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Q&A with Kyle Ragsdale
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“I can sleep when I’m dead”
A profile of two Herron School of Art students
Jose Di Gregorio and Christopher Arnold share a studio in the looming Bodner Building along Madison Avenue south of downtown. Their small space, up three floors at the end of a dimly lit hall, marks where these artists are today. At first, the two seem mismatched. Di Gregorio, with his wavy shoulder-length hair, is bold and charismatic. He loves to perform. Arnold, with his wire-rimmed glasses on his nose, is quiet and contemplative. He prefers to stay out of the spotlight. But both are artistically and politically active in the community, both want Herron’s minority artists to have a strong voice, both are talented and innovative artists — and both overcame long odds to make it here. 
Henryk Gorecki and PBR
Di Gregorio, a junior painting student, stands by a small brown refrigerator next to a metal bookcase. It’s stacked with books about wars and surrealist art. “Halloween” by the Dead Kennedys bounces off the scrub-green tiled walls of the studio. It’s L-shaped, with a tiny room off to one side that’s just big enough for a double mattress on the floor. A robust nude woman leans against the wall beside the bed — a 5-foot tall canvas Arnold painted in figure class. Among the collection of items on the work bench in the main part of the studio: a framed picture of the Virgin Mary, the boom box, Di Gregorio’s cell phone and some of his artwork. A textured abstract painting with bright colors trapped under black paint hangs beside the bench. Di Gregorio also started it in figure class. Then he piled on rope, color and dimension. “I threw it on the ground and stepped on it, just did anything I could to fuck it up,” he says, opening a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “I just wanted an expressive feel about it.” He unrolls a large swatch of canvas, depicting a photo-realistic Nazi solider with a blank expression on his face. Life-sized and nude, the soldier’s heart is covered with a smaller picture of him firing a machine gun. Di Gregorio unrolls a second canvas showing a nude mother and child. The mother’s heart is covered by a picture of her crouched over the child before the soldier’s gunfire. The paintings are based on a photograph Di Gregorio found in one of his history books. These are two of an ongoing series of paintings based on the tragedy of war. “Atrocities in history have always been something I’ve been intrigued by because they are unfathomable moments in history,” he says. He brings out a two-panel study with dark figures drawn on masonite with graphite and charcoal. Below the figures are these crudely written words: “Where has he gone my dearest son? … He lies in his grave and I know not where / Though I keep asking people everywhere.” It’s an ode to Holocaust survivor Henryk Gorecki’s third symphony, which Di Gregorio plans to treat on a larger scale in the future. “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” appeared in the films Fearless and Basquait in the 1990s. 
‘The naked solider: Einsapzgruppen’ by Jose Di Gregorio
Coming to America
Di Gregorio’s dad, Jose Luis, dropped out of grade school to help his father dig wells for septic pipelines in Argentina. Di Gregorio’s mother, Maria, left high school after her parents died, and made a living doing menial labor. Jose Luis and Maria eventually met in Puerto Rico, married, had Jose and two more children, then came to America. They arrived with two suitcases. Jose Luis left the family at a motel and visited a friend he hadn’t seen since he was 10. The friend invited them to stay in his small house outside of Woodland, Calif. With nine people living together, it was cramped but worth it. “My father’s lifelong dream was to come to America, and he took the chance by bringing his family in hopes that they could establish themselves there,” says Di Gregorio, who was 5 when the family arrived. He entered kindergarten speaking only Spanish and immediately felt alienated from his peers. He resented his fellow students because of the cultural disconnect. And his mother’s job as a janitor at the school only compounded the problem. “There came a time, though, when I began to understand the sacrifices made by my parents,” Di Gregorio says. “That has certainly allowed me to become ever so grateful of the opportunities I’ve been given.” And that realization helped Di Gregorio overcome his sense of isolation and anger toward his peers. “I think it is reflective on my daily interaction with others. I mean, everyone deserves a genuine clean-slate hello, no matter the differences.” Di Gregorio also grew through working with his autistic brother, Evan — the youngest of two siblings born after the family came to California. Early on, Di Gregorio decided to become a social worker. He started working with developmentally disabled adults after graduating from high school. Although he wasn’t formally trained, he had plenty of experience understanding the daily stresses and rewards of the job. “We grew up with so little and that made autism prominent in my family. I was pursuing a social work degree. But, after I moved here, I felt art is a terrific way to extend who I am and my thoughts about society,” says Di Gregorio, who came to Indianapolis four years ago. “While I am still proactive in social services and try to participate as much as I can in my brother’s life, I’ve found that art has been able to influence me in my own self-realization. I think that’s more important in my life than anything else, discovering myself.” Karaoke and politics
