Hugh Leeman: You've told me a story about being rejected by countless art galleries, and your first actual show was in an apartment you rented in the Tenderloin with your then-girlfriend. What's the long version of that story?
Jim Campbell: It's how I started making art, really. A friend of mine — actually an ex-girlfriend — needed to get her master's degree, and to do that she needed an exhibition. We were both interested in art that dealt with the theme of mental illness. So we started trying to sell a show to different nonprofit galleries around San Francisco, and because neither of us had any history, no one wanted to show us. So we rented an apartment in the Tenderloin — cheapest neighborhood — where we could set up our own exhibition. The hardest phone call I ever made was to call the curator at SFMoMA at the time, a guy named Bob Riley. This was 1988. And he said to me — and this gave me so much respect for him — he said, I saw a film you made as an undergraduate at MIT ten years ago. So sure, I'll come. I was just blown away. A two-minute video I made as an undergraduate, and he remembered it. He came to the exhibition in the apartment in the Tenderloin, and he really liked a piece called Hallucinations — an interactive mirror work where you see yourself on fire. He put me in his next exhibition at SFMoMA with that work.
Hugh Leeman: You're probably the only person in the history of humanity to show an artwork in the Tenderloin and then have it go straight to the Museum of Modern Art.
Jim Campbell: The San Francisco Museum. And I was ready to give up art at that point. If nobody gave a shit, I was probably not going to give a shit myself. His believing in me really changed my direction.
Hugh Leeman: Between those three works in the apartment, it seems like if it's not for that ex-girlfriend and that collaboration — that you don't become an artist. That's almost the end of the story.
Jim Campbell: I think that's probably true. Her need for the degree really made it happen, and I kind of tagged along.
Hugh Leeman: Then there's the phone call. Walk me through it — this is the era of landlines. You pick up the phone and call SFMoMA. What happens?
Jim Campbell: I don't remember how I got the phone number, honestly. But people were less filtered back then. You didn't have to go through ten places to get to someone. I think I just called the museum and asked for him. And he answered.
Hugh Leeman: It's powerful to think that perhaps none of it happens if this guy doesn't pick up the phone.
Jim Campbell: That seems very likely.
