Lenny Silverberg: Decisions Happen

Lenny Silverberg in his study with his collection of jazz LPs. Photo by Kurt McVey. 

By KURT MCVEY July, 2023

There are too many fantastic aphorisms and confounding zingers between the artist Lenny Silverberg and his late wife and muse, Noni, to single out one for the purpose of framing their special relationship. Not long into an early summer visit to Silverberg’s charming home-studio in the Bronx, however, did one particularly delicious proverb jump out, humbly but clearly declaring its potential to equally encompass the passionate, life-long, conjoined practices of art and love.

“I don’t make decisions, decisions happen.” Lenny says it with a shrug or maybe a gentle wave as he confidently turns, then, like a hip, way-uptown New York City Bilbo Baggins, weaves and floats confidently through his apartment, gesturing to follow and keep up: “Come, come.”

Lenny, a spritely 84, doesn’t sit still or linger idly for too long. He has too many great stories to tell and too many accompanying artworks in various mediums, styles and states of completion to help illustrate these stories. Lenny quite famously boasts several religiously organized walls, each jammed floor to ceiling with rare jazz and blues records in search of a thirsty needle. It’s an incredible, incomparably mint collection. All this, paired with an invigorating wellspring of contagious enthusiasm as it aligns with a pleasant gratitude for the past, present and future.

“I think that the way I work is affected by or similar to jazz in that I pick a theme and do improvisations on the theme,” Lenny says. “I Got Rhythm, (George Gershwin), 15 versions.”

Lenny was actually there, surfing the “high-water mark,” whether backstage smoking doobies with Jerry and The Dead, or orchestrating complexly layered light magic with Ben Van Meter, Bruce Conner, Roger Hillyard, and others at The Avalon Ballrooms, or well after the glow with a young Janis, drinking her preferred cheap whiskey in the back of her cozy, repurposed hearse, discussing how her parents back in Corpus Christi, Texas just couldn't understand. Lenny was there for Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, Sun Ra, even an elder Coltrane, unfolding in real time in the dewey, smoke-shrouded flesh. Lenny isn’t, like so many of us, desperate and dying for another collective moment in this new century, which has yet to arrive and may never come.

The 21st century rather has been deeply pocked by manufactured crises rather than monumental universal blessings for all humanity. Could there ever be another substantial Elysian-style Love-in, or have we been intersectionality dissected and gaslighted into some hopelessly disembodied corpse? Exquisite individuals we are, perhaps, but increasingly, literally plastic, both internally and externally, and caught in a disastrous political and cultural binary, filled up with so much ethnocentric pride as its married to righteous anger, but spiritually bankrupt; well-beyond unity, beyond wholeness; fractured, resigned, safe in theory, but scared in practice; cynical and eternally weary, doom scrolling while waiting for the next shoe to drop onto a mountain of fallen shoes, like stacks of bleached buffalo bones. Lenny’s quirky grace and art, quite quickly, fosters the impression that one’s dysfunctional Millennial shoelaces, mired in a lifetime of muck, bile and disillusion, are being patiently tied by grand and measured hands.

A watercolor by Lenny Silverberg from his book Either Way It’s Perfect. Courtesy of the artist.

“Two or three years after she died, I started these watercolors.” Many of these watercolors on the wall or preserved in art storage draws, can also be seen in Silverberg’s emotional, sometimes jarring, but equally chucklesome art book, Either Way It’s Perfect, which posthumously chronicles Lenny’s experience caring for his cherished wife, Noni Reisner, who passed away from complications due to Dementia in 2012. Noni was infamous in certain circles for her always funny, often oxymoronic, Yogi Berra-meets-Don Rickles-esque “conversation stoppers,“ such as Take what you have and do what you can’t, or, Pretty soon you’ll be the same person you’ve always been.

“I have three recurring dreams of her,” Silverberg offers before making space for one of his recurring cheeky, trepidatious pauses. “I’m not a private person. My daughter (Kimberly, to whom the art book is touchingly dedicated) kicks me under the table.”

Lenny’s three dreams of Noni are: “I lose her in a crowd; She tells me she’s leaving me; and, We’re shopping for food together, deciding what to eat.” One out of three ain't bad.

