FRANK

For 30 years, Frank D’Angelo worked with pizzas, frying sausages in garlic and fennel at Grand Apizza in Clinton, CT. Since April of 2023, he has worked with Picassos. 

“The big Picassos worth money, he didn’t give them to Spain,” Frank says on the third floor of the Yale University Art Gallery, amidst five of Picasso’s pricey progenies. Frank stands taller than the picture frames, donning a warm grin for all of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design to see. Picasso’s choice was political, Frank explains. “He had a problem with the government, so now we’ve got them.” 

Frank likes the Picassos, but his favorite piece is George Grosz’s 1936 Drinnen und Draussen (Inside and Outside); it has a story as well as a political motivation. Split down the middle by a thin row of bricks, the cartoonish painting places two men back to back. “This guy made money in the war, he’s happy, he’s eating,” Frank says, pointing to the man on the left with ripe, red cheeks. “The other guy lost his leg in the war. He’s angry.” 

Frank’s major task is to minimize anger. “When people come in, you gotta go, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ You gotta get them on your side. You don’t want to look at them like that.” Frank feigns a stern glower from behind his glasses. “Then they’re your enemy –– automatically they’ll get mad at you.” 

At 73 years old, Frank began his guarding career after retiring from pizza. He heard about the gig from a guy at his gym. Despite the late start, he’s a natural. “I don’t want to brag, but I’m getting promoted.” Frank leans back, hands up and out to the side. “October 9th –– they’re pulling me out of here. I’ll be with the cameras.” That is an honor among the guards. He could go sooner, but he is staying on for a few weeks to cover for the other guards while they find someone new. 

At all times, 29 guards must be stationed at 29 “posts” throughout the YUAG. Although the guards do not call the gallery the YUAG, Frank explains. “Oh-YAG, Oh-YAG, that’s what we say.” Why? “It’s the slang. At the end of the night, I say, ‘Oh-YAG post 9 is checked and secured.’” 

Not every guard takes such a social approach to the job, Frank admits.“But I’ll talk to you, I will. But I have to get back now, young lady,” he says. Some well-dressed women are pointing their pinkies too close to a Picasso. 

JEREMY

Jeremy Hudman welcomes me to post 19, the contemporary section of Modern and Contemporary Art and Design. He is short with a wide smile and stripe of black hair atop his upturned head. I ask how he is doing. 

“More great than frosted flakes,” Jeremy says.

Before becoming a guard in 2023, Jeremy was the manager of a medical factory –– the first job he took after moving to Connecticut to escape “the heat, the racism” of Texas. Jeremy is Irish-Mexican. He is also a philosopher. He taps his earpiece to pause an audiobook: Machiavelli’s The Prince. Jeremy enjoys Voltaire’s Candide, but despises Russeau. “Candide reads like an episode of Family Guy,” he insists. 

Jeremy has a verdict, a theory for everything –– including his favorite works in the gallery. He whisks me to his spot. “It’s a corner, three paintings, done by different artists at different times, but they talk to each other.” 

We form a square with the pieces. A collage in front of us and a photograph to our left fill the tall corner walls of the white room. Inside a huge painting hanging on a freestanding wall to our right, a woman in a green hoodie slumps on her couch, phone in hand, earbuds to brain, heavy temple resting on tired fingertips. Outside the window behind her, there’s just blue. An eerie, too-bright sky. 

“So she’s in therapy.” Rebecca Ness titled her 2021 self-portrait Teletherapy. Jeremy pivots to our left, across from Rebecca, towards the reflective black photograph. “And she’s staring into the abyss, as Nietzche said.” When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. (I didn’t know what Nietzsche said. I had to ask Jeremy.) 

The abyss is a deep ink spill of a photograph behind a thick plate of glass. In the right third of the photograph, thin masts of sailboats and a dock emerge. I can see clearly, as in a mirror, myself and Jeremy and, behind us, Rebecca. “When this one was placed, I want to say a year-and-a-half-ago,” Jeremy says, “I kept noticing, while she was in therapy she was looking at herself.” 

We turn again, towards Rashid Johnson’s Untitled Escape Collage –– a kaleidoscope of tropical palm trees. Four shattered mirrors part the canvas like snake eyes. “Because of all the negative self-talk, the negative stereotypes, she shatters. That’s the whole therapeutic process, believe me,” Jeremy says. He has been working with a therapist recently, “doing some heavy stuff.” Rebecca looks remarkably like my former therapist (also a messy-bun, monochrome-sweat-suite-type millennial).

He bounces back to Rebecca. “Notice she’s wearing open-toed sandals. Think about what feet represent in movies.” I’m not sure. “Usually, feet represent a character’s soul. She’s opening up her soul and trying to find herself within the void.” 

To the right of Rebecca’s distressed feet, an overturned canvas is stashed behind her couch. “Her canvas is unusable right now,” he says, “You know what it’s like –– when you start, you’re all blocked up.” 

Coincidentally, my ankles are throbbing –– dance injuries. Jeremy encourages me to go upstairs before I leave. There is a new exhibit about art after the Civil War. Jeremy has a theory to share, of course. “You’re walking through the adult mind of Amy March,” he says. He’s been reading Little Women with his 12-year-old stepdaughter. I ask if he will be around to discuss the exhibit later. He won’t. He has therapy. 

FERNANDO

Amy March’s adult mind, or, as it is formally known, The Dance of Life: Figure and Imagination in American Art, 1876–1917 took over the fourth floor in September, when Fernando Ortiz began guarding. The exhibit showcases a generation of artists working after the Civil War who, as the gallery wall reads, “embraced life as their subject.” These artists turned to the human form to embody their new motif. 

