Noah Jemison spent his life teaching himself to see truth, or as he put it, “the reality that exists underneath” the surface.
It’s an approach that’s enabled Mr. Jemison, 81, to recognize potential where it is lacking, both through his art and in other areas of his life — including his apartment.
Before meeting a reporter for an interview in his home, he suggested connecting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first stop was a gallery on the first floor filled with contemporary pieces by Black and Indigenous artists. Among them was a painting Mr. Jemison made in 1976, just two years after he’d first moved to New York, during a moment of strife in his personal and professional life.
He titled it “Black Valhalla,” in tribute to the “lost souls” of the Vietnam War.
The painting towers over six feet tall and features two figures, a male and a female, whose bodies take up the right side of the canvas. He said he’s proud of the work for what it accomplishes visually, beyond the fact that it was the first of his to be chosen for a major museum’s collection.
“Just like most of those paintings that were done in that particular period of my life, I was very consciously trying to impregnate empty space with kind of an intense energy,” he said. “Everything comes from out of nothingness into being, and nothingness is pregnant with possibilities.”
Four years after he created that painting, Mr. Jemison applied that philosophy to a “big, old, ugly, concrete” room in a former Williamsburg factory that became his longtime home.
Mr. Jemison needed a place where he could both sleep and make art, and the light pouring into the loft’s west-facing windows attracted him to the space. Though the building wasn’t meant for residential use at the time, a 1982 state law required landlords to bring the dwelling units up to code and gave the artists-in-residence rent-stabilized status.
When he first moved in, in 1980, he said much of the seven-story building was vacant, save for workers making clothes on the third floor and artists on the fourth floor and above. His radiator didn’t work. From his windows he could see beyond the Domino Sugar Factory and the Williamsburg Bridge, toward the Manhattan skyline, almost to New Jersey. But in the past decade, a construction boom in the Brooklyn neighborhood spawned high-rises that block his view.
“Now the ugliest buildings in the damn world are crowding around,” Mr. Jemison said. “The view, by New York standards, still ain’t that bad, but I miss what I had.”
Mr. Jemison’s apartment, which he rents for $600 per month, enabled him to stay in New York City. He said he feels like he earned the space. Management recently replaced his windows as part of building-wide renovations, but he remembered stretching sheets of plastic over the old ones to keep drafts out.
Mr. Jemison installed the gold and blue tiles bordering his kitchen countertops and laid the wood floors himself. He added walls to make a bedroom and a room for storage at one end of the loft. Above the stove and sink hang his own paintings, photos of friends and family, art his daughter made as a child and masks he collected throughout his travels. A rug from Casablanca delineates the sitting area. A rubber tree he got in the 1970s from sellers in the flower district reaches from its pot across the ceiling and toward the window. Mr. Jemison called the plant his roommate.
Noah Jemison, 81
Occupation: Artist
On traveling: Mr. Jemison traveled extensively, including throughout Europe, Africa and Central and South America, to broaden his horizons and see with his own eyes artworks he’d studied on paper. “I felt comfortable every place I’ve been because I’ve been exposed to it here,” he said. Living in New York was “like a postgraduate education,” that prepared him for life in other places.
On art: Mr. Jemison remembered drawing a cowboy at 4 years old and realizing he could communicate through visuals when his aunt and grandmother saw it. He credited his inner child for keeping him playful. “Creativity is serious play,” he said.
Throughout his career, Mr. Jemison, who is originally from Birmingham, Ala., created sculptures, oil and watercolor paintings, prints and sets for a friend’s performances using junk he found on the street. That continued in Williamsburg, where he befriended Spanish-speakers and relished the quiet of the waterfront at the end of Kent Street.
“Nobody went down there, and I loved it. I would go down there every chance I got,” he said. “It was just this wonderful place to just kind of browse around and think on things.”
He used to go running over the bridge and along the East River, a pastime he rarely, if ever, saw others engaged in.
“The Hispanics would look at me and say, like, ‘what is that fool doing?’” he said.
Mr. Jemison lamented the way the neighborhood transformed over the years, with high-end stores and restaurants catering to newcomers whom he called the “nouveau riche.” Apartments in his building are listed with rents of several thousands of dollars a month. A handful of other artists, long-timers, still live throughout the building.
“You had real New Yorkers here. They were thoroughbreds. It was a different type of New Yorker,” Mr. Jemison said. “They were expressing themselves and being who they were, and they were tough people and strong people, very resourceful people. These new people would have been afraid to come to New York at that time.”
But he acknowledged how the presence of artists like himself made attractive an area formerly considered by many to be depressed. Those artists, he said, put “a kind of chichi, kind of a good thing, on it.”
As part of a wave of newcomers, he said he was “more responsible” for messing up “the neighborhood than anybody,” using an expletive for his self-described contribution to the area’s gentrification.
But when Mr. Jemison goes grocery shopping, he said he runs into a handful of people he’s known for years, and they stop to talk. Those long-lasting relationships are “the joy of my life and one of the most beautiful parts of it,” he said.
The community around him made the difficult parts of living in the loft tolerable. He didn’t expect to stay in the apartment as long as he has, nor did he imagine the dramatic shifts that took place outside.
“No matter what, I’m going to keep this little spot,” he said, “but eventually I’ll probably move to someplace that’s a little more conducive to work. Sometimes this almost feels like a damn college campus now, with all these people.”
In the past few months, Mr. Jemison had been too busy planning exhibitions to make much art, but he had been generating ideas related to negative space, much like what he explored in “Black Valhalla.” He was itching to get back to work.
“When I’m not working, it’s like, I guess, creative constipation,” he said. “I can’t function well. In fact, the world just doesn’t work right unless I’m working. When I’m working, it opens me up to all kinds of forces and stuff that are underneath the surface of practically everything.”
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