slipped out of her harness and fallen. She hadn’t been hit by a car, but she’d had to scramble off the highway, fast.
My heart was thudding in my chest. I had no idea what she was trying to tell me. Only later did she start from the beginning.
“I’m okay, I promise! Some bumps and bruises, that’s all.” She was laughing, out of breath. “I’m okay!”
I didn’t know what it was all about, but I understood that she’d had a moment of pure fear. And I was so grateful that, inside that fear, she’d called me. And I was even more happy that she was glad to be alive, but now always when I think back over on it, I wonder if maybe she was just glad she’d lived long enough to put up her art.
LUCY LIM: I came down to New York to see Addy for my Thanksgiving break. She was on a high. She’d finished that painting of Marie-Claire, and she’d learned that it had been selected for display in the Armory exhibit. She was wild about Lincoln Reed. The Thanksgiving piece had gone up that previous week, and it was viral, and she was being whispered about, along with the Lutz brothers. The only thing Addison liked better than being gossiped about was being whispered about. She was happy, but not manic.
Justine and Seventeen and Teen People magazines were all knocking, too. Everyone wanted to know more about the pretty girl who painted Being Stephanie and MCB. Addy was catnip. It bothered her that she was also starting to be called “Girl Banksy.” You know Banksy? That guy who pulls the public hoax stunts? I didn’t. Addy had to show me his stuff—she didn’t think they had much parallel. The Banksy shout-outs were still great press for her. But like all Addy highs, it ended with a crash. And in this case, I was there, and the name of that crash was Jonathan Coulsen.
MCB by Addison Stone, courtesy of the Broyard family.
JONATHAN COULSEN, WHO DECLINED to be interviewed for this book, is an American-born art critic whose blog, Juggernaut, is known for its provocative pieces and scathing critiques of international art and culture. While Coulsen’s sharply contentious opinions have sometimes been derided as “party trick prose,” his criticism has always drawn attention for its nerve and poison-dart targeting. While Coulsen is not affiliated with any one philosophy of art, he is occasionally dismissed as an “old-school conservative.” Rights to republish Coulsen’s piece, “Bohemian Bauble: A Closer Look at Addison Stone,” were denied.
LINCOLN REED: God bless Lucy Lim for being with us over Thanksgiving, the same weekend that we found out about Jonathan Coulsen’s article. Erickson had left, gone to Teddy’s house in Virginia. So it was just us three, Lucy, Ads, and me, making a kickass “Friendsgiving.” That was what Lucy called it. Stuffed portobello mushrooms, maple-roasted Brussels sprouts, key lime pie. None of us were cooks, not like Erickson, and the kitchen was tiny, but nothing mattered except that we were all together.
At the time I was just in it, you know? Just stupidly assuming it would be the first of dozens of “Friendsgivings” like that one, until we were old and gray.
Late that afternoon, I’m on my phone, and I see Addison’s name in my Twitter feed, with a link to Coulsen’s blog. Jonathan Coulsen’s a big, swinging dick of an art critic. One of the whales. Everyone knows when he’s showing up at your opening, and everyone listens when he barks. And at the same time that I click the link, thinking it’s going to be Coulsen sending out some love for Ads, I yell out—wishing too late that I hadn’t—“Hey, listen to this!” Mistake.
She’d have found it anyway. But to this day I always kick myself for being the messenger.
LUCY LIM: A lot of people thought that Addy could have been the next Lucien Freud, easy. But this guy Coulsen was determined to smack her down just because she was young and hadn’t been to some fancy art school and didn’t know technique or tradition—basically, that she was just a kid.