MoMA Mixtape: Bridget Everett and Larry Krone Feel the Joy

Actor and comedian Bridget Everett and artist/designer Larry Krone joined us for a rare tag-team installment of MoMA Mixtape. Larry, a successful visual artist and costume designer, admits he’s a seasoned museum patron, while Bridget, whose award-winning HBO series Somebody Somewhere is currently in its third season, came in feeling like an outsider for this exercise. The two friends approached Mixtape with a tilt toward comedy, but they also found deep emotional connections to the art, so the laughter was mixed with longing, romance, and much more.

June Leaf. Robert Enters the Room. 1973

June Leaf’s Robert Enters the Room + Waylon Jennings’s “If You See Me Getting Smaller”

Larry Krone: I love Waylon Jennings’s song “If You See Me Getting Smaller,” written by Jimmy Webb. There is something heartbreaking about the way Waylon describes his goodbye, creating an image of the visual effect of a person gradually appearing smaller as they walk away: “If you see me getting smaller, don’t worry/I’m in no hurry. I’ve got the right to disappear.” When I saw June Leaf’s small painting with collage, Robert Enters the Room, it made me think of that song—but in reverse. Leaf took a photograph of her husband, the artist Robert Frank, and incorporated it into her painting. The image of Frank is very small in the far corner of the room. She represents herself in the painting by including her hands, large and foreshortened, stretched out on a flat plane in front of her. The use of perspective is at home in a painting, but the emotional effect—the romance—of Leaf seeing her husband entering the room, lovingly anticipating him coming closer to her, feels musical.

Robert Frank’s Hold Still Keep Going + Elton John’s “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”

Bridget Everett: I love words, letters. When I heard LL Cool J say “DDHD” (dreams don’t have deadlines), it changed my life. A simple sentiment, but true. Same applies here. Frank’s Hold Still Keep Going will stay with me. The scratching of the words into the negatives feels a lot like life, especially when you are grieving someone, as Frank was during this time. We feel it and we go on. “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” reminds me of my sister, who passed in 2008. I’ve performed it with my band probably 100 times since then. And every single time, it’s like I’m scratching the words right onto the negatives.

Robert Frank. Hold Still—Keep Going. 1989

Henri Matisse. Dance (I). 1909

Henri Matisse’s Dance (I) + Sade’s “Nothing Can Come Between Us”

Bridget: I think this is probably a romantic love song. Most are. The opening groove screams connection to me. Great walking-down-the-street music. Then the lyrics: “Nothing can come between us/ it’s about faith, it’s about trust.” Looking at this circle of women dancing in their natural state feels very hopeful to me right now. Necessary. I could cry. I guess that’s art doing its job? Maybe not the way this piece is intended but how I am feeling it right now.

Henri Matisse’s The Rose Marble Table + Fancy Hagood’s “Forest”

Larry: Coming to MoMA is always such a fortifying experience for me. I’m usually drawn there by a special exhibit, but on every visit, I take time to roam through the collection galleries of modern art masterpieces. There is still a special aura to these paintings in person. On this visit, Henri Matisse’s The Rose Marble Table stood out to me, seeming to glow and hover there on the wall. The real rose marble table was probably in somebody’s yard or garden, but in this painting, it seems like an ethereal vision in some kind of enchanted forest—maybe because of the color contrasts or the slightly disorienting plays with perspective and foreshortening. The scene feels like something you would stumble on deep in the woods and question later if it had really been there. The magic and romance of the forest made me think of Fancy Hagood’s gorgeous love song, which creates the same mystique. “Let the darkest of nights ease your mind, free your soul/ I’ll meet you in the forest; let’s let this wild thing grow.”

