Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, USA): "Continental"

Maya, Saskia, Kristen— if you happened to be a girl
painter, & wanted to be in the shit the right way at PAFA
in those days, the right names were the right names. PAFA,
it turns out, were no shrinking violets about turning out
their version of ladies-of-the-night, & now Mary & Abby
were initiated into rites of passage in which obeisance was
done to the coven that ruled a bunch of campus roosts.
Maya, Saskia, & Kristen shared in common a sense of
worldliness, of knowing Europe; of having come from
the right kind of money to have done Europe & everywhere
else the right way; a conviction that Philadelphia could
work as a European city of note; and a sense of art that, like
Mary & Abby’s, lingered on form as an agent of class
rather than an impossibility, as in Manhattan; a distaste,

as it were, for the formless. But beneath the surface ethos
of a coven destined to guiding light Mary & Abby’s first
years in Center City, the real sense of class & distinction
was about drugs. Maya, Saskia, & Kristen would certainly
never reduce painting to a mere front; but at the end of
the day, when all was said & done, what they were dealing
was who they were. They attempted to deal, as Gaetan
later would, with the class & distinction of European dealers
in Philadelphia, and the ring of painters around them would
have to evince similar class for them to be happy. Mary & Abby
zoomed into view for them as two already-seasoned recruits.
Mary, leading Abby, wanted a line on coke, & got it. From her
first months at PAFA, she would hide bits of blow around her
studio, sneak off from anywhere for a secret gummer. Continental.

© Adam Fieled 2026