Fernando’s springy voice greets me in the winding hall, adorned with kinetic sketches of bodies in motion. On the white and navy walls, pairs of hands clasp one another, torsos twist, and gowns billow from half-drawn forms. “The body itself is a wonderful thing,” Fernando says. “It also is a gateway to imagination.”

Bodies prompted Fernando’s fascination with art. “I’ve always had the sort of creative, perhaps imaginative mind. I loved stories,” they say. It was sequential visual art –– comics, manga, animation –– that first interested them. These styles rely on caricatures of the human form. “You look at video games and anime, they know the body in and out,” Fernando says. “So they know how to bend and break or change it to suit what they want. I realized in order to do anything like that, I had to learn about the human body itself.” 

Fernando felt pressure in high school to pursue a career in STEM. They enrolled as a biology major at Southern Connecticut State University, despite the challenges their ADHD presented to coursework. “I did have a fascination with biology,” especially in the science of gender, they say. “But the whole ADHD thing reared its ugly head.” Fernando realized they could not split their focus between art and biology. “I said, ‘screw it.’ If I’m going to go to college for something, it might as well be something I want to do.” They began a program in graphic design at Gateway Community College, where they study part-time. 

Guarding the gallery seemed like a good gig to pair with the degree. Despite the large amount of standing involved, quite a bit is enjoyable. “I can look at what others before me did,” Fernando says, palms folded and feet planted wide beneath John Singer Sargent’s study of clasped hands.

The Dance of Life charts progress –– of a nation toward rebirth, of artists towards their monuments to this rebirth. It is rare for sketches to be displayed alongside masterpieces. For artists, however, this mode of study is standard. Fernando takes inspiration from digital artists, “people you could just follow on Twitter or Tumblr,” he says. In videos and chat rooms, these artists share their processes with global communities. 

The Dance of Life serves the same purpose. The internet eliminates the barrier of space in sharing artistic practices; The Dance of Life eliminates the barrier of time. It groups studies by different artists to highlight parallels between the artists’ methods. And viewers are invited to participate. In early October, curators added sketching stations throughout the exhibit, loaded with paper, pencils (Blackwings, which Fernando and I agree are the best), and corkboard drawing surfaces. Next to one of these stations is Fernando’s favorite piece in the exhibit, James Carroll Beckwith’s 1892 sketch The Telephone and the Ticker. 

“As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized just how fascinating a still image can be. How that frame can tell a story just by how something moves.” Suspended ticker tape encircles the androgynous figure stepping down from its pedestal. “The body has been posed in a way that accentuates the moving parts of it, you know?” The figure’s elbow juts out, one hand up by the ear, the other down by the hip, pinching a strand of suspended ticker tape. It is hard to tell if the figure is clothed –– sleeves hang from the biceps, but I can also make out a belly button and soft abs. 

Fernando likes this ambiguity. “It’s a little bit weird. If you look near the neck area, it looks like they began drawing a shirt, but then it forms into how the naked flesh would be, right?” Right.“It feels like something I do, like, I’m drawing something and I’m like okay, I just have to finish this. Like they didn’t know where they were going with it, so they said, ‘screw it.’” This departure from strict realism also allows the figure to maintain an unspecified gender, Fernando and I agree. “The movement and sensualism of the body, regardless of the figure, is still there. I guess it’s a bit of a mistake, but it also makes it human,” Fernando says. 

Beckwith drew the piece to personify the telegraph as an ode to instantaneous modern communication. Fernando and I gaze at the androgynous figure, separated from its creator by more than a century. The sketch hangs here as a monument to the body –– the first and eternal mode of human communication.

JEREMY

The finale of The Dance of Life, titled The Hours, is itself an iteration, a half-scale study in which Edwin Austin Abbey, as the wall label reads, “recorded his final thoughts, uncertainties, and many changes.” He painted the finished mural onto the ceiling of the Pennsylvania State Capitol between 1904 and 1911.

On my second visit to The Dance of Life, I turned into the final room to see Jeremy, dwarfed beneath the massive circular canvas. Six feet above him, hunched masculine figures cloaked in black march along the top of the frame towards twirling women, draped in loose pastel tulle. Behind the women, long golden rays of a sun stretch outward. Behind the men’s cloaks, a smaller silver moon glows. Against the dark blue sky, a thick spread of golden stars lights the whole scene. 

“You keep on going around,” Jeremy says. Soldiers in the Civil War, he continues, witnessed weapons of death like none seen before. “People never heard of guns that shot more than once, let alone 20 times. You look at war journals, people describe how they were horrified watching people get gunned down, enemies or not.” The human body had been a site of violence. Abbey’s work upheld it as one of life. 

He imbues the female body with particular radiance. “It was the moms, sisters, daughters that were running society,” Jeremy says, like the March sisters, who greeted their father with joy upon his return from the Union Army. Jeremy raises his palms toward the mural, a monument to love, “that great, big, soft love that we all feel from this.” He and his step daughter, however, haven’t reached Mr. March’s return. “Right now, we’re still at the beginning. But I have ambitions.”  

As with all of the art in the OH-YAG, Jeremy walked around The Hours over and over, “trying to piece together every symbol. What does it mean to me? What does it mean to the general population? Historically? What does it mean in art and poetry?” 

Jeremy has settled on the theme of recovery. The Hours places bodies in pain across from those rejoicing, but provides for them, too, a path to reach one another. Abbey composed a rhythm of recovery: a perpetual chase of death for life, darkness for light, bodies dancing through time –– together in it all.