Many of these watercolors evoke an immediate reaction: Lenny has the touch, meaning, he isn’t messing around with color, emotion, application and composition. Beyond his own work, his walls are filled with art from other great artists; peers, friends and heroes, categorizations happily blurred and intermingled. Immediately upon entering Lenny’s apartment, guests are greeted by an original painting by the guerilla poster artist, Robbie Conal, a long-time friend of Lenny’s going way back to when they wheat-pasted Lower East Side streets, uptown to what was once called, perhaps not too appropriately, “Noodle Town.” On Friday July 12th (7pm PT), Mr. Silverberg will be joined by Mr. Conal in a sure-to-not-be boring artist talk at Track 16 Gallery in Los Angeles to celebrate the closing of Lenny’s solo show at the gallery, Streets and Borders.

Silverberg holding a Robbie Conal poster.
 

Lenny and Robbie in the 1970s and in 2024

It’s surmised somewhat quickly that Lenny might in fact be Jewish. A further inquiry supposes that many of Lenny’s figures-whether in his studio or in the LA show-people often huddled en mass, mid-exodus, might have something to do with the long and winding Jewish diaspora.

“A little bit,” Lenny partially concedes. “I had an uncle who told me to always keep a bag packed.” And did Lenny catch Anselm Keifer’s gargantuan, ambitious, but perhaps overblown and ostentatious 2022-23 bi-coastal exhibition, Exodus? “I think he’s really, really good. I like what he’s dealing with; his history.” Lenny isn’t that political or journalistic; it’s more about a feeling or vibe. In newer works, figures in his paintings might simply be folks waiting to cross the street in New York City, or living apparitions from his high school reunion, or just Robbie eating a slice of pizza, but all thrown in together. “I might be at a train station sitting in a corner; light coming through the old windows. Immigrants and refugees. I mix up everything. There’s people from different eras, different ethnic groups, some from the 18th century, some from the 20th. It’s the universal experience of migration. I saw Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera years ago. The scene where the smugglers come over the hill. I thought, ‘I could use that.’ ”

A watercolor from Silverberg's "Streets and Borders" series.

A small-run, large-scale print by Alice Neel, with whom Lenny shares some aesthetic DNA, leads to a coffee table where a Max Beckmann art book lies open, full spread. Lenny is showing you where he belongs or hopes to exist as he drops allusory crumbs on the “hiding in plain sight” journey to his own positioning in the canon and contemporary discourse. What are his thoughts on Käthe Kollwitz and her conferring revolutionaries? He has several prints by the artist hanging in his office but lost out on a bid to buy an original work by the passionate German printmaker. Francis Bacon? Yes! Francisco Goya? (Lenny possesses a couple works by Goya) Totally! Arshile Gorky and Gustave Moreau? Absolutely! Willem De Kooning? Sometimes (see: Pink Angels). Edvard Munch or Egon Schiele? Not so much.

While looking at one of Robbie Conal’s original paintings in Lenny’s living room-all dark, gritty sinews of gorgeously emotive impasto-it’s asked if Lenny is able to remain so light and playful in personality because his work and the art he likes can be, rather, well, heavy. “He thinks I’m too dark,” Lenny says of his pal Conal’s take, and with a playful pot calling the kettle black, “What can you do?” The aforementioned book has received similar criticism despite its unanimously acknowledged power and poetic beauty. “Some people find it too heavy because it is her (Noni) passing away from me. The last images are of her dying. When she died, I called my daughter who lived an hour away. So my daughter was coming, but I was there. So I drew her. When I first saw Monet’s drawing of his first wife who died (Camille on Her Deathbed, 1879), I said, ‘Why would he draw her?’ Then I was in the situation and it made a lot of sense to me.”

A watercolor from Silverberg's "Streets and Borders" series.

Lenny knows most people don’t generally relish looking at death, let alone their own. But Lenny, who was more than around during the core Haight-Ashbury days, meaning the mid to late-sixties in San Francisco, is familiar with the core lessons behind a bad trip, especially that of the pioneering LSD variety. This means reconciling the ego as it correlates to the inevitability of our mortality and the likely decay that precedes the end. Most importantly, bad trips, like good trips, tend to end eventually. Like any difficult situation, challenges deserve to be met with a sort of playful, proactive stoicism. “The psychedelics teach us that we shouldn’t be afraid of the darkness. The ‘bad trip’ is not wanting to face what comes up,” Lenny adds. Whether making art or caring for his wife, especially the increasingly difficult years between 2006 and her passing in 2012, Lenny never needed the existential lifting and rarely let in any “woe is me” rumination. He never saw it as courage, just daily action connected to necessity: “This is what I needed to do.”