Henri Matisse. The Rose Marble Table. 1917

Michael Smith. Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar. 1983/2023

Michael Smith’s Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar + Jim Andralis’s “The Worst Thing”

Larry: I was excited to find this installation by Michael Smith on display in MoMA’s contemporary galleries! I’ve seen Smith’s work and loved it over the years—I mostly know his performances where he dresses up like a baby, and his collaborations with Joshua White of the Joshua Light Show. This fallout shelter piece has some of the same silliness and vernacular tone to it, but there is a sense of doom here that especially draws me in. Walking through this installation, I immediately thought of my husband Jim Andralis’s song “The Worst Thing.” Unlike Smith’s piece, Jim’s song has no irony, but the two share a humanistic approach to talking about the helplessness we, as individuals in the world, feel in facing our worst global and existential threats and disappointments. Jim ends “The Worst Thing” with the question, “What if you didn’t sing about it?” which feels to me like an acquiescence to disaster similar to a group of partygoers in Michael Smith’s rec room shutting down their snack bar and loading it up with concrete bricks in preparation for the imminent atomic explosion.

Hans Bellmer’s The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace + Peaches’ “Boys Wanna Be Her”

Bridget: Ok, this is may be a little on the nose but looking at this piece I hear Peaches right away. Rebellious, alive, vital and a little nasty. All my favorite things! And Hans Bellmer was doing this in 1937? Clearing a spot at the table in my five-people-I’d-like-to-have-dinner-with challenge. I think I’ve found a new hero. Thanks for getting me out of the house, MoMA. This is what it’s all about.

Bridget Everett with Hans Bellmer’s The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace (1937)

From left: Bridget Everett and Larry Krone with Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936); Things are looking up in the collection galleries.

Joan Miró. The Birth of the World. 1925

Joan Miró’s The Birth of the World + The Pointer Sisters’ “River Boulevard”

Larry: I was surprised to see the title of Joan Miró’s painting, The Birth of the World. I’ve always thought of his paintings as formal abstraction and have never paid attention to his titles, so I got an emotional rush when I took this title in while looking at that beautiful painting. To consider Miró’s atmospheric field of soaked-in, blotchy gray with the sharp focal points of the geometric shapes and lines in red, black, and white as not just a design, but as a representation of the pinnacle moment in what would eventually become our world, felt complicated and hopeful. The early Pointer Sisters song “River Boulevard” came straight to my head. It’s such a joyful song that, to me, is about simply celebrating feeling really good. I never have gotten around to listening to the lyrics in the verses, because to me this song is all about the chorus that repeats “Isn’t it just a beautiful day” over and over. And there’s something very human about this production, too. The voices don’t blend perfectly, and the bold harmonies often overpower the melody. It gives me the feeling of working together to create a balance that, like the world’s, is never perfect.

Bridget Everett and Larry Krone at MoMA

Anges Pelton’s The Fountains + Barry White’s “I Can’t Believe You Love Me”

Bridget: This painting immediately brings to mind the dreamy, expansive opening of Barry White’s “I Can’t Believe You Love Me.” Soft, floating, tender. The orbs going on and on as we will. Maybe it’s the literal connection of the orbs expanding or the luminescent, ethereal colors but it, again, makes me feel hopeful. That’s the only direction I’m taking these days.

Agnes Pelton. The Fountains. 1926

Yoko Ono. Painting to Be Stepped On. 1960/61

Yoko Ono’s Painting to Be Stepped On + Lucinda Williams’s “The Night’s Too Long”

Larry: I see much of Yoko Ono’s work as poetic and deeply emotional, mixed with her thrilling expression of irreverent rebellion. There is joy in doing something you’re not supposed to do, like stepping on a painting. Ono provides this basic joy and celebrates the bad behavior by putting it in the context of a museum with her engraved plaque. Lucinda Williams’s song may seem like it’s in an entirely different world from Ono’s art, but I get the same sense of finding—and clinging to—the little joys in life from her lyrics and straightforward country sound. “With her back against the bar, she can listen to the band/ And she’s holding a Corona, and it’s cold against her hand” is one of my favorite lines from any song. It’s so simple, but these little details and basic pleasures are the things that make us know we are alive.

Bridget Everett is a comedian, actress, singer, writer, and cabaret performer. She currently stars in the Peabody Award–winning and critically acclaimed HBO series Somebody Somewhere. The series is currently in its third season.

Larry Krone is a visual and performance artist whose work has been showcased in galleries throughout New York City. Krone is also a frequent collaborator with other performers, designing and fabricating costumes and sets and occasionally appearing in productions.