Since then, Di Gregorio does his discovering and observing in front of other people. When he first visited his friend Brent Eskew in Indianapolis, Di Gregorio didn’t intend to stay here long — until he found out about Herron. Art school was something he could not afford in California. But here he received scholarships and enjoyed the lower cost of living. Di Gregorio formed a rock band with Eskew, his former co-worker at a facility for the developmentally disabled in California. The Relatives, a hard-rock group with politically conscious lyrics, won the 2002 Battle of the Bands at the Vogue. The band just played a show at Talbott Street in March. But Di Gregorio, the band’s lead singer, still views music as more of a hobby. “My focus is on art, culture and politics,” he explains. “Not just politics as in Democrats and Republicans. But the politics of living and how people lose themselves in affluence and cultural ideologies.” These interests led to Di Gregorio becoming president of the Active Student Artists — a form of Herron student government that organizes trips, events and allocates money to reach out politically to students. He’s working to get students involved in this year’s presidential election. “It just blows your mind how many people just don’t participate, don’t register, it’s sad,” he says. “I certainly have my own underlying biases though, and encourage people to think outside of mainstream media.” Di Gregorio also performed two art pieces last year — one in front of Herron and the other in front of the Harrison Art Center. He built a wooden “Karaoke Box” that he could fit comfortably inside. There, he performed songs with a bullhorn and fed chewy chocolate chip cookies to people who paid a buck for requests. “It wouldn’t necessarily be the song you requested,” he says. “It was a way to interact with the viewer or public in general. And I wanted to do something that wasn’t planned, where they had to come to a certain space to see me, where nobody planned to go visit this particular space. I wanted it to be something people just happened upon. The spontaneity was important.” He sang 1980s ballads like “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” “Metal Health” and “Sunglasses at Night.” “It was kind of a way for me to be comfortable in public by singing songs. It was also a way for the public to be able to get something out of it without having to see the artist,” Di Gregorio says. “It made the viewer a little bit more comfortable in purchasing their songs because they didn’t have to look me in the eyes.” Nude man in a kiddy pool
Right now, Di Gregorio is just waiting for spring. He’s going to France in May to spend the summer studying under Robert Reed, an art professor at Yale. When Di Gregorio returns, he has plans for Indianapolis — nude plans. “I want to expose myself in a vulnerable state in front of a large group of people. Regardless of what I think, I am self-conscious of who I am. I’m curious to how exposing myself in that way will push me in my own art,” he says. “If I expose myself, my genitalia, people are going to look at that and have their perceptions of who I am.” He may couple the nudity with karaoke and kiddy pools filled with disgusting substances. These plans remain tentative. “But,” Di Gregorio says with a smile, “if I were given the right environment I would definitely push it.” Chris Arnold’s Vision
Leaving the stigmas behind
The studio changes with Arnold around. Jazz has taken over the boom box. “Architect’s Vision,” Arnold’s self-portrait in bright watercolor, is framed and propped up on the workbench. The painting represents Arnold’s distinctive style — swirls and shapes in gold, blue and red composing his face. “I feel these shapes and colors,” he says. Arnold sips from a bottle of water as he speaks softly but passionately about helping breathe life into watercolor, the medium he worked with growing up. The problem, he says, is that watercolor is almost dead because people only paint barns, trees and other “boring stuff.” “I really like that I’m put in a position to try to revive that medium because, in a lot of ways, it’s not looked at as a serious form of painting,” he says. “If you grow up eating cornflakes”
Arnold grew up on the Southside. “Not Greenwood south but south of Washington Street south,” he says. His family was one of the only black families in the neighborhood. Once, when he was a little boy, a neighbor woman visited the house and said, “Why your house isn’t dirty at all!” “I looked at my mother,” Arnold says. “She just raised her eyebrows and said, ‘No.’” Even in grade school, Arnold was becoming aware of the issues of race. His family had played a part in the civil rights struggle in Kentucky. His grandfather helped integrate the schools there. And his aunt was the first black woman to attend Murray State University. “I would listen to their conversations, just being nosy and a kid. I didn’t grasp it all. But I got a grasp of some things about just being black,” he says. “The first lesson I learned as a child was to go off the positive things, the things you do have in common with other people, not focusing so much the things you don’t. ‘You like football? I like football, too.’ That type of thing.” 
