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For the May 26, 2010 issue of Stylist, Kate Bussman interviewed Barbara about her experience in New York City during the 60‘s.  Barbara, who was one of six women of different ages interviewed for this article, shares her thoughts about New York then and now and talks about the influences on her work and personal life.

Barbara enjoyed the interview and her discussion with Kate Bussman.  Barbara adds, “I am happy with the Stylist article except that it missed the significance of the Terrain Gallery and Aesthetic Realism.  Since it opened in 1955, the Terrain Gallery and Aesthetic Realism, founded by the great American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel, have had a major, valuable effect on the art world, on individual lives including mine, and on education generally here and abroad.  It is based on this fundamental principle:  ‘The world, art, and self explain each other:  each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.’  See www.aestheticrealism.org.”

From left to right: Barbara at the Terrain Gallery in 1966, photo by Nancy Starrels; Cover page of article; Cover of May 26, 2010 Stylist. Below: Article in Stylist.

My Life in New York

by Diana Best, Priyanka Boghani, and Kate Bussman

Stylist 26 May 2010: 29.

Barbara Singer

Age: 83  ~  Location in her early 30’s: Greenwich Village  ~  Decade: 1960’s

“I was born in the Bronx in 1927, but I was brought up mostly in New Rochelle, a suburb 35 minutes from the city. When I graduated from New York University in 1947, I moved to Manhattan. In the Sixties, I worked as an X-ray technician at the Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn and then a registered mammographer.

In the Sixties I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in a Greenwich Village townhouse, the first cooperative building [jointly owned and run by the tenants] in New York, with my husband, Nat Herz, who was a photographer and poet. We shared the kitchen with everyone else in the building and took turns to cook. I can’t recall how much we paid for our apartment, but I do remember that before I moved in there, I shared an apartment with a friend and we paid $29 (L20) a month.

Everyone in our co-op studied Aesthetic Realism, a philosophical theory about art and poetry, and together, we opened up the Terrain Gallery downstairs (it later moved to SoHo.) Nat was tremendously interested in what was going on in the world, and in fact he went on the March on Washington and 1963 [when Martin Luther King Jr delivered his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech] and took an iconic photograph of the reflecting pool and Lincoln Memorial. Through him I became a little more aware but I really wasn’t interested in Politics then, and I regret that deeply.

A lot of people were in the artistic scene in the Sixties, and galleries were opening on 9th Street. There was a lot of wildness but I wasn’t involved in that. That whole scene with the drinking and the sex? Forget it. It was a lot of pain and falsity, like people trying to get jobs by using sex. I preferred going to the opera at the Lincoln Center, which had just opened, and I took a lot of dance classes - I loved Afro Cuban dance. Nat took me dancing at the Apollo in Harlem - all the great jazz singers performed there.

Nat died unexpectedly in 1964. He’d had asthma since he was a child, and they were giving him cortisone, but they didn’t know then that it weakened the heart. He had a heart attack. We didn’t have children and I took it very hard. Soon after I had a nervous breakdown, it was too much. I had stopped working because Nat was getting big. He’s just had his first advertising job and I thought we were going to be wealthy, but three days after Nat died. I had to buckle down and work. Inspired by Nat, I became a photographer, and now I’m also an actress, and I’ve been in advertising campaigns including one for J.Crew.

The city was much more livable in [sic] back then - there were more jobs and apartments. Today Manhattan is impossibly expensive.”

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