Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy

It doesn't rain often in Los Angeles. When it does, the locals react as if Noah had rejected them entrance onto the ark: 'Good-bye world! I'm staying home to eat canned food!' In that sense, I feel lucky to have visited the exhibition Sympathetic Seeing: Esther McCoy and the Heart of American Modernist Architecture and Design on a rainy morning in Los Angeles. For at least one hour, I had the good fortune to walk around the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House—the 1922 live-work space that R.M. Schindler built for his own live-work purposes in West Hollywood—in the undisturbed company of Esther McCoy's articles, letters, quotations, works of fiction and fragments of memory. In having the house to myself, I found McCoy's reflections on architecture and architects (which can too often be cold and technical) all the more intimate and animated with the sensitivity that McCoy brought to her texts.

Co-curated by Kimberli Meyer and Susan Morgan, Sympathetic Seeing is the first exhibition to chronicle the life and work of this writer, journalist, activist, and one-time draftswoman for R.M. Schindler. Though persuasive, the exhibition remains quiet enough to allow McCoy's words to speak for themselves. For example, the displays designated to Irving Gill's 1916 Dodge House, considered by many to be the first true modernist home in the West, are a well juxtaposed series of letters, documents and essays, effectively demonstrating the verbal hell McCoy raised in an effort to save the residence from demolition (sadly, not even McCoy could stop the wrecking balls in 1970). Through the course of this exhibition, The Dodge House, which lived just up the street from the Schindler House, comes to feel like an amputated limb—though no trace of it remains today, its absence is an enormous presence.

Yes, this exhibition is built on the written word of McCoy, and it is indeed a difficult task to show through telling; nevertheless, the exhibition's visual elements, such as McCoy's personal photographs, copies of vintage late-'40s magazines like Living for Young Homemakers to which she contributed, and naturally The Schindler House itself, make the framework in which McCoy found herself working all the more tangible and immediate. And while McCoy's ability to have a reader make eye-contact with her surroundings is, of course, celebrated in the exhibition, the journalist's confident voice is also skillfully contrasted against the insecurities and anxious circumstances that played out in the world beyond McCoy's typewriter.

At age 28 in 1932, McCoy moved to Los Angeles to wait out a New York City rainy season while she regained her health after a pneumonia scare. She ended up staying in Los Angeles until her death in 1989. During World War II, she worked as an engineering draftswoman in the Experimental Shop at Douglas Aircraft, and in 1944, at age 40, McCoy applied to study at the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Her application was 'strongly discouraged,' on grounds of her being, well, a forty-year-old woman at a time when the G.I. Bill was filling up classroom seats with returning vets. That same year, McCoy applied for the position of draftsman at Schindler's office. Certain the architect would send her immediately packing, she apologetically told him about the failed matriculation to USC. 'The less to unlearn,' he answered, and hired her on the spot.

Or so McCoy tells us in an excerpt from her article, 'Schindler: A Personal Reminiscence,' the words of which crawl across a wall of the Schindler House, as if a metaphor for the bond between senses and structures. Of course, an exhibition like this one, which narrates a very important life, runs the risk of telling its story as if it were a series of thrilling exclamation marks—the auspicious job interview being one of them, or the 1960 publication of McCoy's seminal book, Five California Architects. But Sympathetic Seeing is careful to provide the ellipses and question marks of a lifetime, as well: McCoy's work, significant and original, went largely unrecognized for much of her life, and the exhibition makes evident that her accumulated body of work and her level of reputation is the result of decades, not days. In this way, Sympathetic Seeing lives up to its title, approaching McCoy in a way that she might have approached her own subjects—with fairness, lucidity, and an unfettered curiosity.
Katya Tylevich