‘Architect’s Vision’ by Chris Arnold
When being special isn’t
“All I can remember is I was in class, doing my work and the teacher was like, ‘Chris you have to switch classes.’ I didn’t think too much about it until I walked into a room full of fourth- and fifth-graders,” Arnold says, who was in third grade at the time. “If it wasn’t for art or that part of me, there’s no telling,” he explains. “I would probably be a weak person. Other than the teachers pushing the students by saying, ‘You can do anything you want to do,’ the rest of the world sort of shits on you.” As a fifth-grader, Arnold earned an Outreach Scholarship to attend classes at the Indianapolis Art Center in Broad Ripple. There, he met teacher Kay Clay, who introduced him to working with watercolor and inspired him to continue taking his artwork seriously. Clay also happened to teach art at Manual, the high school in Arnold’s neighborhood. So the two were able to work together during his four years there. They are still great friends and Arnold credits her with motivating him to continue on to college. Despite his successes in art, attending special education classes hurt his self-esteem and made him anxious when dealing with people. “Being a pretty good artist was stressful because on the weekends and evenings, when I had to go to all these banquets and functions, people would say, ‘You’re a bright kid.’ Then, when I was at school, I was going to those ‘special’ classes with kids that really needed help,” he says. “I mean, some of those kids were mentally handicapped. For a long time I hated to talk to people.” Arnold considers how much stronger he would be as an artist and a person if IPS had given him the education “normal” students received, the education he deserved. “I always wondered about writing. It’s just by me now, having gone to IPS. I love IPS and all. But I didn’t learn anything. I thought I was mentally handicapped by the time they were through with me.” Seeing color and shape
Arnold became a teacher at the Indianapolis Art Center right after graduating. He was the first person to teach there after starting out as a student on an Outreach Scholarship. Teaching art to children soon led to a one-man show at the center. “It’s not New York City or anything but people still ask, ‘Well, how did you do that?’” he says. Arnold saw another life-changing experience that year when two autistic children joined his class. After some early concerns, Arnold enjoyed teaching the children and decided he wanted to work with other autistic kids in the future. “One of them was very straightforward and the other kept to herself. It made me learn a little more patience and helped me develop different techniques to help them understand,” he says. “It was exciting to see them get the same experience of learning and fun as the rest of the class.” During freshman and sophomore years at Herron, Arnold worked even more in the community. He assisted storyteller Marvel Davis (Marvel’s Marvelous Stories) in an after-school program. He worked at her “Refrigerator Art” gallery, serving inner city kids on the Eastside. Then Arnold taught art at Trinity Christian School where he had attended as a boy. “Working at Trinity also made me want to work with children. It was a place of learning and made me feel a part of it. Made me feel I could work in that field. I want to do that for other kids,” he says. But all of this soon left Arnold feeling burnt out. He went into autopilot as an artist, just painting “pretty pictures.” That changed when he encountered Herron teacher Kevin Wolf, who helped him “see color and shape for the first time.” “Finally, I decided, ‘I’m going to make something ugly and learn from it.’ I had to — because there was no other way to grow,” he says. “I saw people around me who didn’t have as much talent but were growing as artists. I learned I still had a lot to learn.” ‘The Life and Times of Christopher Arnold’
He’s going to call it The Life and Times of Christopher Arnold. “It’s about growing and trying to understand the ways I’ve grown as a young black male into a man,” he says. “I just need a place to have the show and the time to get the work done.” Arnold has a lot to do. Before he’s 30, he wants to operate a school where he can teach children about what he feels saved him — art. “I feel really pressed for time, I’m already 24,” he says. “It’s an ‘I can sleep when I’m dead’ sort of feeling.”
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Aug 29, 2008
Indianapolis Museum of Art
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