Lenny Silverberg was born in Brooklyn. “The bottom of the hill of Crown Heights,” he says, which was a primarily Italian neighborhood that many called “Pig Town” so many years ago. Lenny remembers a local gang with the same moniker. “There was no domestic animal law, so there were free-range pigs. Jews lived at the bottom of the hill.” Lenny went to Brooklyn College Museum Arts School and was lucky enough to study under Ad Reinhardt and other influential abstract painters. “He (Reinhardt) taught process and that it involved being open to possibly changing direction throughout. I had a painting seminar at the end of the semester and had my pastel paintings spread out on the floor. We’d be sitting in front of them and he would say, ‘Good. Good. Bad. No, we don’t need those.’ ”

A watercolor from Silverberg's "Streets and Borders" series.

After graduating, Lenny spent some time as a young painter on the LES. Looking for experience and adventure, he saved up some money from an unlicensed social worker gig and decided to go to Mexico for six months to study the works of the Mexican muralists. “I was almost running out of money and wasn’t ready to go back to NYC.” Lenny remembered he had a friend in San Francisco. He arrived there in late September, 1965 and was warmly received. “At that time, I thought San Francisco was Heaven. I had been there in ‘63 when I went with a friend and girlfriend to hike in Yosemite. I fell in love with the white and pink buildings and how clean the city was then compared to New York.”

Lenny became a true hippy. He was deeply in it. “Actually, I might be one of the last true living hippies,” he says with a proud giggle. “I was part of The Avalon Ballroom’s lightshow, The North American Ibis Alchemical Company. Not The Fillmore, The Avalon Ballroom ones.”

Lenny confirms there was a playful competition between the two iconic SF venues. The light shows are memorable for marrying multiple modalities to create a cumulative kaleidoscopic, micro-photographic fluid effect, now synonymous with this moment and movement. “I did light shows for 2 1⁄2 years,” Lenny says. “Six overhead projectors with vegetable dye, a different color on each dish, and linseed oil that makes bubbles, then move it all to the music-a flowing color thing. Ten to twelve slide projectors, two or three 16mm projectors and clock faces of different sizes for their convex curves. Bruce Conner was very difficult to deal with.” Lenny remembers Conner, a sort of proto-Terrence Malick in terms of his desire for image flow as opposed to narrative cohesion in his art films, demanding a portion of the gate during a planned retrospective at the SFMoMA, which eventually happened a year after he died. “He had his fame.”

A watercolor from Silverberg's "Streets and Borders" series.

Lenny shared one other story about Bruce Conner inserting the infamous clip of Jackie Onassis frantically climbing over the back of the car the moment after JFK was assassinated, in the middle of a performance by Blue Cheer, a band often credited with being early pioneers of heavy metal. Conner, like some kind of hippy-trickster Tyler Durden, apparently loved messing with people’s heads. Hippies were not without their hard edge. Lenny left San Francisco in 1968, after getting mugged for a second time. The first incident wasn’t scary. The second was. “A problem of what happened to Haight-Ashbury; people stopped taking acid with respect for it. The Summer of Love, for me, was the beginning of the end,” he says. Lenny recalled getting punched in the head by a strung out vagrant being the last straw. “When I was in Haight Ashbury in ‘65, there wasn’t this homelessness there is now,” he clarifies, sensing the question.

Lenny eventually left San Francisco and spent some time in the American Southwest looking after an authentic Adobe house in Placitas, New Mexico that belonged to some creative friends. “I’m a city person,” Lenny admits. “I really did like it, but the scene was so unstable. People would move there, think they were gonna stay in Placitas forever, and then after three months, they would go. After a year, I ended up with four Canadian geese, a mallard and his Beijing duck wife, and chickens who never laid eggs. I should have put them in a pot.” Lenny stayed for a year, before heading to his friend Tom Dewitt’s parents’ house in a still-crunchy Poughkeepsie, New York to tackle an as of yet uncompleted film project. Tom, meanwhile, was making Sunday morning (Camera 3) TV programming back in New York City.

