Jonah, the cute desk clerk at Pearl Paint on Canal Street who never smiled at anyone but me, whispered one afternoon that Pine City bought an abandoned hotel somewhere upstate. It was to be their private retreat, though he’d heard they might host a couple of artists the following year. Immediately I pictured receiving an invitation in the mail that said Welcome to Pine City. I told Jonah I was going to be there someday, and he rolled his eyes. Then I spent a thousand dollars on materials. He didn’t roll his eyes at my wrinkled pile of money, rubber-banded from the restaurant. When I left he looked at me with something that was either pity or pride or a mixture of both.

Soon, I had my first show.

It was in Brooklyn at a shitty gallery in Bushwick when I was twenty-three, and I called it Ohne Titel, “untitled” in German, which is still embarrassing. Only two of my paintings sold. The other eight I donated to a homeless shelter. The gallery dropped me afterward, making the radically uncreative argument that they had no real way to sell a series of near-identical untitled paintings by a young no-name female painter; it was too difficult, especially as long as I insisted the work remain untitled and that the wall text include basically no information. It was like trying to sell a plain white t-shirt with no brand name for two hundred dollars. Did I know anyone famous, they asked, who could help me? Did I have any well-known friends? Or maybe a group show that made it look like I was a part of a trend…whatever it was, something had to be done about my “identity problem.”

Anyone could sell plain untitled abstracts by a young female painter with an identity, they insisted. All I had to do was get one.

By contrast, Pine City, now crossing into their thirties, were becoming a reference point unto themselves. Their private retreat upstate had been photographed, celebrated, and fetishized, and their lifestyle was a romantic touchstone. At DIY venues without toilets or bars, people lined up around the block to see Jes’s performances. Marlin’s wheatpastes became sites of pilgrimage. Jack and Tyler’s site-specific installations, always mounted illegally at midnight, were now left up for a week or two, instead of being taken down immediately.