Her first, a woman in a bikini with strangulation marks around her neck, HARD BODY (7 TIMES A DAY), won the Young Prize. The title of the work referred to the statistical number of women killed by a domestic partner per day in America, and every piece she had made since then featured what she called “working-class bodies” in various shades of disease and decay. It was that one-two combination—of her simple (almost simplistic) way of being, and the extended shadow of her morbid imagination—that went right up the nose and into the lungs, contaminating the crowd.

That night on Grand Street was the most informative night of my young life, thus far. Much of it was semiotic: Up until that show, even in my second year of art school, I possessed very little vocabulary for what being an artist looked like after 1960. I was only a sophomore, after all, and this was before everyone had a smartphone, before the internet was piped into your every living moment. I didn’t know how the YBAs had been living or even what Warhol’s Factory was. I think at the time I didn’t actually know what Jean-Michel Basquiat looked like. I hadn’t read the New York Times on more than three or four occasions, and I certainly didn’t know to subscribe to Artforum or Interview or any of those arty, expensive magazines; I was just a kid, and I was a painter, my world limited to a lineage of painters. At nineteen, my entire frame of reference was essentially based in old photographs of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell hanging in the East Village with the vast landscapes of their canvases, their hair set into big curls like I was doing with my own pale, rosy bob.

But beyond my lack of the most basic cultural and historical knowledge, much of my awe was relational. Pine City were three women and two men in a spiral of their own making, five people who were best friends, lovers, partners, equals. It was family and friendship and romance at once. I’d never seen anything like it, partially because I was from a town in Florida where men had pickup trucks and women, if they were lucky, had abortions, and because I was incredibly young—but also because Pine City was genuinely special, and the way they lived was rare.