Noni Reisner was already in the picture at this point. Lenny had met Noni on the LES in ‘63 when she and her husband, Doug, along with their daughter Kim, came to New York from Pomona, CA. “They had a baby and both dropped out. He (Doug) came to New York first, Noni and Kim followed. Noni and I, well, there was a clicking at the beginning. I went to Mexico. We were writing to each other on and off. I don’t have those letters.”

Silverberg's Noni book cover 

Noni visited Lenny when he was in New Mexico at the Adobe house trading goat milk for apples and looking after the property’s water rights. It was admittedly, saturated with romance. Noni was breaking up with Doug who Lenny says had alcohol problems, which was too much for her to handle. “I was in Poughkeepsie to make this film. The plan was she would come there and we would drive back to Berkeley together where she had a house.”

After driving cross country in someone else’s car they were helping to deliver, after spending several days with Sam Shepard and his wife O-lan, no less, Lenny and Noni moved in together. They didn’t officially marry until 1992. “Her father said I had the record for wooing. I had wooed her for 20 years!” In 1984, after years teaching in Berkeley, Lenny and Noni’s mothers both fell sick. “Her mother had a stroke and my mother got breast cancer. They were both in New York so we came back. I said to my mother when we arrived, ‘I’m so glad I can be here for you.’ She said to me, ‘I’d rather I was well and you were still in California.’ ”

After digging through the Village Voice, they found a sublet opportunity in SoHo. This one-year sublet turned into a 35-year stretch in that apartment on Broome and Centre right across from the old police building. Lenny recalls a homeless village in the courtyard garden of that building, now filled with upscale apartment units. “There were two guys who kept that fire going.” These were the first faces Lenny started to paint. He also kept his eye on migrants, whether displaced by war or famine, all the same recurring elements that drive humans towards new lands and an uncertain future. Same problems, new faces.

Noni had epilepsy before she had dementia. The epilepsy derailed her more than once. Lenny remembers that she started to make “little films” that were “quite good,” with several landing in various short film festivals. She later had an epileptic seizure while cutting a film. “She tried to work around it but that didn't quite work,” Lenny says. “She did pottery for a while, but this led to a seizure too. She would go for long periods of time; 11 years without a seizure.” Still, Noni got her Masters in teaching English as a Second Language. “I first noticed dementia when she was having trouble keeping it together. This was around ‘98, but it completely took control in 2006.”

Lenny says he stopped making art for a concerted stretch because he had “lost her once,” as he put it. “She had slipped out the front door while I was painting in the studio. I came out, the door was open, and she was gone. She didn’t have her cane so I knew she couldn’t get far. She’d be limping. I ran down from Broome to Canal then up Mulberry, came upstairs, called the police. They sent a car over. Right after I hung up, a neighbor called me: ‘Noni is confused and in a restaurant across the street.’ The guy in the restaurant saw that she was confused and gave her lunch. When she walked in and he asked where she was from, she said Los Angeles. She grew up in the Hollywood Hills. Ricky Nelson was her neighbor. She told me she used to tease him.”

Lenny started doing the portraits of Noni two years after she died. The book, which Lenny is hoping to turn into a film with the multifaceted help of several family members, originally took shape in 2020. “In many ways, Noni was easy to care for,” Lenny offers. “She had anxiety. She once hit me, but she didn't go through the constant anger thing. She never didn’t know who I was or who Kim was. At one point, her friend Lucy, who had been her college roommate, came over. Noni didn’t recognize her. Lucy loved the blues like Noni and we were talking for hours. Noni said at one point, after Lucy put on a record she knew Noni loved,‘Oh, Lucy, what are you doing here?’ ”

Lenny did the cooking. One evening, before bringing the food from the kitchen to the table, he noticed the silverware was gone. “She had put the silverware on each side of the pillow, like placemats. She’d done it on both pillows. You know the iron grills on your stove? She hid two of those and it took me a month before I found them. They were amongst her bras and panties.”

Lenny, don’t over-be yourself. Why not just be naughty? Or: You look strange considering who you’re supposed to be. Or perhaps: Either way it’s perfect.

“I’ve been lucky,” says Lenny. “I fell into things. I did what was necessary. Sometimes we would just sit and hold hands. It never occurred to me not to do it, the caring for her. And I never thought that I had completely lost her. There was always some connection.” WM